Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2009.

My cast away this week is the illustrator Jan Piankowski. He's published more than 100 books over the past 40 years and delighted generations of parents and children. His work has been described as violently colourful.

It's inventive and often macabre. Childhood terrors are realised in Gothic scenes, witches are a constant presence, and his haunted house was a pioneering pop-up book.

Born a few years before the Second World War, his childhood was spent in Poland, Bavaria, Vienna and Italy, before he reached Britain more than 60 years ago. He's been here ever since.

But the folk traditions of Central Europe can still be seen in his work.

Let's talk for a moment about one of your most famous witches, Meg, from... I mentioned the Meg and Morgan.

Yes. Books that people have loved for so many years. She was inspired by a real person, is that right?

I think she was. Where we lived during the war was in the Reich. I mean, it was technically Germany.

And my father ran a farm there, and my mother was always working.

And she was terribly anxious that I shouldn't get TB. So I had milk from the cow, but it had to be boiled.

And I'd read, didn't like it, but I hated it.

And so there was this poor lady, our neighbour's wife, who had this task of making me drink this awful milk.

And she hit on this solution where she started on one of these gruesome stories and then stopped.

And said, drink your milk and then I had a little bit. And then she'd tell me the next bit.

And the heroin of the TB stories was always Bavaria, the terrifying witch flies about, needs children and so on.

And I think that Meg is a kind of, whatever the word is, when you get rid of some childish terror by softly playing it.

And I think that probably what it is, you know, that's how Meg came about.

I mean, Meg is relatively benign, but of course the books are meant for very young children.

Yes. Other books that you've been responsible for are a good deal more scary.

Do you think it's fine for children to be petrified?

Well, I don't know. I don't know that my pictures are that petrifying.

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