John Burningham: 'In 2009 being young is terrible. You can't run wild'

John Burningham, in his calm, measured tones, is describing an aspect of life in 1950s Britain that is all but forgotten. "They had piano smashing competitions, you know, that was the thing. Outside a country pub the local youths would take sledgehammers to pianos, which is ... barbaric behaviour."

It's clear that Burningham speaks from the heart, not least because his spacious Hampstead home is a monument to furniture salvage, with strange and lovely pieces of all kinds of provenance fitted in any space where something can be fitted. He still shudders at the idea of beautiful things being destroyed for pleasure and entertainment, and the huge horn of his ancient record player attests to his collector's passion for retrieving abandoned and otherwise forgotten music.

At that time, he says, he even feared that music itself might be lost. "I remember a discussion on the radio, saying: 'We've got the London Philharmonic Orchestra filled with German and Austrian Jews, these people are getting quite old, and we don't really know where we're going to get the musicians from when this lot die ...'"

This venerable creator of dozens of beloved children's books, still furiously productive as he approaches his 74th birthday, remembers post-war Britain as culturally barren, and wonders still at the massive creative outpouring that made the 1960s swing. He is thankful that the "huge artistic explosion" of the Sixties maintained its momentum. "There was such a resurgence, particularly in the field of music, and that has endured. It's great."

Burningham's own part in this great renaissance is not quite as widely documented as the rise of The Beatles, or the emergence of the Rolling Stones. But his personal contribution to the redefining of the British creative landscape, and that of his like-minded colleagues, was just as significant in its way. The 1960s also saw a revolution in the way that books for very young children were conceived and presented, with a decisive shift away from preachy narratives to exuberant and colourful chunks of wonder that strove to capture the world from the perspective of the pre-school child.

Burningham's own first book, Borka: The Adventures of a Goose with No Feathers, published in 1963, was instantly recognised as a classic of this dynamically developing genre, and awarded the prestigious Kate Greenaway Prize. (He is the only author to have won it twice, the second time for Mr Gumpy's Outing in 1971.) Borka tells the story of a baby bird that is ostracised in its rural community for being different, and escapes to London on a fishing boat, where it lives happily ever after in Kew Gardens, because there were "already so many strange kinds of birds" that "nobody laughed". The illustrations look fresh and contemporary today, with their distinctive melange of techniques and styles, and their beautiful, evocative landscapes and skies. At the start of the Sixties they must have seemed mind blowing.

It's widely acknowledged that first fictions tend to draw on autobiographical experience, and Borka is not an exception. The "deserted piece of marshland near the East Coast of England" where Borka was born, is East Anglia, where Burningham spent the most settled part of his odd, peripatetic early life, before he came to London in his late teens. Like the goose in his story, Burningham, born in 1936, had "a curious childhood". Looking back, he says it was "an amazing experience" but he admits that this is a function of hindsight. "People look back to the best times of their lives, being at school, being a teenager, whatever, and in fact it's very difficult. There are things going on which ruin the enjoyment of being young."

Burningham writes about his own childhood in his eponymous new book, which is partly autobiographical and partly a retrospective of his long career in graphic illustration. In his own account, his childhood comes across as both blissful and disturbing, hugely shaped by the influence of two world wars. Burningham's father had been awarded the Military Medal after fighting in the trenches in France. Like many of those who were involved, he spoke very little about his experiences, but they scarred him, and in the second war, he registered as a conscientious objector. Laid off his work, he rented out the family home, and Burningham, his parents and his two sisters "travelled in a caravan to a place near Gloucester where my father found work as a handyman and a gardener at a school. The caravan was parked in the grounds while my sisters and I attended school there."

The arrangement didn't last, and the family rented a series of sometimes very rudimentary houses around the English countryside, always very isolated, as they were the cheapest. Burningham's father worked as a commercial traveller, so his mother was usually alone. The weird life was adopted in order to give the children, pre-Butler Report, a private education. Because his parents "had avant-garde ideas about education" Burningham went to 10 different schools, eventually attending A S Neill's radical boarding school, Summerhill, where lessons were famously non-compulsory. Burningham spent most of his time in the art room, and left the school with virtually no qualifications.

At the time, Burningham was glad just to be in one place for three or four years. "It became a way of life, being dumped at a school and having to adapt and make new friends." When he left school, at 16, Burningham registered as a conscientious objector as well, "to please my father", and notably did slum rehabilitation in Govan, Glasgow, as part of his alternative national service. There, he witnessed living conditions that shocked him deeply. Sketches he made at that time provided him with the portfolio that later won him a place at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where he met his wife, Helen Oxenbury, who also became a celebrated illustrator of children's books.

Oddly, since he has such a genius at communicating with children through words and pictures, Burningham had no great desire to do this kind of work when he first left college. Even now he candidly admits: "I can't think of anything worse than sitting about discussing the pros and cons of children's books. That's a subject that doesn't interest me a bit." That attitude, in part, is what makes his books so distinctive. They are clearly creative artefacts, rather than commercial propositions, brought into being, above all, as an artist's expression of his own desire to create. Many of his books, like Borka, contain beautiful, bright-but-ethereal landscapes, as pleasurable to the adult reading as the child looking and listening.

