Like all great children’s storytellers or illustrators, the Polish-born artist Jan Pieńkowski instinctively understood that fear is an unavoidable and necessary part of childhood – and that how a child’s emotions are contained and held is crucial when it comes to an individual’s learning to operate in the world. Pieńkowski, who died on Saturday, used fear to great effect in his works: one of his early books with the writer Joan Aiken, with whom he had already collaborated on her story A Necklace of Raindrops, was a collection of central and eastern European fairy tales with many fantastical and terrifying elements, not least in his pictures of Baba Yaga, the witch who lives in a house that stands on chicken legs and flies about in her pestle and mortar – a character who was also a scary presence at Little Bulb’s children’s Christmas show, Wolf Witch Giant Fairy, at the Royal Opera House, London, last year.
Pieńkowski was no stranger to fear – real, terrible fear. As a child in rural Poland, the son of a country squire, his existence had at first been idyllic and, from a 21st-century, post-industrial perspective, almost impossibly distant (the farm grew its own flax for cloth, which would be handspun before being woven). The coachman’s wife would tell him scary witch stories and then stop on a cliffhanger – only continuing when he’d drunk a hated cupful of boiled milk. But then came the war. The family moved to Warsaw. Frightening stories became frightening reality. He witnessed awful things in the city: “I have blotted out the screams. The noise has been obliterated,” he told Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs in 2009. But as an adult he could never bear “shrill noises”, or screaming or people stampeding.
The “safe fear” contained in children’s stories was still something to be cherished and, his case, created. After the family moved to the UK, and Pieńkowski had studied classics and English at Cambridge, he turned again to his first love of drawing. Meg and Mog, the bestselling books he made with Helen Nicoll, were, admittedly, not very frightening, with their splendidly hapless witch heroine and her endless failed spells. But Haunted House, his wildly inventive 1979 pop-up book, really was, with its yellow-eyed cats peeping malevolently from roof-spaces, its haunted four-poster beds, and its skeletons in, literally, cupboards. There was also a great deal of humour: an octopus doing the washing up, a UFO lurking outside the window, and a crocodile in the bath.
Funny and frightening were not so far apart – just as in, say, the dark pleasures of Heinrich Hoffmann’s Shock-headed Peter, in which Little Suck-a-Thumb has his offending digit cut off by a shears-wielding tailor, or indeed Edward Gorey’s various alphabets (though some parents may regard “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by bears” to be rather more of an adult than a child-appropriate pleasure). “What was nice about being frightened,” he told Young, “was that I was in a safe place. When you’re in bed and your father or mother is reading you a story you can be as petrified as you like – because you know you are safe.”