4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Andy Griffiths: ‘I think it's a pity that reading is being lost through neglect'
It's the kind of day you wouldn't believe is winter when Andy Griffiths and I meet – crisp blue sky, barely a tussle of wind and a temperature warm enough to breathe and think.
We both arrive 10 minutes early to his childhood home on a steep street in Vermont, a suburb that was very much the fringe of Melbourne when Griffiths grew up, but now is comfortably in the eastern suburbs.
Built in the 60s, the brown brick house hasn't changed much. 'It's really comforting,' says Griffiths.
'This was a really great place to grow up,' he says, 'because there were kids everywhere.' He points to the houses on the corner, reflecting on his neighbours. 'There was always someone out on the street to play with or talk to, or little kids to tell silly stories to, and there were dogs everywhere.'
At the bottom of the intersecting street is a pine forest that leads to Dandenong Creek. We walk down slowly, stopping to ponder the trees. 'It feels a little bit lighter than it did. Or maybe it's just me who's changed, but it did feel a lot darker and more mysterious. It's like you're in another little world.'
The trees stand tall, with very few low-lying branches, not at all good for climbing. Every other kind of mischief, however, was within this open circle of trees: dragsters with banana seats, making up outrageous stories, hiding beers for teenage parties, and firecrackers.
'It was one of those childhoods where you'd go out in the morning and didn't really have to come home until it got dark.'
Griffiths' father was an industrial chemist, with a knack for building things and gardening. His mother was a midwife who ran the secondhand book stall at the school fete, filling the house with all sorts of books donated from the neighbourhood. Griffiths often had first dibs, and still has some of those books spanning from fiction to philosophy.
'They're really precious reading experiences, because they're not necessarily what you would have given to a kid, but they just opened up the world to me. I often muse back on that and think, something was looking after me there.'
Children's books did still appeal to him, however, and he loved Enid Blyton from an early age.
'I loved her because she'd just get the kids away from the parents in the first chapter, plunge them into danger or an adventure.'
The tattooed punk children's author is rather dapper in a tweed jacket over a cardigan vest and wearing a trilby hat, but still at home in the forest, leading us the 'traditional way' that the kids would go down to the creek. He compares the creek to Winnie-the-Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood, a place of freedom.
Freedom comes up a lot in conversation – not necessarily in a large political sense but rather the freedom to imagine, to play and to explore the world without adults present. He didn't know the years of unobserved childhood wandering around the creek would become the bones of his career, spanning four decades, although his résumé also includes bottle shop worker, punk vocalist and English teacher.
Griffiths has made an impressive career spanning four decades of writing for six-to-10-year-olds, an age at which he says, 'Anything is possible. They're still in that phase where the world is large. You don't know what's quite true or what's not true,' he says, slowing down for a moment.
Despite reports that children, especially boys, are reading less and struggling more with literacy, Griffiths is mostly optimistic, meeting thousands of kids a year.
'Parents do have a role to play in ensuring a balance in their kids' lives, a balance between outside play, gaming, reading. Because [in] reading, while you're getting that intense experience, you're gaining literacy skills, which make such a difference to every aspect of your life, which I think is a pity that that's being lost through neglect.
'At the same time, there's more books for kids than there ever was for more varied readerships. So much more.'
His own childhood took place during the golden age of reading, as Griffiths calls it. 'We weren't spending all our time reading books, because we had our dragsters and we had the keys to the kingdom.' But he had the best of both worlds: playing for hours, all children together, and also getting lost in books, simply because, 'we had many spare hours growing up that couldn't be filled with anything else'.
We leave the forest by a sharp ascent over muddy grass and rocks, returning to the block around Griffiths childhood home, heading towards the old milk bar.
'I want to keep writing the type of thing that a particular reader really craves. It's the most positive way I can think to make a difference. What I'm doing is translating what I loved in my childhood reading, finding that essence and the spirit of it and modernising it and passing it on.'
His newest series, working with Bill Hope, is a change of direction after 30 years of collaboration with Terry Denton on the Treehouse series. The series with Denton ended after 13 books, published from 2011 to 2023, which sold more than 10m copies and were published in more than 35 languages. The series was a slightly unexpected hit internationally – Griffiths' previous series had only received local success.
'I just thought our particular flavour of humour was like Vegemite.
'There was an outpouring of grief by dedicated readers and their parents [when the Treehouse series ended]. And they were like, you can't stop. And I was like, well, I have,' he says, 'But it doesn't mean I'm going to stop writing.'
He knew where he was going next. Over the years, many children had written to him, asking if they could appear in a book, because obviously that wouldn't be too much trouble, which led to the idea of the ubiquitous main characters in his latest book, You and Me, illustrated only as a pair of adventure costumes to leave their appearance to the imagination.
You & Me is an adventure series, in which the main characters are called You and Me, which serves to encourage reading aloud.
The second book, You & Me and the Peanut Butter Beast, firmly establishes the characters: Me, who wants to follow the rules, and You, who is more impulsive. Then there is Johnny Knucklehead, a reappearing swindler who started out as just a name in Griffiths' head, until Bill Hope sent over some drawings, the final sketch now tattooed on Griffiths' palm.
Keeping in touch with a childlike sense of imagination, play and humour is something that Griffiths considers greatly.
'I allow myself to do things that appear to have no ostensible value or purpose,' he says, permitting himself to spend hours in a record shop and rereading childhood favourite books.
'You come away restored and buzzing with the excitement. It adds richness.' Griffiths says he always knows when he is working too much – everything is a chore and not much fun. Humour, he says, has great value, not just because it is pleasurable to laugh, but because it can shift frames of thinking.
'Laughter throws the switch back to openness where you've got the potential to make a more creative decision than just grimly doing whatever needs to be done.'
For now, what excites him – like he is 13 years old again – is the fact the Alice Cooper Band is releasing their first album in 50 years. 'It's really good to allow ourselves to be excited by whatever it is.'
Andy Griffiths' latest book, You & Me and the Peanut Butter Beast, is out on 19 August
