Megan Dunn puts all her eggs in one basket with Meg and Mog.
When my daughter Fearne was nearly three, I found a copy of Meg’s Eggs in Pegasus Books. I slid the lurid red spine out and knelt on the floor, leafing through the pages. I felt a frisson of recognition and delight. Those funkadelic colour schemes! You can tell Meg and Mog originated in the 1970s, like me – that decade of bell bottoms, and Abigail’s Party, and hallucinogenic drugs.
I took it home in a brown paper bag and read it to Fearne that night. For those not in the know, Meg is a stick figure witch with a broom, clumpy clogs, a stripey white-and-black cat called Mog – with yellow eyes and a twirly tail, his entire barrel body covered in bristles – and a pet Owl, white and circumspect.
The first Meg and Mog was published in 1972. The “violently colourful” stick-figure drawings are by the genius illustrator Jan Pieńkowski, and the stories by Helen Nicoll. They met at the BBC in the early 1970s working on the TV show Watch! She wanted to write kids’ books and asked him to illustrate. He said yes, but on one condition: the witch’s spells mustn’t work.
For years they met in the cafe at Membury service station, equidistant between their homes on the M4. There, they nutted out the comic-strip layout, the ratio of words – approximately 10 – to each page, the eye-popping double spreads, and the fantastic use of negative space. Pieńkowski always brought flowers to put on the table; Nicoll brought salmon. And, over multiple cups of tea, a classic was born.
Meg’s Eggs does what it says on the tin, and what’s for dinner really matters.
Meg casts a spell and three giant eggs burst out of her cauldron. But the eggs are too hard, so the trio must go to bed without supper. They troop up the stairs – those black outlined steps, so simple, so right. In the middle of the night, creak! crack! Out of the first egg hatches a long-necked diplodocus! Next, a stegosaurus! Tap! Tap! Owl sits on the last dotty egg. Suddenly a bright-red T-rex bursts out. Chaos ensues.
Meg has to whip up another spell: “Bacon and eggs, jump over their legs.”
Meg inspects the diplodocus under a looking glass. “I must have put in too much bacon,” I read aloud to Fearne.
Then I turned the page, and, in a circle Meg, Mog, and Owl waved at us.
“Goodbye,” I read.
“Goodbye,” Fearne repeated.
Hello and goodbye are essential words in every language.
I read Meg’s Eggs to death, or till a chunk had torn loose from the page of the stegosaurus in the garden eating all the cabbages.
The joy of our life together back then was phonetic, the alphabet exploding into onomatopoeia, Fearne’s steps mismatched alongside mine, bedtime stories each night, and her fingers twined through my long witchy hair. Meg always cooking something up in her cauldron: “Double trouble, rock and rubble, oil boil, and cauldron bubble,” Meg chants in Meg’s Castle (Pieńkowski’s favourite spell in the series). Speech bubbles pop in the dark, eyes blink open, and things tumble downstairs, like a toddler falling over and learning to get back up again. And there’s always time for tea.
I bought every copy of Meg and Mog I could find in Pegasus. Then I got serious and ordered everything going on Book Depository. Yes, I know it’s owned by Amazon, but my principles aren’t always rock solid. Once upon a time, I was a freewheelin’ young woman who did lines off toilet seats. But, as an older mum – I had Fearne at 40 through IVF – I take my thrills where I can.
In hindsight, Meg’s Eggs chimed with me.
I also loved that epic purple sky and seething green ocean in Meg at Sea. Especially the page where Mog catches a giant orange fish.
“It’s a whopper!” I read.
“It’s a whopper,” Fearne repeated.
“Mine’s bigger!”, said Owl, wrapped in the tentacles of a giant green octopus. Poor Owl. Even now, all these years later, I sometimes hear Fearne say “It’s a whopper”, and I recognise the pure glee in her voice, the joy of sound.
Back then, I was about to go to America on important research for my mermaid book. Oh, to write a spell as catchy as the one in Meg at Sea: “Mermaid’s Tail, lobster’s toe, octopus wriggle, blow wind blow!”
Before my trip, I bought Fearne a pink Meg and Mog T-shirt for her third birthday. I ordered it from a website and requested that her name be embroidered above the circle of Meg, Mog and Owl waving.
I didn’t want to say goodbye to Fearne. I was afraid to leave. What if I never returned?
Somehow, we got through that fortnight apart, even though Fearne wailed “Mummy!” at the cat flap every night. And my mermaid book later backfired. And the T-shirt embroidery had cross-hatching at the back, so it was “too itchy” to wear.
Back when I was first pregnant with Fearne, I saw a Meg and Mog number chart in a shop on Cuba Street. I pounced on it, like Owl swooping down on the vole in Meg’s Bed.
In the early days of her life, when I hardly slept and my mind festered, I hung that chart along her cot. Pieńkowski’s vivid colour palette is from his own childhood, growing up in Poland. He only used 16 colours in the Meg and Mog books, always selecting the brightest hue. Those hues were a comfort to me, as I learned how to be the face of comfort for my daughter. As I learned who I was as a mum. MUM. Now there’s a word with some cushion, those Ms provide a sense of warmth, like the armrests on a sofa, a snuggling-in.
