Holes, moles and mushrooms

Some more of my mother's art work. The back story:

She and my father had decamped from the London blitz to an isolated smallholding in the Breconshire Black Mountains. With neither of them employed they lived on a pittance and dreamed up ways of earning some cash. Writing a children's book was one of them. My mother, Ida, had artistic talent and contacts in publishing, my father possessed imagination in abundance and no mean knowledge of the natural world, fungi in particular.

The story seems to have been inspired by Alice in Wonderland. A little girl climbs a tree and finds a tiny door in the trunk. She descends a staircase leading deep into the roots where she enters a kitchen staffed by moles, all frantically preparing a banquet for the king of the badgers. The adventure continues when she emerges through a molehill to see a Boletus mushroom hurrying off (yes, it had feet!) into the woods; she follows and comes upon a bizarre clinic conducted by the corvid-looking Dr Q (Quack perhaps?) for fungi who have become infested with larvae. The treatment involves being tapped on the head/cap with a small mallet - the grubs  thus harvested appear to be gathered up by the attendant nurse, no doubt to be saved for future consumption by the medical pair.

I can imagine my parents conjuring up this eccentric tale on dark winter evenings by the fire, my mother poring over her paints and tracing paper in the lamplight and my father pulling out books to show her the details of the animals she was trying to depict. Sad to say the story never saw the light of day and even after I came along it was not resurrected.

I dug out the art work recently because I was alerted to the existence of a Swedish children's author, Elsa Beskow 1874-1953, who also illustrated fungus folk, mainly families of fly agarics or in this case, chanterelles, rather than ceps. I don't think for a moment my parents knew of her but hatched the idea solely as a result of their own interest in  mushrooms.

Extras show other scenes from the story: queuing for the doctor, treatment in progress and one of the patients.

Another Monday blip to celebrate my mother. Several other blippers have now followed suit - click the tag to see them.