Jean Adamson was never one for fantasy books. Like GK Chesterton, she believed that for small children the real world was magical enough. She proved it by illustrating the everyday adventures of Topsy and Tim, which would go on to sell more than 27 million copies.
When she and her husband, Gareth, first decided to write children’s stories in the late 1950s, they noticed a gap in the market. Infants could live in the slightly surreal world of Noddy or Andy Pandy, or be transported by Thomas the Tank Engine, but books on offer never really suggested something that they might actually do for real the day after being read their bedtime story. “We went to look around big bookshops and found lovely books about