After graduating in 1973 she spent a year living in the Okavango swamps of Botswana with an anthropologist boyfriend. She left for England and the Canterbury College of Art, which she chose mainly because it allowed her to rent a field in which her pony could graze. “You could be a nun, a wife and mother, or you could go off the rails.”

“The school offered a choice of three careers,” she recalled.

Even so, Mummy Laid an Egg! was shortlisted for that year’s Smarties prize and went on to sell a million copies, while Drop Dead was popular with grandparents.īabette Cole was born in Jersey on Septemand went to a convent school, where her talent for drawing was put to use making feast day cards. She upset members of the clergy with her portrayal of divorce in Two of Everything (1997), which featured an “unwedding” ceremony. These themes were not to everyone’s taste, and Babette Cole recalled that she came in for “the odd bit of abuse”. Drop Dead, which won the 1996 Kurt Maschler award, told the story of an elderly couple from birth to death. Mummy Laid an Egg! (1993), her sex education guide for young children, included stick-figure illustrations dubbed “the Kama Sutra spread” by concerned parents’ groups. It was this forthrightness that garnered attention in the second phase of her career, when she embarked on a series of books tackling delicate subjects. She detested Beatrix Potter, however, once declaring that she would “rather shoot a rabbit and eat it than buy a book about one in a frock.” The Hairy Book (1984), The Slimy Book (1985) and The Smelly Book (1987) tapped into the childish preoccupation with everything off-putting while every page of The Bad Good Manners Book (1999) was illustrated with a youngster merrily engaged in a proscribed activity (“Don’t have a shampoo with a big tube of glue/And don’t tell your Mum that’s she’s fat”).īabette Cole’s art style drew on the grotesque elements of John Tenniel’s Alice in Wonderland illustrations, and the lively composition of each image echoed the work of Quentin Blake. Her retelling of Cinderella had Prince Cinders as a “scruffy and skinny” youth who is turned into a gorilla by an incompetent fairy. Babette Cole, who has died aged 67, was a children’s author and illustrator who won critical acclaim – and some opprobrium – for her frank and funny picture books on sex, divorce and death.Ī stud farmer by profession, Babette Cole delighted in subverting the moralistic elements found in many stories for young children.

Prince Cinders by Babette Cole