JadeW

The back door of Allan Ahlberg's elegant Bath townhouse opens on to an equally elegant garden, through which a meandering path leads to a rather less elegant shed. But step inside and covering every inch of the pin-boarded walls is the history of 35 years of a writing life that has produced more than 140 books for children, from picture books to poetry to stories.

There are notes, drawings, family photos, ancient toys that have been brought to life in stories, layouts, shelves of proofs. "If I get stuck for an answer, I can just start reading the walls," Ahlberg says, and although he's rarely lost for words, he is constantly reaching for evidence to illustrate what he is saying – reading out poems-in-progress to reinforce an anecdote about his home town, or showing a page of intricate early drawings for his 1981 story Peepo!, to explain how he and his late wife, Janet, worked together on picture books.

Of all the books the husband-and-wife team created together, Peepo! is perhaps the best-loved. Thirty years old this year, it is firmly established as a classic for toddlers and babies. Its simple, rhythmic text and richly detailed illustrations tell the story of a day in the life of a baby in the 1940s, from breakfast to bedtime, with the added fun of a circular cut-out on every other page so that the next part of the story peeps through.

While it took Allan just three or four weeks to write the gentle little story, Janet spent months creating the pictures, which are packed with absorbing detail. The cosy scenes of working-class domesticity are filled with period detail, from the tin bath in front of the coal fire and the outside lavatory in the backyard to the baby's sturdy black perambulator. "This was Janet's bible," says Ahlberg, pulling down a battered old red hardback edition of The Army and Navy Stores Catalogue, 1939-1940. "In the days before computers, if she wanted to see what a jug or a mangle or a wringer looked like, she could check it out in here. She loved this book; she would get waylaid in it and sit for ages looking at bread-bins and kettles."

The war, never mentioned explicitly in the text, is lightly gestured at in Janet's pictures: a bombed-out building in the far distance; a gas-mask box hanging off the end of a bed-knob; the poignancy of the father dressed in uniform as he kisses his baby son goodnight at the end of the story. For Ahlberg, this balance between words and pictures is precisely what a picture book is about. "When I'm writing a picture book, I automatically think 'I don't need to say that' because the pictures will say it. Or, better still, 'I'll say this and the pictures will say that, which contradicts it.'"

He compares the text of picture books to lyrics of songs, which can only very rarely stand alone on the page as poems. "Bob Dylan's stuff is wonderful, but you really need to hear him sing it; you need the music. On the page by itself some of it is still wonderful, but it's lacking something."

It's a description of an unshowy style of writing that mirrors Ahlberg's modesty about his own talents. "I'm far from being the best writer in the world, and Janet was very good but she wasn't the greatest illustrator in the world either. But the pair of us were twins in the sense that we both really wanted our books to be good. So it's as though we took my modest talent and we took Janet's modest talent and we poured it into a tiny 32-page thing."

While Ahlberg can now articulate the ingredients of a successful picture book, it never occurred to him and Janet that Peepo! would be the success it is. They were too busy getting on with producing the next one; firing off ideas and scribbling roughs for the variety of books for which they are now well known. There is, he claims, no blueprint. "Usually you can't build a house without an architect doing drawings – there is an intention prior to the existence of the building. But books are made up like sandcastles: you add stuff and knock it down and change it – and, in fact, you didn't even know you were building a castle at first, you thought you were building a garage. Or you were going to have a cave and instead it turned into a garden full of shells."

Born in Croydon in 1938, Ahlberg was adopted as a baby into a poor, Black Country family and raised in Oldbury in the West Midlands. His father was a labourer who worked long hours, his mother a cleaner and, by today's standards, his upbringing was tough. "In those days, most people beat their kids up," he recalls. "You were told that when your dad gets home you'll get the strap, and most teachers hit kids with canes." He discovered that he was adopted when a kid in his street told him that "your mother isn't your mother". While he now believes that he was "dead lucky" to have been adopted at all (on the grounds that "almost any child is better off being adopted by the most ordinary, even harsh, family than being in the most well-ordered and loving of institutions"), at the time the discovery only increased Ahlberg's feeling of being "a cuckoo in the nest". He confesses to acting like a "rather snobby intellectual" around his family as a teenager: "My mum and dad and brother would be watching What's My Line? or whatever on a little 9in black and white TV in the front room, and I'd be in the kitchen with the cat, listening to the Third Programme."

Growing up in a house with few books, he joined three libraries so that he could have a dozen books out at a time. But although he dreamed of being a writer, "I couldn't complete a sentence, let alone a page. I remember as a young man reading Brideshead Revisited and thinking: 'Christ, I can't be a writer because it's full of descriptions of trees and flowers, and I don't know the names of any.'"

He doesn't remember many trees or flowers in Oldbury, by the sound of it. "This dirty, scruffy place," Ahlberg calls it: full of factories and smoke, its dwellers "as white as mushrooms" because of the layer of smog that hung over the town, shielding them from the sun. Yet it has its hooks in the writer – half the books he has written, from Peepo! to his current work, are set in the town. "Oldbury is the only patch of ground in the world that has an emotional pull for me," he says, reading a draft of a poem he is working on that recalls Oldbury's "corrugated iron roofs / corroded and oily ground / forty-five factory chimneys to count / without even turning round".

He "scraped" into the local grammar school but left at 17 with a couple of science A-levels. A job assisting a research chemist at Fort Dunlop left him determined not to wear a suit and have a career in an office. Three years of national service followed (he did an extra year because you got £3 a week rather than 21 shillings, and it meant he could send some money back home to his mother, who was by now a widow), then a string of jobs from plumber's mate to postman.

