Nungu, Promise & Early Animal Adventures
Before many of Babette Cole’s best-known picture books came foxes, ponies, crocodiles, elephants, hippopotamuses and wonderfully unruly adventures. This is a world of brave children, mischievous animals, early television characters and stories that could turn the impossible into a very good joke.
The books take centre stage
Six early books, each with its own little world. Hover over the covers on desktop: they lift gently from the page, just enough to feel like objects rather than flat images.
The Nungu adventures
Nungu and the Hippopotamus
A vanished river, a magnificent hippo and one determined young hero. Nungu sets out to bring the water home.
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Nungu and the Elephant
With drought hanging over the village, Nungu befriends a clumsy elephant who turns out to have a rather important connection to the rain.
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Nungu and the Crocodile
A crocodile falls in love, village life is thrown into a muddle, and clever Nungu once again has to find a solution that works for everyone.
Read moreEarly Basil Brush books
The Basil Brush Cook Book
Recipes for children brought to life by Babette’s energetic drawings of Basil shopping, cooking and getting thoroughly involved in the kitchen.
Basil Brush of the Yard
One of Babette’s early encounters with a much-loved television fox, full of character, costume and comic expression.
The Basil Brush Song Book
Seventeen familiar songs collected with music for easy piano and illustrated throughout in full colour.
Where Nungu began
During the 1970s Babette spent time in Botswana’s Okavango region while accompanying anthropological fieldwork. She listened to local stories, sketched, watched the extraordinary animal life around her and began shaping stories that children there could recognise as belonging to their own world.
The result was Nungu: small, brave and practical, surrounded by animals capable of swallowing rivers, refusing to leave, falling in love or otherwise making life considerably more complicated.
The archive material on this page shows how real travel, observation, drawing and storytelling gradually fed into the finished picture books.
A fox, a paintbrush and an early break
After art college, Babette contacted Peter Firmin and began working on children’s illustration connected with television and publishing. That early period led to work on Basil Brush books, giving her plenty of room for the expressive faces, costumes and visual jokes that would become so recognisably hers.
For the Basil Brush Cook Book, Babette described studying Basil’s expressions and characteristics before turning the recipes into a sequence of lively comic illustrations.
Before the finished books
Early drawing-book studies and contemporary press cuttings give a glimpse of the work behind the stories. They sit here as fragments of the archive — deliberately quieter than the finished book covers.
Archive newspaper material is reproduced here as historical context rather than as a main visual feature. Additional cuttings can be rotated into this area later without changing the layout.