Poetry in motion

WHEN well-meaning festival organisers wanted to introduce artist Olivia Lomenech Gill to award-winning writer Michael Morpurgo, Olivia was reluctant.

It was at a children’s book festival in a small town in Brittany where Olivia and family were visiting her Breton in-laws.

“They wanted to introduce us, just because we lived in England,” says Olivia, horrified at the thought of barging in on a famous author.

Eventually, it was easier to agree. And a good thing too, for the result is a book that could be a children’s classic.

Michael Morpurgo, former Children’s Laureate and author of War Horse and more than a hundred other novels, lives in Devon where his wife, Clare, had an idyllic country childhood.

More than 30 years ago they set up a charity – Farms for City Children – to give less-privileged children the chance of those same experiences.

To aid the charity, the couple decided to collaborate on a book for the first time.

Where My Wellies Take Me is a collection of well-known poems about the countryside, linked by a new story by Michael. It features a girl called Pippa and her day in the Devon countryside, and is very much based on Clare’s own childhood in the village of Iddesleigh.

All they needed now was an illustrator...

After protestations were ignored and the French connection was made, it turned out that the couple and Olivia were travelling home on the same ferry. They met, they ate together, they talked and made an instant connection, helped in part by Olivia’s younger son.

His name is Elzeard, which Michael Morpurgo immediately recognised as the name of the shepherd who single-handedly grew a forest, acorn by acorn, in the legendary story The Man Who Planted Trees.

What better recommendation could there be?

The story in the Morpurgos’ book takes place in the Iddesleigh’s May Day celebrations. “And I felt it was really important that I was there for that,” says Olivia.

She didn’t want to have to wait for another year, so even before there was a definite contract from the publishers, Olivia was camping out down in Devon, with Michael’s scribbledon Ordnance Survey map, getting a feel for the route that Pippa takes during the book.

“It was the first time anything has dropped into my life like that and it was out of my comfort zone really,” says Olivia, who lives with her husband Vincent, a paper conservator, and their two sons in a tiny farmworker’s cottage in Northumberland.

Olivia had never illustrated a book before.

“Although I’ve made my living as an artist for 15 years, my background is in theatre. But I’ve always been influenced by stories and story telling, looking for the narrative.”

She was intrigued by the difference between artists and illustrators but also admired the classic children’s illustrators, such as EH Shepard, of Winnie-the-Pooh fame.

In any case, this was never going to be a straightforward project.

The Morpurgos had collected 40 poems for the book, ranging from Incy Wincy Spider and I Had A Little Nut Tree, through to Yeats, Masefield, de la Mare and Shakespeare, plus lots by Ted Hughes, and gave them to Olivia on random bits of printed and photocopied sheets. “And that’s where I got the idea that the book would be Pippa’s journal, as though compiled by her,” she says.

The result is a glorious scrapbook effect of drawings, paintings, collages, flaps to lift, surprises to uncover. The main text is written as if by Pippa (complete with crossings out and corrections) and the poems look as though they have been stuck in.

This book is not merely illustrated, but designed and constructed to make something unique.

The people in the illustrations are all based on real people from Michael and Clare’s village, who took Olivia to their hearts… and homes, when the English spring proved too cold for camping – “I thought I was quite hardened, but May in Devon proved too much” – looking after her and helping her with the intricacies of vintage tractors: she likes to get every detail absolutely right.

Olivia’s career has not been straightforward.

After a music scholarship to a top school where she was inspired by a brilliant and passionate teacher, she fell in love with art, often drawing and painting in the rehearsal rooms when she was meant to be practising an instrument. She didn’t want to go to art school, though, and studied drama at university.

She continued painting and gave her first exhibition as a student, which helped finance her studies.

OLIVIA was living and working in London, moving around different flats, working in the theatre, trying to do two or three jobs, when she “finally succumbed” to fine art. She did an MA in printmaking and has never looked back, winning several major awards and exhibiting at the Royal Academy.

She met her husband in a framing workshop where he was working in Deptford and six months later, they were married. Olivia was already living in Northumberland, but Vincent’s work was in London, so they bought a canal boat and for a few years lived at different ends of the country. Now Vincent runs his paper conservation and framing business from their home in Northumberland.

“I was unhappy in the city, but had no roots, didn’t belong anywhere. The nearest place was the cottage which had belonged to my mother and which I had visited with her as a child,” says Olivia.

It’s at the end of a terrace with a wooden studio that Olivia built herself and of which she is, quite rightly, proud. They have mains electricity, water comes from the hills and as they have no central heating, they have to split endless logs for the fire.

This old-fashioned approach is echoed in Olivia’s style of dress. Instead of jeans or trousers, she favours long skirts and aprons or “a khaki house dress and galoshes” from her trunk full of treasures.

“And I love Harris tweed, it’s so warm and practical.

If more people lived without heating, they would quickly rediscover the properties of Harris tweed. I have stitched enough skirts out of it to vouch for its merits. “ The book has been a big project, but Olivia has still found time for other painting and printmaking.

She would like to do more bookmaking.

“I’ve been fascinated by plans to reintroduce wolves into Scotland. Perhaps Peter and the Wolf set in the Cairngorms...”

• Where My Wellies Take Me by Clare and Michael Morpurgo, designed and illustrated by Olivia Lomenech Gill (Templar £17.99), is being sold in aid of Farms for City Children.

The book is available as a limited signed slipcase edition of 250, signed by Michael and Clare, for £45.

• Farms for City Children provides stays for children on working farms where they participate in the life of the farm, learn where their food comes from, share three homecooked meals a day and learn how fulfilling a simple life can be. farmsforcitychildren.org.