John Burningham by John Burningham
Jonathan Cape, £25; 223pp Buy the book

It's a Secret! (3+) by John Burningham
Walker Books, £11.99 Buy the book

The year 1963 has been immortalised by Philip Larkin as the time when “sexual intercourse began/ Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles' first LP”. Yet for those who were children, it marked something quite different. Two extraordinary picture books were published, one on each side of the Atlantic: Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, and John Burningham's Borka: The Adventures of a Goose with No Feathers.

Sendak is internationally famous and fêted as a picture-book artist, but our own Burningham is, if less stellar, just as admired as a fearless original whose wit and sense of fun should be a part of every infancy. His contemporaries include Brian Wildsmith, Quentin Blake and Helen Oxenbury - who, in time, became Burningham's wife. Borka was swiftly followed by Trubloff, the story of a mouse that wants to play the balalaika.

Eccentric animals with strange, passionate vocations, round-faced humans who casually embarked on tremendous adventures, landscapes rendered in a pencil, collage and a mixture of media (which, maddeningly, the Jonathan Cape appreciation does not identify), all in gorgeous colours, were as much a part of a 1960s childhood as Doctor Who. His pictures for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang were fun, but those for Cloudland, Avocado Baby and Oi, Get Off Our Train! became part of childhoods from 3 and up. Dreamy, melancholy and charming, they are feasts for the eyes of the young.

It is no surprise to learn that the author is the son of a conscientious objector in the First World War, and a former pupil of a number of progressive co-educational schools, including Summerhill, where he failed every subject but English. His talent for drawing was inherited from his mother, who “should have been an artist but never had the chance”.

Burningham's books work not only because of their witty line and strong sense of atmosphere but also because he has perfect recall of a child's sense of boundless possibility. Why not shrink like his Shirley to become so tiny that you whoosh down the plughole of your bath rather than get out? Who hasn't considered whether, as in Would you rather, they would “rather be crushed by a snake, eaten by a crocodile or sat on by a rhinoceros”?

Yet Burningham's best-loved characters always outwit their persecutors. The weedy Stephen in The Shopping Basket is a precursor to Julia Donaldson's Mouse in The Gruffalo; the frail Avocado Baby becomes so strong on his new diet that he develops Superman qualities; and in The Boy Who Was Always Late, the central character has the satisfaction of seeing his tormentor Sir carried off by a gorilla.

Jonathan Cape's appreciation of Burningham's work will be appreciated in its turn by adults, but children will be interested only in his books and It's A Secret! is well up to scratch. Malcolm the cat is one of those snooze-by-day, hero-by-night felines, much in the mould of Paul Geraghty's Slobcat or Posy Simmonds's Fred. Marie Elaine meets Malcolm, all dressed up in a scarlet coat and a green plumed hat, follows him through the cat-flap and, with another child, embarks on a thrilling journey. Up cranes, over rooftops, they escape the dogs (wearing hoodies) and arrive at a party where there is dancing. Then the Queen of the Cats turns up.

Like Raymond Briggs's The Snowman, or Sendak's In the Night Kitchen, Burningham's latest picture book is a celebration of the kind of extended dream-adventure that a child can half-fear, half-love and never forget. Above all, such adventures are a celebration of the best kind of childhood, one imbued with confidence, imagination, humour, friendship and kindness - qualities displayed by their author.

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