The Forgotten Art of Childhood

Rediscovering the illustrations of Margery Gill and a cautionary tale

Cover illustration by Margery Gill, Jonathan Cape, 1965

I was knee deep in research for a different post when the thread of a memory kept pulling. Perhaps it was the heat, or the approach of the long school holidays, but during the intense, hot days of 1976, I lay in the cool of my bedroom, lost in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series.

My grandad used…