Queen of Comedy

With Book Day approaching prolific author Jeanne Willis is getting her bag ready for in person and online visits. Here Nicola Baird finds out more about her writing life.

Jeanne Willis is a phenomenal conversationalist who has written more than 400 books. She’s writing one now too, about guinea pigs, with the working title of Pigman Freud. There’s a huge range – picture books, chapter books, educational books and poetry. Many are written to make the reader laugh, because Jeanne makes things fun.

Not surprisingly Jeanne, who sports a glamorous Marilyn Monroe bob and coral lipstick, loves to go into schools to talk books. And the children get far more than an author and a story – they get a show.

“I bring my preserved beetles. I bring a massive great boa skin. Just to show them wonderful things that a lot of the children have never seen,” says Jeanne. “I’ve got a lovely puppet that looks like a tadpole, then you turn it inside out and it metamorphs into a frog, and the same with a caterpillar so I use them for Tadpole’s Promise. Then I always do a ‘make’ with them, maybe make the character or something. And if I’m with the older children, I take a bag with my very first book.”

On the Zoom screen Jeanne gives me the same show and tell to reveal A House Full of Poems (circa 1965) that she thinks she wrote when she was “about five”. She produced many books as a child, sometimes with her sister Chrissy. Fortunately, many of the collection were kept safely by their Nana. Little Green Monkey, written when she was a little older but still at primary school, is written in pencil but some of her early opus were typed on her Nana’s typewriter, like Birds Nest Soup, then hand stitched and finished off with carefully crafted sticky-back plastic covers.

“The kids always have lots of questions and we segue into terrible things, like what are you most afraid of?” she says wickedly. I’ve just watched the very unexpected conclusion to Tadpole’s Promise on line and reckon that Jeanne use humour to cope with what life throws at her – when she can’t lose herself in a passion for entomology and animal rescue. She’s currently waiting for a “very large larvae of a beetle called Megasoma Rex, which is one of the biggest ones you can get. But they might take about two years to pupate and come out as adult beetles.”

Books and beetle boxes share her office space with indoor plants, a rescued giant African snail and the occasional newt brought in from her garden pond to assist with online book talks – the famous Jeanne Willis book “shows”.

Back in her 20s Jeanne had to deal with all sorts while living in London. It all kicked off when she worked as a copywriter and the paparazzi doorstepped her on the hunt for the creator of the 1986 “Tell Sid …” ad campaign for British Gas. “We were all sworn to secrecy and were told if anybody revealed who Sid was, we’d be fired on the spot. But, you know, people were offering to pay our mortgages off… I wish I’d done it,” she says with a big grin. Not long before this incident, when she lived in a “wedding cake house, you know three storeys”, on Seven Sisters Road she was stabbed by a random attacker who was never found by the police. “It’s a very good anecdote and I did get compensation, enough to retile my kitchen,” she says without a tremor of self-pity.

Jeanne grew up in St Albans, Hertfordshire. Both her parents were secondary school teachers at the same school. And guess where she ended up at 11? Yes, at their school which was mortifying and led to her sister Chrissy, “who was very small” being bullied. Chrissy is still a big part of this writer’s life and features in Jeanne’s adventure The Bog Baby which creatively tackles nature, nurture and keeping secrets.

Bookmaking was a constant for the young Jeanne; even at a reasonably recent reunion with one of her early years’ teachers, the never-ageing Miss Stevens, a book about a falcon created by Jeanne was produced to show to its author. “There were some terrible illustrations, but she’d put marvellous comments in it and kept it for years,” says Jeanne marvelling.

Despite all this initiative the young Jeanne didn’t get to choose what books to read.

“My father was quite strict. Until we were almost in our teens, he would insist on choosing my sister and I library books, which we got really annoyed about because he kept getting us things like Sue, State Registered Nurse. We wanted more interesting material,” she says admitting that nowadays she does read a lot of non-fiction. Current book on the go is Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton. “I’ve got beetle books and everything from pig breeding to learning the tarot and folklore. I just want to learn new stuff all the time. Obviously, it’s inspiring for plots and books,” she adds.

This life-honed magpie approach got a boost when, “A new library opened very near my Nan and Granddad’s and we used to pop in there quite a lot, often just to keep dry. But I loved pottering around and selecting my own books. I bought them home sometimes and my dad would say, ‘No, you’re not reading that’. Both my parents were very overprotective. We didn’t have newspapers in the house, and we weren’t allowed to watch much telly unless they said it was all right, so we were limited to Jackanory, Blue Peter the Magic Roundabout but not allowed Magpie, because that was too boisterous, or Crackerjack.”

Jeanne says that her book SuperCat instantly produced a big postbag. “It’s often from parents who’ve got children, nearly always boys, with autism. And they say they can’t get enough of that book and they’re demanding more titles.” On Jeanne’s website there’s a clip from a young female fan who’d been introduced to Super Cat as a class read and says she loves it because there’s “a good villain and it’s funny”, so it’s good to hear that this has been optioned. But Jeanne urges calm as her short novel for kids, Dumb Creatures was also optioned, and got to the script stage, but has yet to be filmed.

Wouldn’t it be a joy to see some of Jeanne Willis’ books on the big screen? Until that day you can be certain that she’s going to keep having fun looking after her bugs and dreaming up more wonderfully wicked plots.

www.jeannewillis.com >>

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