Chris Riddell

And I wanted to read that.

And so, of course, I went to my teacher and said, are there any more books like this?

And she said, oh, yes, there are.

And I've got to say, since that day, you know, Peter and Jane were dead to me.

I went into the real stuff, the stories, the pictures, the exciting things.

And it was about the time, I think, I started to read for myself.

So up until that point, I had enjoyed being read to.

And one of the books I would put on that shelf next to Peter and Jane,

to be, just for sentimental reasons, and next to Hackett and Sacks and the Jewel Thieves with Quentin Blake's illustration.

Next to that would be a book that was read to me, and that's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

And that was, you know, I loved listening to the story being read to me, but then just pouring over the beautiful John Tenniel illustrations.

And I always enjoyed drawing, and one of the things I loved doing was to copy the pictures

from Alison's Adventures in Wonderland because they were so wonderfully intricate and difficult and absorbing.

And I used to draw the White Rabbit because he particularly took my fancy, the frontispiece from my edition.

And I would sit and try and decode it by copying Tenniel's drawing of the White Rabbit.

And in fact, the other experience I had just pre-lockdown

was to illustrate my own version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which was a wonderfully sort of sentimental thing for me to do.

And of course, I approached the White Rabbit with huge trepidation, remembering my childhood.

But it was a dream come true.

What I consciously did was put aside my much-loved Tenniel editions