Finding our Bearings

Picturebook Backstories : 11c Where's my Baby Bear? and Mr Bear's New Baby

Oh, world.

Been a total clusterf**k this week. In the personal sphere, the wider family orbit and the world at large. It’s all kicking off, as they say.

I’m not about to dwell on the darker areas of the news cycle. We can access that kind of content on many wildly opinionated platforms, should we desire to do so. If, however, like me, you’re exhausted and saddened by Life Inc, allow me to offer a spot of light relief. That is, after all, my day job.

Are we sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

Imagine a place full of trees, with a river running through it. Dappled light. That Mediterranean scent of pine resin and the faintest of faint wafts of the perfume of spring birches. Water making gloop-bloop splashy sounds as it meanders downstream. Think Moominvalley. Think Hushnow. Think…Mr Bear’s Home Turf.

Watercolour artwork for the Mr Bear Animation ‘Bible’ back in the heady days when there was the distinct possibility that all the Mr Bear Books were going to become a TV series. Each of the houses ( The Grizzle’s, Rabbit-Bunn’s, Buzz’s, Small Bear’s, the Hoot-Toowit’s) had to match the homes I’d already drawn in illustrations across the series of @ 17 books. Consistency is all…

Anyhoo. Writing and illustrating an ongoing series of picture books across many years and changes of editors, publishing styles, governments, global events and personal and family events is…well, let’s just say it’s quite the journey. Especially when you’re making books for very small people, which means you can’t have Mr Bear running off to the Misty Hills with Mrs Grizzle-Bear, leaving two devastated families and an enormous question mark about exactly did happen that night in the Bat Cave. No. Absolutely not. As regards the substance of all those Mr Bear mss, some degree of consistency in the narrative arc was mandatory, and ‘issues’ had to be child-centred and age-appropriate, even if you, the creator of this world were undergoing a meltdown, a family crisis, a financial cataclysm or all your baby bears had grown up and left home.

In short, I just had to grin and bear it (sorry).

First up in the post-Mr-Bear-To-the-Rescue saga: Where’s my Baby Bear?

From the top: Mr Bear reading - finished print and rough sketch. Finished print. What happens when you lift the flap. The artwork for each side of the flap.

Bear in mind ( oh, lord, somebody stop me) that I’d never made a lift-the-flap book before and I’d left my purpose-built studio behind along with my marriage, so essentially I was making this book on a kitchen table, not, alas on a draftsman’s table where it’s easier to line up overlays and check that flaps will match their backgrounds and that the fold will work and all the many protocols an illustrator has to observe in order to construct sheets of artwork for a book where some of the flaps are layered, one on top of the other. See below -

From the top: Two closed flaps. One open flap, one closed. Two open flaps. Rough sketch and finished print.

Normally, or so my editor told me afterwards, an illustrator is assigned a paper engineer to help with the construction of lift-the-flap and pop-up books. Not this illustrator. God knows why…

It was fun firing up my hitherto unused synaptic pathways though. Getting my head round the difficulty of flaps that, by my own design, had separate images printed on both sides, and thus had to line up when closed and open.

The pram and newspaper examples didn’t have this problem. But several other pages did. To explain -

Curtain closed. Curtain open.

When the lace curtain is open, the top arch of the window had to be ‘visible’ through it. The curtain pole had to line up on the page and the flap. The plant in the pink pot, Mrs Bear’s left paw and the teacups on the tray had to be ‘visible’ through the lace curtain when the curtain was closed, but also when it was open. Just recounting this now makes me want to go and lie down in a darkened room. Unsurprisingly, my brain was fully engaged in figuring out all of this stuff for the entire duration of making of this book. Which was fortunate because it certainly beat the heck out of worrying about how the ongoing separation-heading-to-divorce war of attrition was impacting my children. In my new post-marriage life, I’d finally moved into Beloved’s small house and we were attempting to squish two adults and three, occasionally four children into what social workers quaintly term a blended family.