Though Burningham, like his goose, was happy to find himself in London's Chelsea during a thrilling and stimulating period, he again was living in derelict accommodation, and found it a struggle to make ends meet. "Actually, it was brilliant. But at the time ... you're trying to make a living, you're trying to heat the place, but you don't have enough money. All those little problems. But there I was in this place, completely free to do anything I wanted, and what a privilege that was.

"In the early Sixties there was this creative explosion, but artists have always had to find various ways of being employed, I suppose, and the early ones had to paint aristocracy or bishops or burghers or whatever it is ... There must have been a great boom in stained glass, you know when all those Victorian churches were being built. That's a long-winded way of saying it was sheer accident that I began working in children's illustration."

Burningham's good fortune was to have been published from the beginning by Jonathan Cape, with, in Tom Maschler, a radical and gifted editor. Some of the work he did then has become iconic. In one of just two commissions he has accepted to illustrate the words of another writer, he worked with Ian Fleming to create the visual grammar for Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang. (The other was a reworking of The Wind in the Willows.) And though he regrets turning down illustrating Ted Hughes's The Iron Man, he did undertake some astonishingly imaginative work during that period. Burningham even travelled as far as he could round the world in 80 days, to make another lavishly landscaped children's book of his own in tribute to Jules Verne's novel. He remains with the same publisher, although it's no longer a small independent company, of course, but part of the bookish behemoth Random House. "I was jolly lucky to work in the Bedford-Square time of Cape, with all the editorial people they had then. There was tremendous innovation and great fun."

He does not feel that the corporate nature of much contemporary publishing has been a great advance. In many ways the business model has developed to become absolutely the opposite of what the pioneering young men and women at Cape thought they were creating.

"The approach now is to keep doing something new and hope for success, rather than seriously thinking about the amount that is done, but doing it really well. I'm not madly impressed by it ... they have so many restrictions now. They have very good editors out there, very good production people ... but it's committee-led. You have to get a committee to pass everything ... the accountants, the salesmen, the marketing people. I'm in the lucky position where I can do what I want and just get on with it, but I don't know what I'd do if I had to start now."

One aspect of Burningham's books that changed over the years is that as he had first three children, and then three grandchildren, he exhibited greater awareness of the practicalities of looking after children as well as being one. He admits that part of himself is forever five years old. But, for parents, his later books, like Husherbye, published in 2000 (that worked like a charm at sending my youngest son to sleep), or Avocado Baby, describing the difficulties of feeding a recalcitrant toddler, offer genuine and useful help and support. Others, like Would You Rather? make a game out of the confrontation of difficult choices.

Burningham's own children are adults now, all of them working in art in one way or another. The family still seems close, for in the hour or so I spent in the household, two of the offspring, Emily, a textile designer, and Bill, a picture restorer, dropped by. One is tempted to think that maybe between them Burningham and Oxenbury have all the answers, and understand child-rearing perfectly. It's strangely reassuring that they seem instead to have the same dilemmas as most other people.

"Helen and I have no idea what the perfect childhood is. OK, I ran wild ... yet, you know, my parents did make me learn the piano, learn the violin, and I'm so glad now. Likewise we tried to give our children freedom in the countryside too. But I wish I'd dumped my kids in school in France for a while because they'd now speak perfect French. They might have suffered a bit at the time, but they would have been grateful now.

"That's the great dilemma. It's such a brief amount of time, and you're panicking all the time really, aren't you? Oh my goodness, he's eight and he still doesn't read, whatever ... That's what's absurd about all this testing. It judges people so uniformly, suggests that we all have to develop in the same way at the same time and we have to have qualifications to do something. Well, yes you do, if you want to be a brain surgeon. It's worrying."

If there's a lasting theme to Burningham's books, it is a plea for children's less conventional and sometimes plain bad behaviour to be understood by adults even if it is not always accommodated. Works like Where's Julius?, John Patrick Norman McHennessy, the Boy Who Was Always Late, or Edwardo The Horriblest Boy In The Whole Wide World, all these are arguments for unhappiness not to be mistaken for wickedness. Edwardo's naughty pranks keep going wrong, in so much as people keep thinking he is being good by, for example, washing a dirty dog, when he is actually throwing water over it out of spite. But the praise he gets for all these bad-turns-gone-right encourage him to start pleasing people instead of annoying them.

Burningham feels, and quite passionately, that since he started producing books for children, their lives in some ways have got worse and not better. "Kids these days. They may travel a lot, but travelling may mean getting into an aeroplane, getting out, and going to a resort. I was lucky in that I did experience a hell of a lot of stuff. That's the terrible thing about being young in 2009. There are so many restrictions. All that running wild, and playing, and doing dangerous things, you can't do it, you really can't do it. It's 'Don't go out in the field or you'll meet a prowling paedo.' Usually the abuser is Uncle Geoffrey. Everybody has to be programmed and monitored and they're only just discovering that actually putting seven-year-olds through intense testing is a complete waste of time."

In many ways, the vision of childhood that Burningham and other young artists portrayed in their ground-breaking picture books has gone the same way as the publishing houses who championed them with such passion. The need for work like Burningham's is as urgent now, if not more, than it was back in 1962.

'John Burningham' is published by Jonathan Cape, which is also publishing his new children's book, 'It's a Secret'. A retrospective of Burningham's work will be on show at the Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh (dovecotstudios.com) during July and August