He was 22 and working as a grave-digger when he had what he calls his second big stroke of luck. The head of Oldbury's parks and cemeteries, a somewhat paternalistic "officer class" boss who had been a squadron leader in the RAF and still treated all his employees as "his men", discovered that the quiet young man he employed to dig graves had left school with some A-levels. "He came to the cemetery one day, stood over the grave I was digging and told me that he had decided that I should become a teacher," says Ahlberg. "I didn't think it was such a good idea. I was very shy – I found it embarrassing to buy a bus ticket. But he got me to put my suit on and have a wash and a clean-up, and he took me to one or two schools, just to visit, just to get the feel of it. It was great: in those days you could go into a school and effectively be a teacher with no qualifications at all."

Ahlberg discovered he was a natural. And not only did he love teaching, but it led to the third big stroke of luck in his life, when he went to a teacher-training college in Sunderland and met his wife-to-be, Janet. They married in 1969, after which a few years passed during which he was still teaching and she was getting steadily fed-up with working on non-fiction craft books about how to make things out of yoghurt pots. Then one day, she asked him to write a book for her to illustrate. "It was like this," Ahlberg explains, reaching for a clockwork toy and setting it running across the desk. "It was as if she turned a key in my back and I was off."

Publishers weren't quite so quick on the uptake, and at first the rejection slips piled up. Still, the pair didn't give up, and kept sending out their stories and pictures. "It was like we were on a desert island, putting messages in bottles and sending them off," Ahlberg says now. But just as they ran out of money, three books – Burglar Bill, The Vanishment of Thomas Tull and The Old Joke Book – were commissioned by three publishers, and they were off again.

Each Peach Pear Plum, which won Janet the Kate Greenaway medal in 1978, came soon afterwards, followed by the birth of their daughter, Jessica, in 1980, which was to prove the source of further inspiration. Much to her bookish parents' dismay ("It really did piss us off for a while," admits Ahlberg only half-jokingly), the toddler Jessica was consistently entranced by the Mothercare catalogue – so the Ahlbergs decided to go one better and create 1982's The Baby's Catalogue. Following five babies of different ages through the paraphernalia of everyday activities, it was a surprise hit (though not to the Ahlbergs). Jessica's love of playing with the post, taking letters in and out of envelopes, meanwhile, inspired The Jolly Postman, one of their most popular and technically advanced picture books with its inclusion of real envelopes in the book, containing letters and cards.

The Jolly Postman appealed to their mutual interest in the mechanics of creating a picture book, including standing over printworkers at the plant in Beccles in Suffolk at 6am to ensure that the colour was just right. Ahlberg often refers to "making" a book rather than "writing" one. With Peepo!, he explains, handing over the tiny hand-drawn proof of the book Janet created, "it's all in the engineering. You have to turn the page in order to see something – it's a whole string of little suspenses, almost like in a theatre. In order to see if you've made something that's any good, you have to make the book. You can't just draw it on a layout. So Janet would make something like this, and then we could begin to see how the whole book would come together. You can like all of the images separately, but they have to turn and flow together."

It was "making books" that came to Ahlberg's rescue in 1994 after Janet died from cancer at the age of 50, leaving him and 15-year-old Jessica bereft. He drank too much for a while and "forgot things that way", before realising that he wanted to create a book in memory of his wife. The book that emerged – Janet's Last Book – was an act of instinct rather than conscious therapy, but "the wrestling match of trying to make it took me away from the grief. Writing about something is distancing it." And focusing on the details – the binding, the paper, the slipcase – of the privately printed work helped to lift Ahlberg out of the pit of despair into which he had fallen. "It distracted me for a whole year," he says. "And then I was on the road to recovery. And then I met Vanessa."

Vanessa, who was one of Ahlberg's editors, is now his wife. Used to working with other illustrators even while Janet was alive – as he could write books so much faster than she could illustrate them – he has found other partners for his books as well as his life.

His regular collaborators include Bruce Ingman, with whom he created his classic title The Pencil, and Andre Amstutz and Fritz Wegner, who between them illustrated many of the books in Ahlberg's Happy Families series. He has also worked with Raymond Briggs, producing The Adventures of Bert in 2001. The old friends enjoy a relationship based on banter and the trading of gentle insults.

"Ahlberg was once a very promising young children's writer. Of course, today he is very old and semi-retired," laughs Briggs. "Decades ago he was taken under the wing of the brilliant Janet Ahlberg, who had consented to become his wife in order to help his immigration status. Janet created superb illustrations for 'their' picture books and Ahlberg added several words to fill up the blank spaces between the pictures. Ahlberg is hell to work with. He sends you these bits of stuff, then just leaves you to get on with it. Would that there were more like him."

Now in his 70s, Ahlberg still crosses the garden to his shed to write most days. "I'm like a dripping tap. As I get older I drip more slowly, but I still come down here. I'm less impatient to spend hour after hour writing, though I like it as much as ever. I don't mind now if it takes me two years to write a few little poems."

This is typically self-effacing: he has far more than a few little poems on the go. A picture book with Ingman, Hooray for Bread, is nearly finished, and his poems and prose about Oldbury and growing up in the 1940s will be out next year. He has also been working on a book of subverted fairytales, The Goldilock Variations, with Jessica, now an illustrator herself. Ahlberg believes that his facility with words must be genetic, a gift from his birth parents. "It's not a brilliant start in life, to be in an orphanage and then to be adopted, but it turned out that my unknown parents dealt me some good cards. If I can write, it must have come from my mother or father or from their parents. Janet's father was a wonderful painter and her mother was a good artist as well, so she got something from them."

Now it appears that their own daughter has also inherited the family talent. She's "a miniaturist's miniaturist", Ahlberg says proudly, as he shows examples of her delicate pictures that will illustrate another intricate book with movable parts and a tiny book buried deep within. The Ahlberg family is back in business.

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