The fourth child, technically an adult, was showing first signs of the drug dependence which would eventually claim him (and all of us as we watched helplessly) for the better part of a decade: utterly terrifying. The other three were bickering and fighting over territory and parental attention: totally understandable. We made many trips to speak with their teachers and nursery nurses: ritually humiliating. Also made several visits to a lawyer: hideously expensive. And in the background, if not exactly fiddling while Rome smouldered, I was trying to make books all about happy bear families: optimistic? hypocritical? tone deaf? None of these. No. What I was doing then was exactly what we’re all doing right here and right now ; trying to carve out a life in the middle of Very Challenging Times.

Somehow we did. We made a family. And as a side project, I made several books. As I’ve said before, it’s impossible to stop Life Inc. from leaking out across whatever project you’re working on. Mainly because we’re human, and the process of living through time brings emotions to the surface and as artists, our emotions will always colour our work, even if we can only see those colours in our rearview mirrors.

DEEEEEEP!

So, the next life event that swept into our already eventful lives was the discovery of the impending arrival of the youngest member of our family. No prizes for guessing which Mr Bear book celebrated this occasion…

Well, of course I was going to write a new Mr Bear book about our new baby. Write what you know being a solid bit of advice regularly offered to would-be authors. So much, so obvious. But for me, looking back, it’s the small details, the expressions on the bear’s faces, the books scattered by their bedside, all of these easily overlooked things that add depth to my understanding of where we were at when Broad Bean¹ landed.

I was an elderly multigravida ( obsolete term for a mummy who’s already delivered at least one baby and is over 35), the delivery did not go according to plan, and far from relaxing back home with our new infant, surrounded by flowers and oxytocin-fuelled contentment, we had a barely-established family to blend, two older children who were not in the least impressed at the arrival of a Small & Squeaky in their midst, and a deeply pissed-off toddler who alternated between loving her new sister to bits and wanting to get medieval on her Pamper-clad ass. Small & Squeaky was not a happy bunny for the first twelve weeks six months year fifteen months of her life, whereupon she flipped overnight into the smiliest, most contented toddler one could wish for. Breastfeeding did not go according to plan, there was an embouchure/nipple misalignment that left both participants in floods of tears and worst of all, there was outright hostility from my Dad, aggro from Beloved’s ex-wife and weaponised obduracy from my newly-partnered ex-husband. Happy Families - NOT.

So in the light of all of that, look at the expressions on Mr and Mrs Bear’s faces when their Baby Bear refuses to settle. Write what you know, indeed.

spread from ‘Mr Bear’s New Baby’ published by Orchard Books

Note too, the flowers - wilting and going brown because Mr and Mrs Bear are too shattered to attend to anything other than their little Baby Bear and her siblings. And the books - ‘Solve your Bear’s Sleep Problems’, ‘Pregnancy and Bearbirth’, ‘Bearbirth for the over 35’s’. Oh lord…. And we used to have those pillowcases and that sheet, although not the lily duvet cover, alas. And the little pop of bright red below Mr Bear’s right paw? Red Dog. A beloved toy, given to our Baby Bear by her lovely midwife, and still treasured twenty-nine years and ten months later. Although somewhat chewed around the ears…

I think picture books are diaries, full of memories preserved in their full colours, pressed between the pages like flowers from the past. Our family’s library of picture books, read ragged and unconsciously memorised are repositories of some of the best moments we enjoyed with our children when they were Smalls. Our unbelievably precious and beloved little pyjama-clad people, snuggling up beside us, pointing to the illustrations, adding their own frequently surreal details to the stories, making the books their own.

Real books, written by real people living real lives, read by real people to their most beloved and precious children. Why anyone would countenance inserting an artificial intelligence into that most tender and human of relationships is beyond my comprehension. We are all the children who books built. We found ourselves in between the pages of the books we discovered in childhood and we need to share that miraculous discovery with each other. Passing it on. Sharing the passion.

1. We actually placed a birth announcement in the Scotsman to the effect that the baby who rejoiced in the name ‘Broad Bean’ would henceforth be known as ( name on birth certificate) Broad Bean was the name given to baby-as-bump by their big sister, who at 18 months, wasn’t very big at all and enjoyed the idea of a sibling as big as a broad bean.