The writer and illustrator Mary Rayner, who has died aged 89, was best known for her picture books about Mr and Mrs Pig, and the escapades of their 10 piglets. In stories that wittily navigate the complexities of family life, the clothes-wearing Pig family make no reference to being pigs, except in riffing off the story-book trope of pigs being threatened by a wolf.
Such was the success of the first book, Mr and Mrs Pig’s Evening Out (1976), that a further seven picture books and many short stories about the familial dramas surrounding the vivacious Pig family followed, as well as other picture books and novels. Mary also illustrated stories by other writers, including Dick King-Smith’s Daggie Dogfoot (1980), Magnus Powermouse (1982) and The Sheep-Pig (1983).
Although she began by writing a novel, The Witch-Finder (1975), a tautly written family story infused with a sinister creepiness very unlike her subsequent warm and benign picture books, she had always been as interested in illustration as writing.
To refresh her artistic skills after the birth of her children, she enrolled on a course in children’s book illustration at Chelsea School of Art, which led directly to Mr and Mrs Pig’s Evening Out. The course was an evening class and it gave her both the necessary training in illustration and the idea for her first story. Mary used her experience of hiring a babysitter to create a pleasingly scary and heroic, and also delightfully funny, story. Mr and Mrs Pig also book a babysitter for their night out but, more interested in how they look in their going-out finery and in a rush to get out, they carelessly ignore the fact that she looks unmistakably like a wolf. Luckily, the piglets are spirited, wise and well-read: working as a team, they know just what they have to do to keep themselves safe and make sure Mrs Wolf comes to a sticky end. The vivid, fluid illustrations capture small details of domestic life that allow children listening to the stories to get all the jokes and to work out what is happening for themselves.
In Garth Pig and the Icecream Lady (1977), Mrs Wolf is now Madame Lupino, her pink and brown Volfswagon bringing danger to the piglets on a hot summer day. Lured by the ice-cream, Garth is stolen away and must be rescued by his determined siblings who chase the Volfswagon on their 10-piglet bicycle. Moving away from the pig versus wolf theme, Mary wrote stories reflecting preschool life including Mrs Pig’s Bulk Buy (1981), one of the best books about children’s love of tomato ketchup, and Mrs Pig Gets Cross and Other Stories (1987), a longer collection that drew on episodes from her own children’s lives although, as she later wrote: “I am not, repeat not, Mrs Pig.” The latter includes Lettuce is Too Flat, a story about being the youngest in the family and hating lettuce, as well as The Potato Patch, a perfectly observed story that deals with young children’s confusion about planting and growing.
Mary wrote several other picture books and novels for children including Reilly (1987), the story of a streetwise cat fighting for a territory of his own, and The Echoing Green (1992), which picked up on the traumatic past of her own family.
The daughter of Yoma (nee Wilkinson) and Aubrey Grigson, Mary was born in Mandalay in Burma (now Myanmar) and lived there for the first eight years of her life. Her father, who worked for the Bombay Burma Trading Company, was one of seven brothers whose family had the tragic distinction of losing most sons in the two world wars – only two of the seven survived, one of them the poet Geoffrey Grigson.
Writing and illustrating little books of stories was a constant in Mary’s fractured and drama-filled wartime childhood. Although her family lived so far from “home”, as they always referred to the UK, her avid childhood reading was entirely based around classic and contemporary English books and their influence was obvious in her own work.
In her memoir, No More Tigers (2020), Mary wrote of her happy life in Burma until it became too dangerous to remain. “In 1942, when I was eight, I walked out of Burma,” she wrote, before describing the extraordinary journey to safety of Mary and her two siblings, Ann and Stephen, led by their mother, and the terrible wrench of leaving her father behind, serving in the allied forces. Three months later, Aubrey was killed by the Japanese.
The family settled in India in Kotagiri, a small hill station, and Mary went to school at Nazareth Convent, Ootacamund. They returned to Britain in 1945 and Mary went to St Swithun’s school, Winchester, then the University of St Andrews. After graduating with an English degree, she worked in publishing until her marriage to the psychoanalyst Eric Rayner in 1960 and the birth of their three children.
Mary described feeling a sense of dislocation from Britain throughout her life because the influences of her formative years were from somewhere completely different. Nonetheless, she lived very happily, particularly in Wiltshire, where she settled in the late 1980s with her second husband, Adrian Hawksley, a public relations consultant whom she had married in 1985.
Feeling too far from childhood by then to write more picture books, Mary concentrated instead on painting, initially watercolours in the style of her picture books and then big and bold oils and collages. Through classes and exhibitions, Mary’s art became the centre of her energetic social life. She was also a keen gardener and she and her husband entertained generously.
Adrian died in 2009; and Mary moved to Hove in East Sussex in 2013 to be nearer her daughter.
She is survived by Sarah, Will and Ben, the children of her first marriage, which ended in divorce, and by four grandchildren, Rosie, Polly, Tess and Conrad.
• Mary Yoma Rayner, children’s author and illustrator, born 30 December 1933; died 27 February 2023
• This article was amended on 23 March 2023 to correct the name of Mary Rayner’s second husband. A further change was made on 28 March to correct the name of the wolf character in her first book.
