The Grade II-listed, honey-coloured limestone cottage has exposed oak beams, metre-thick walls and russety-brown Devonshire combed-wheat reed thatch. In the tiny upstairs bedrooms, floorboards slope and whitewashed plaster walls undulate in and out of the perpendicular. The garden is filled with roses, hops and honeysuckle.
“This place was a haven,” says Craig, 71, who has lived in the cottage since 1975, and recalls it from childhood visits to her grandmother. When she inherited it from her great-aunt, she found herself alone with her small son, Ben (now an art director at Walker Books), and was just realising that she couldn’t make ends meet in London. Then Vine Cottage fell into her lap.
“It had got to the situation where I was not sure which way to turn. I thought, if we move to the cottage, we could go to bed with the sun and get up with the sun, if necessary.” A valuer estimated the cottage was worth £11,000, citing its glorious view over the countryside towards Thame as the price-hiker. “I was quite indignant,” Craig recalls. “It meant I had to pay death duties.” She adds, still infuriated: “My flat in London had only cost £9,000.”
She and Ben settled in happily, charmed by occasional finds of 19th-century lace bobbins in the house. For £7,000, she built a kitchen-bathroom extension, rewired, exposed some of the fine old oak lintels, added banisters to the narrow staircase and refloored the sitting room with handmade French terracotta tiles. Craig’s brother, John, an architect, handled the project.
Craig comes from a prodigiously artistic family. Her great-grandmother was the actress Ellen Terry; her grandfather, the stage designer Edward Gordon Craig; her father was an art director who worked on films such as The Blue Lagoon (1949). “I always wanted to draw but never thought I was good enough,” says Craig. “My father was so critical of my work when I was small but, funnily enough, when he was old, one of his favourite things was to look at my children ’s books.” At 16, Craig was, rather unwillingly, apprenticed to a Fleet Street photographer. By the 1960s, she had opened her own studio in Hampstead. She snapped some of the first portraits of Julie Christie and did a stint with Magnum’s Eve Arnold. It took a baby and an enforced change of scene to turn her towards her earlier ambition of illustration.
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Her tale has a happy ending, as everybody with a small daughter will know. As writer Katharine Holabird first conceived the Angelina Ballerina stories, the heroine was human, but when Craig was shown the draft, she had the idea of turning Angelina into a mouse. “The first book came out in 1983,” she says. “We thought we would do one and that would be it.” Thirteen books later, the mouse is a massive industry, with spin-off merchandise and a television series. So, for 23 years, Craig has spent most days in her spacious garden studio, listening to the birdsong outside, drawing and redrawing until she is happy: “There’s nothing worse than knowing a wrong image is out there in hundreds of books.”
Her surroundings have made their way into the illustrations. Angelina Ballerina lives in a cottage in Chipping Cheddar, which appears in Angelina’s Christmas as a snow-veiled replica of Long Crendon. Craig’s watercolours of Angelina’s home — a thatched cottage with exposed beams and wonky walls — reveal Vine Cottage as its muse.
After 30 years, Craig is leaving Long Crendon to move closer to Ben and his sons, Nat, 8, and Will, 6, in Cambridgeshire. “I feel torn,” she says. “This house has been such an inspiration, and I would never have left if it hadn’t been for the pull of the grandchildren.” But, even though Craig is quitting the stage on which Angelina made her debut, she isn’t retiring, and assures her readers that the mouse will dance on.
Vine Cottage is for sale for £325,000 with Hamptons International, 01865 512 332, www.hamptons-int.com