A significant number of readers will need no introduction to Horrid Henry, but
for those who have not been within pea-shooting distance of a child
recently, suffice to say that scheming, subversive Henry and his saintly,
simpering brother Perfect Peter are our modern-day Cain and Abel, and a
publishing phenomenon.
Two thirds of all five to eight-year-olds own either a Horrid Henry story or
tape, according to Orion, the publisher, and over the past decade book sales
in the UK have topped eight million. This places their creator, Francesca
Simon, in the same league as, if not quite J. K. Rowling, certainly
Jacqueline Wilson, Anthony Horowitz and Philip Pullman.
Post Harry Potter, children’s literature has ceased to be the Cinderella area
of the book world, but for the most part its authors remain refreshingly and
sweetly untouched by their quasi-celebrity status. Simon continues to live
in the home she has had for the past 17 years — a Victorian terrace in one
of North London’s least flashy enclaves.
From the outside it looks just like the sort of house that Henry and Peter’s
hapless parents would choose, and for a fleeting moment, as I hover on the
doorstep, I am lulled into thinking that its owner must be a
muddling-through, middle-of-the-road working mother just like me. Then I
step inside and bang, wallop, I can see that there is nothing remotely
neutral about her.
Simon’s house is a place of polar extremes. To our left as we pass down the
hallway is the snug sitting room, complete with original Liberty wallpaper
and a gilt-framed mirror above the fireplace. Ahead is the kitchen-diner, a
Pawson-like temple of minimalism.
The contrast is as stark as her characters — frenetic and chaotic Henry versus
calm and ordered Peter, memorably illustrated in the books by the artist
Tony Ross. “It is possible to be both. I love the clutter, but I also love
this,” she says, opening her larder to show me rows of neatly arranged jars
on pull-out shelves. “Henry and Peter are the two sides of me, and actually
they are the two sides of all of us. We all have this war within between
wanting to conform and not to conform.”
This dichotomy is the key to Simon’s success, which has resulted in 15
storybooks, one of which knocked The Da Vinci Code off the top of the
bestseller lists — and several spin-offs, the latest of which is a joke book
published to coincide with April Fool’s Day. “I don’t tell jokes. And I
certainly am not the sort of person to play practical jokes. But I am
playful, even though I may look deadly serious,” she says gleefully.
Now 52, Simon is an American who read medieval history at Yale before coming
to study Older Middle English at Oxford in the late 1970s. She drifted into
teaching English before working for several years as a journalist, and never
for a moment considered becoming a children’s author until the birth of her
son, Joshua, in 1989.
“Writers don’t necessarily choose what they write well,” she says. “I was
always an academic, but when Josh arrived I found that my mind flooded with
ideas.” Henry evolved as Joshua grew, but her son — now a delightful
17-year-old, according to his mother — was never a template for Simon’s
truculent antihero. Henry’s anger, frustration and despair at his irritating
brother are a direct hangover, Simon explains, from her own upbringing.
“The emotions of childhood have always been close to me — the rage of being
trapped, the indignities, the fact that you have to ask someone else for
permission to do absolutely everything. The best things for me about being
grown up are that I can have a room that I can make mine, decide what I want
to eat, go where I want to go.”
The daughter of an Academy Award-winning screen-writer and a stay-at-home
mother, Simon, like Henry, was the firstborn child. There were three further
siblings. The youngest, a brother, was born 14 years after her and did not
feature large in her upbringing, but she, her sister and her first brother
were born within three years of each other.
It was this closenessin age that was the foundation for much of her fury. “I
get on well with my siblings now — even go on holiday with them — but back
then, all I wanted was to be an only child. I couldn’t stand having them
around, not because they were awful but because their very existence
bothered me, in a way that Peter annoys Henry because he has a pulse.”
Her brother and sister called her Miss Maturity “because I bossed them around
and wouldn’t play with them”. But she also felt the burden of
responsibility. “When I was 7, my sister and I were each given a doll. One
had a skirt and one trousers and I was given the one in trousers, but then
my sister wanted that one and my mother made me give it to her, saying ‘But
she’s younger than you. Can’t you be grown up about it?’ And I didn’t want
to be grown up. I was so angry. I have lots of vivid memories like that. I
was always raging and slamming doors.”
This portrait that Simon paints of her childhood self is so demonic that it is
hard to believe she could grow up into the same frizzy-haired but
soft-round-the-edges woman now sitting before me. Until, of course, you
remember that the Henry element was only one side of her.
Much of her childhood was idyllic. The family moved around but mostly lived in
Malibu, across the street from Lana Turner. “She lived on the beach side, we
were on the poor side in a rented shack. It was cramped and I had to share a
room with my sister, which I hated, but we got to swim every day and I was a
voracious reader — it was my way of tuning out from the chaos around me.”
