The timeless style of mums in Shirley Hughes books

And why they matter (to me)

I think parenting is always, to some extent, either a continuation of or a reaction to the way we ourselves were raised. And while there are areas I’ve been excited to find have evolved in the past 30 years (the chicken pox vaccine; CBeebies on demand) I’m afraid to say that a lot of the time I seem to want to give my daughter a historical reenactment of my own youth.

Maybe it’s the millennial urge to live in a warm bath of nostalgia, but I want her to watch good old telly, like Postman Pat before he became an Evri driver, and wear good old OshKosh dungarees and read good old books like the ones I used to read. Or the exact ones I used to read, complete with dog ears and Munch Bunch stains. No disrespect to the Julia Donaldson industrial complex, but all I want at bedtime is Shirley Hughes.

For the unacquainted, Hughes was an author and illustrator who wrote more than 50 books and illustrated over 200, from the 1960s until nearly all the way up to her death in 2022. She chronicled mos…