My favourite story is Meg’s Mummy. Meg and Mog fly to Egypt – “Salaam!” Mog falls down the side of the pyramid and is bandaged up by Meg – “Oh dear, oh dear” – then mistaken for a mummy. On the Nile, Meg is nearly eaten by a crocodile. SNAP! The whole story reeks of eurocentrism now, but I appreciated her array of adventures, and Nicoll and Pieńkowski apparently argued over details in the British Museum ensuring everything was accurate.
I also like Meg’s Mummy because in our rented Wellington flat on the Hankey Street hump is an old three-seater sofa, patterned with Egyptian pyramids and hieroglyphs. I’ve written two books on this sofa, even though according to Rich, my partner, “it is the worst sofa in the world.”
Helen Nicoll died in 2012, and afterwards David Pelser – Pieńkowski’s life partner – took over the storylines. The quality waned, but let’s not go there. I’d rather let Meg and the Dragon lie. I never got much out of Meg’s Car either, but then I don’t drive.
In 2018, after my first book came out, I took the shuttle from Auckland airport to the Writers Festival. I was seated next to the author and film critic David Larsen, a good-humoured back-seat companion. I was keen to be seen as a writer, rather than just a reader of bedtime stories and maker of cups of warm milk. I remember pronouncing, brashly, “Meg is a feminist icon.”
I had whipped my intellect out like the broomstick my mind flies about on at night while my daughter twirls her hands through my hair. David said, “That wasn’t what I was expecting to hear.”
And I sat in the backseat feeling smug. Yes, I am a children’s book snob. I am also an egg, because Meg and Mog has sold over three million copies in the UK alone. It’s hardly my secret.
Why do we read before bed? If you are still here, chances are you were read to as a child, books entered your mind and were set to your circadian rhythm. The brilliance of Meg and Mog is obvious. It’s a great bedtime story – that’s why the series is still in print after nearly 50 years. In 2003, the characters were also animated for TV.
But listen to Clouds’s puritanical Goodreads review of the first book: “I was expecting more character development, more emotional angst – but there’s nothing at stake here, nothing driving the tension… It’s just a story about a witch, who lives with her cat and an owl.”
Um, I think that’s what I like about it, thanks very much. Being a parent is all the emotional turbulence I need, my heart is already served up on a plate, every day, like a pile of Wattie’s peas, and I know that financially my life as a writer is a backfiring spell, that might later put my daughter through hell, in a world already riddled with climate change. Occasionally even smoking koalas burst out of my cauldron.
“Mummy did koalas die in the bushfires,” Fearne asked once.
“Some koalas died,” I said.
“Did baby koalas die?” she asked.Pienkowski
“Some baby koalas died.”
And more recently, in one blip on the news, showing a blood-stained pram. “Why did they kill the four-year-old? Where is her mum? Why would they bomb a child?”
“Putt Putt. Man on the moon, we’ll see you soon!”
The only story we have left now is the little yellow board book, Meg on the Moon. Fearne and I still do the count down together, 10, 9, 8, 7… Meg and Mog bounce over a pair of astronauts, seeing how high they can jump on the moon. Splashdown is in the pond in the garden and Owl is waiting to greet them.
Pieńkowski won the Kate Greenaway medal for illustration twice. His use of paper cutouts and silhouettes stemmed from his second world war childhood. In Warsaw, a soldier in an air-raid bunker had entertained the young Pieńkowski with shapes made from newspapers. And it was a neighbour in Poland who first told him stories of the witch Baba Yaga, but she always stopped before a cliffhanger. “I used to have terrible dreams, nightmares, of this witch, always chasing me and trying to put me in a pot,” he told one interviewer, “I think in a way she gave birth to Meg, because I think Meg was really sublimating – isn’t that the word? Taking this terrible monster from my childhood and making it into a harmless toy.”
Pieńkowski died in February this year, with more than 140 books to his name.
On Desert Island Discs, he said, “If you are in bed and your father or mother are reading you a story, you can be as petrified as you like because you know you’re safe.”
Today Fearne and I walked to school, down the Hankey Street hump, past the building site, and Fearne said, “Meg and Mog are the best books ever.”
She is seven now, but recently has taken to wearing her T-shirt again, with a layer underneath, so it’s not too itchy.
“What do you love about Meg and Mog?”
“The details and at the end they always say goodbye.”
She raised her chin in a self-satisfied smirk.
“I should have never given away our Meg and Mog books, what was I thinking? Silly Mummy,” I said.
Something my own Mum used to say, “silly mummy” has bounced back into the communal cauldron.
We stepped over the cracks in the pavement.
“What was the very best story?” I asked.
“The one with the eggs.”
“What did you like about it?”
“Well, I don’t really remember it, but I remember it was good.”
“Yes,” I said, and I raised my chin in a self-satisfied smirk.
