Listen to Allan Ahlberg reading from his book Funnybones

Allan Ahlberg knows a thing or two about what children like. He has sold 17 million books and is not sure how many he has written. “More than 100,” he says, “I fear, more like 150. Some very short and some I really regret and would like to destroy, really. You don’t always get it right. You think something is a good idea and it isn’t.”

On the whole, though, his ideas are good and the results have been some of the best-loved of all children’s books written in the past three decades: Each Peach Pear Plum, Pee-po!, The Baby’s Catalogue, Burglar Bill and The Jolly Postman. Funnybones, another of the popular titles illustrated by his late wife, Janet, is to be given away to 700,000 children who started school this autumn. He has waived his fee. “They needed to find an author who wouldn’t take his royalties and go and buy a Porsche,” he says.

Last year 250,000 copies of Lynley Dodd’s much-loved Hairy Maclary’s Bone were given to children starting school under a new scheme called Booktime. The project caught the eye of Gordon Brown, who has stumped up more cash, so that every child in reception class in England and many starting school in the rest of the UK will get the book.

When Ahlberg, 69, was the age of the children who will be receiving Funnybones he had hardly seen a book. Born illegitimate in Croydon, he was adopted by a poor family in the Black Country. His books, with their zany sense of humour, often explore his own childhood.

He realised only when he was entering middle age “how fortunate I was to be adopted. My mother used to whack me but she loved me. She didn’t buy me books because books weren’t part of her experience. But I went to primary school and learnt to read in the usual way”.

He did not excel at school, scraped into grammar school and then worked as a postman, plumber’s mate and gravedigger before becoming a primary school teacher. He was in his thirties when Janet, to whom he was by then married, asked him to write a children’s book for her to illustrate.

“If I had grown up in a bookish family they might have noticed that I had a feeling for language,” he muses, but he does not regret that his talent went undiscovered. He started writing when he was more mature and thinks that was just right.

He doesn’t even agree that he is the exception that proves the rule that without a house full of books kids are disadvantaged. “When the working classes were left alone there were a lot of immensely clever, talented men and women in that class.”

But he passionately believes that reading is “valuable in itself” and “an absolutely crucial tool to get on in the world. Sadly in any population there will be a group of kids who for one reason or another grow up in situations where access to the printed word doesn’t happen. It’s in all our interests to help them.”

So this project is aimed more at those households where books are not bought. But it is also about reminding parents of the importance of actually reading the books they have provided for their children. “Lots of adults don’t really enjoy the company of little kids - they are bloody hard work.”

Market research conducted for Booktime threw up some interesting statistics about the way primary school children spend their time. Unsurprisingly, it discovered that the major activity for children was watching television and that the average child spends 7hrs and 46min a week in front of the box. But the survey also found that children spend 3 hrs and 51min a week reading – that’s a little more than half an hour a day, and a further 3hrs and 25 min a week, almost another half an hour a day, reading a book with an adult.

This would suggest that the outlook for the printed word is rosy. But one can’t help but be suspicious of these figures. The survey relied on parents telling researchers how much time their children spent on each activity. It is tempting to think that the real figures for TV viewing and video games are a little higher and the reading figures a little lower.

Handing out a single book is, as Ahlberg admits, merely a “drum roll” to help things along but “better a drop in the bucket than nothing. For me there’s a small embarrassment in recommending books since I make my living from the sale of books. But that’s being a bit precious. Books are a good thing.”

The key to fostering a love of reading in a child, says Ahlberg, is to start early. When their daughter, Jessica, was a baby, “Janet discovered that if she put a book in her cot after she had gone to sleep, when she woke up she would turn the pages.”

Parents should then spend time looking at books and discussing them with a child so that reading becomes a time of bonding and associated in a child’s mind as a happy experience. The Ahlbergs read to their daughter in the bath and Allan then taught her to read in ten days with a Ladybird book (“very simple, 16 words, lots of repetition, big print”), a Dr Seuss and one of his own easy-reading books.

When teaching to read he suggests that there is no need to “obsess with reading books”. He advocates getting a blackboard and writing words on it that kids suggest to you. It might be a message like “Mummy has a big nose. The simplest thing is to be a secretary to your child. Get a couple of sheets of paper, fold them and you’ve got an eight-page book.”

Janet Ahlberg died of breast cancer in 1994. Allan subsequently married Vanessa Clarke, who had edited some of his books. He has worked with other illustrators since, including his daughter, but with Janet he had “the best working relationship”.

For him the fact that many of the books were bestsellers is less important than “the notion of a book that endures. Each Peach took me a day to write and more than ticks over. It’s very pleasing to have written a book and 30 years later it is still there.” The latest project should ensure that Funnybones endures for another generation at least.

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