She recalls her teacher asking them one term to make a list of all the books
they had read. “I had a list of 75 and she accused me of lying, saying that
I couldn’t possibly have read so many, which really hurt.” This is her
Perfect Peter side. “He just wants to please, and the tragedy is that it
doesn’t get him very far. I feel for him.”
Simon enjoyed a good relationship with her father but had a difficult time
with her mother. “She said that I could either have a career or get married,
because that had been her choice, but she later became a political
activist.”
By then Simon was long gone. She was among the first women to be admitted to
Yale in the early 1970s and scrimped every penny to get herself to Oxford —
“I’ve worked since I was 16, my parents never had any money” — only to find
it a disappointment. “It was like a finishing school, filled with people who
were arrogant and not as bright as they thought they were.”
In a sense, Simon has always been the outsider — as a child, as a female
Jewish student among the then predominantly white, rich Republican males of
Yale, and as an impecunious American at Oxford.
She met her British husband, Martin Stamp, a software developer, in 1983, and
with him felt that she finally belonged. They did not set out consciously to
have an only child, but Simon concedes: “Part of me was anxious about having
more children because I felt that somehow I would be doing him a disservice,
and by the time I realised that I would cope I wasn’t able to conceive
again, so the decision was taken out of my hands.”
Unlike her, Joshua was not a big reader. “He didn’t read at all till he was
7½, and even then it didn’t come easily to him. But I thought, if you are
not going to read the books I want you to read, then I will read them to you
— and he loved that. A lot of parents punish their children for learning to
read by stopping reading to them, and that is a mean thing to do. You should
read to them until they push you out of the door and bolt it, because books
are such a great thing to share.”
She refuses to simplify the language in her stories (“Children love
encountering words that they don’t know, they are used to it”) but is
nonetheless thrilled when parents tell her, as they often do, that Horrid
Henry books are the first ones that their children read independently. I
tell her that this was the case with my two children, and that my
13-year-old still likes to devour them under the safety of his duvet.
“That really pleases me, because reading should be fun above all. If you tie
it up too much with education and the idea that if your child is not reading
a challenging book, well, then you drain all the pleasure out of it.”
Henry was an instinctive creation. Simon had written four books before the
series really took off with Horrid Henry’s Nits in 1997 “and it
was only then that I started to analyse them. I was getting letters from
children from all sorts of backgrounds, but they all connected with the good
child/ bad child theme.”
Henry is now a television star — ITV bought the rights last year — and the
books are published in 23 countries, including China, Vietnam and Korea but,
curiously, not in America. “The reason I’m given is that they are
unsuitable, although no publisher will say that on the record,” she says. “I
don’t think they have read the books properly.
“Henry gives the illusion of great wickedness but his parents are still in
charge — when they tell him to go to bed he may stomp, but he obeys them. He
tricks his brother and hits him and calls him names, but I would love to
meet the child that hasn’t done that. Maybe there is no sibling rivalry in
America and maybe all families are happy, but I doubt it.”
The humour in Henry stems, anyway, not from his ferocious temper, but from his
totally understandable desire to escape the boring hikes, museum trips and
necessity for thank-you letters that punctuate all our childhoods. “Thank
you for the horrible gift. Next time, just send cash,” he writes.
“I just love that,” Simon chortles. “I wouldn’t do it because I am too polite,
but the imp inside me wants to.” It comes as no surprise to learn that
Anthony Trollope is her favourite writer “because he writes about the rules
of society and people who are trying to fit in with them but don’t quite
make it”.
Her favourite Horrid Henry story is Horrid Henry Gets Rich Quick , in
which Henry sells Peter to Moody Margaret. Horrid Henry has, of course, made
Simon richer than she ever imagined — “no one sets out to be a wealthy,
successful children’s author, unless they are pretty idiotic” — but she
displays little evidence of lavish spending.
There is about her now a mellowness that has no place in Horrid Henry’s
repertoire. “I rage, but I think I have always been quite content. You never
know how life is going to turn out so I enjoy the process, because that may
be the best it ever is.”
Horrid Henry’s Jolly Joke book is out now (Orion, £4.99). Times
readers can buy a selection of Horrid Henry CD and Book packs
(£8.99rrp) at three for the price of two. To order at the special price of
£17.98 including free p&p call 0870 160 8080. To celebrate April
Fool’s Weekend, Francesca Simon will be signing copies of her books at
Waterstone’s in Bluewater on March 31 and at Waterstone’s in Guildford High
Street on April 1. There will also be Horrid Henry events in Waterstone’s
nationwide. Visit waterstones.com for details
