Even now, all these years later, I sometimes hear Fearne say “It’s a whopper”, and I recognise the pure glee in her voice, the joy of sound.īack then, I was about to go to America on important research for my mermaid book. “Mine’s bigger!”, said Owl, wrapped in the tentacles of a giant green octopus. Especially the page where Mog catches a giant orange fish. I also loved that epic purple sky and seething green ocean in Meg at Sea. But, as an older mum – I had Fearne at 40 through IVF – I take my thrills where I can. Once upon a time, I was a freewheelin’ young woman who did lines off toilet seats. Yes, I know it’s owned by Amazon, but my principles aren’t always rock solid. Then I got serious and ordered everything going on Book Depository. I bought every copy of Meg and Mog I could find in Pegasus. Speech bubbles pop in the dark, eyes blink open, and things tumble downstairs, like a toddler falling over and learning to get back up again. Meg always cooking something up in her cauldron: “Double trouble, rock and rubble, oil boil, and cauldron bubble,” Meg chants in Meg’s Castle (Pieńkowski’s favourite spell in the series). The joy of our life together back then was phonetic, the alphabet exploding into onomatopoeia, Fearne’s steps mismatched alongside mine, bedtime stories each night, and her fingers twined through my long witchy hair. I read Meg’s Eggs to death, or till a chunk had torn loose from the page of the stegosaurus in the garden eating all the cabbages. Hello and goodbye are essential words in every language. Then I turned the page, and, in a circle Meg, Mog, and Owl waved at us. “I must have put in too much bacon,” I read aloud to Fearne. Meg inspects the diplodocus under a looking glass. Meg has to whip up another spell: “Bacon and eggs, jump over their legs.” ![]() ![]() In the middle of the night, creak! crack! Out of the first egg hatches a long-necked diplodocus! Next, a stegosaurus! Tap! Tap! Owl sits on the last dotty egg. They troop up the stairs – those black outlined steps, so simple, so right. But the eggs are too hard, so the trio must go to bed without supper. Meg casts a spell and three giant eggs burst out of her cauldron. Meg’s Eggs does what it says on the tin, and what’s for dinner really matters. And, over multiple cups of tea, a classic was born. Pieńkowski always brought flowers to put on the table Nicoll brought salmon. There, they nutted out the comic-strip layout, the ratio of words – approximately 10 – to each page, the eye-popping double spreads, and the fantastic use of negative space. He said yes, but on one condition: the witch’s spells mustn’t work.įor years they met in the cafe at Membury service station, equidistant between their homes on the M4. They met at the BBC in the early 1970s working on the TV show Watch! She wanted to write kids’ books and asked him to illustrate. ![]() The “violently colourful” stick-figure drawings are by the genius illustrator Jan Pieńkowski, and the stories by Helen Nicoll. ![]() The first Meg and Mog was published in 1972. For those not in the know, Meg is a stick figure witch with a broom, clumpy clogs, a stripey white-and-black cat called Mog – with yellow eyes and a twirly tail, his entire barrel body covered in bristles – and a pet Owl, white and circumspect. I took it home in a brown paper bag and read it to Fearne that night. Those funkadelic colour schemes! You can tell Meg and Mog originated in the 1970s, like me – that decade of bell bottoms, and Abigail’s Party, and hallucinogenic drugs. I felt a frisson of recognition and delight. I slid the lurid red spine out and knelt on the floor, leafing through the pages. When my daughter Fearne was nearly three, I found a copy of Meg’s Eggs in Pegasus Books. Megan Dunn puts all her eggs in one basket with Meg and Mog.
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