IT ALL BEGAN WITH A STORY about a little boy on the wrong side of a door.

He is inside the house with his mother’s shopping and keys and slams the front door; she is outside at the bottom of the steps getting his baby sister out of her buggy. He can’t reach the latch; bravado deserts him and he cries, the baby cries, the neighbours come to see if they can help, the milkman stops his float and offers to pick the lock, the window cleaner brings his ladder but just as he is halfway up to a bedroom window, the door swings open: the little boy has fetched a stool from the kitchen and stood on it to reach the latch.

Twenty-five years later, the little boy is still a little boy; his name is Alfie, hero of a dozen more stories. Along with his friends shouty Bernard and shy Min, and his babysitter, Mrs MacNally’s Maureen from across the road, Alfie is forever young. Only his sister Annie Rose has grown a little older, graduating from babyhood to toddler: “Annie Rose just demanded a bit more of the action,” says their creator, the author and illustrator Shirley Hughes. “

Characters come alive for me as I start to draw them: Alfie Gets in First was just a little story about a child in a classic situation, locked the wrong side of a door. I didn’t know he was called Alfie until I drew him and I certainly didn’t know there would be another Alfie story, and another and another.”

Hughes’s books were a staple when my children were small; Alfie is a couple of years younger than my oldest child and I can picture where we sat as I read to her and she frowned over the pictures, stabbing a small fat finger at Alfie’s new yellow wellington boots, saying: “My boots are red.”

When she stamped in puddles in her boots, her body was bent forward, her arms held away from her sides in exactly the same way as Alfie. It is one of Hughes’s great gifts, capturing the body language of small children. She started when her own three were small, but although Alfie is popularly supposed to be based on her son, the journalist Ed Vulliamy, she says that she never used models.

“I took my sketchbook everywhere: you go out, hang around playgrounds, get an eye for the way children look, cluster together, run off. You draw very fast, train your memory, then go back to the studio and make it all up. You get that look of when they are a little anxious or distressed — that’s how you convince your audience.”

Life for a small child is not a sweet idyll, she says, but high drama: “They are learning more at this stage than at any other, grappling with these big things: are my boots on the right feet? Can I safely put my security blanket down? You have to tap into the way they feel about these things.”

I have been invited to tea with Hughes and her husband, John Vulliamy, a retired architect, in the big old house where they have lived for 53 years. It is graceful and comfortable with the patina of family life. There is smoky tea in china cups, tapenade on thin brown bread, biscuits and two kinds of cake. All the houses in this now fashionable area of Notting Hill Gate back on to a communal garden where the Hughes children played all day with the neighbours’ children — some of whom are still friends, 30 years on. It was raffish, down at heel, back then, Hughes says, full of interesting people. Now, she observes sadly, you rarely see children or hear the sound of their laughter from the big garden: “They are being driven to after-school commitments or away abroad on holiday, or at the weekend cottage.”

Does she worry that the pace of life means that children and parents are losing the habit of reading? She nods. “These days children are saturated with electronic imagery. The danger is they become so quick on the uptake that they don’t look for the sake of looking. It is so important to slow down, to inhabit a picture, discover things for themselves.”

Despite its universal themes, Hughes’s world of Victorian terrace houses, doorstep milk deliveries, back garden birthday teas and school fêtes is quintessentially English. Publishers would say: “Oh Shirley, you are so middle class, so English, you will never sell abroad.”

The breakthrough came with Dogger, the story of a little boy who loses his favourite soft toy. It sold all over the world. “It is the most English book I’ve done,” she says, “set in that most English of places, the school sports day. But it worked because everyone can relate to that heart-stopping moment when you realise that the child’s vital security blanket — in this case a toy — goes missing.”

She lost her own as a child: in a fit of wild experimentation, instantly regretted (like Alfie slamming the front door), she threw Oscar the koala out of the car window. “I didn’t tell my mother for another hour,” she says. “By then it was too late.”

Appointed OBE in 1999 for services to children’s literature, Shirley Hughes at 78, tall and upright in elegant, home-sewn clothes, shows no sign of slowing down. Last year she produced her magnum opus — a pictorial record of the first half of the 20th century – and when she is not working on a new Alfie story, she writes books for older children: in 2004 Ella’s Big Chance, a reworking of Cinderella, won her the Kate Greenaway Medal for the second time.

Her books have sold 11.5 million copies worldwide. “It’s the most wonderful job,” she says, “I can’t believe my luck that anyone would pay me to do what I love.”

She rarely goes anywhere without a sketchbook to record people and animals in parks, streets and cafés. “When we’re on holiday, John is at it too. It’s been a great bond in our marriage — sitting around with our sketchbooks. When you come back you find you are very freed up and can get straight into work.”

An exhibition, 25 Years of Alfie, is at the Illustration Cupboard at Thomas Williams Fine Art, 22 Old Bond Street, London W1, from May 8-20. Entrance free. 020-7610 5481

www.illustrationcupboard.com

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist