Model daughter Saffron Aldridge reminisces about her fantastic – and fantasy-filled – childhood in the magical presence of her father

Throughout my childhood and into my late teens I spent much of my time at my father’s beautiful Georgian rectory in North Norfolk. This was not just my home; the house was also my heart and to this day I miss it as one would miss a loved one. It was a place filled with magic and fantasy. Fairies lived under the stairs along with their goblin friends, who, very kindly, always made my bed. In the cellar, where only the brave would venture, dragons would lie quietly sleeping, only stirring on howling, windy days when you could hear their moans echoing through the corridors. At night, from the attic windows, the stars became diamonds and the moon would watch over me with his smile.

We were permitted endless hours of play, weaving through the rooms on skateboards, as rules didn’t seem to exist in this world where children laughed and giggled – to the delight of adults.In the middle of the house on the first floor there was a room that was painted as black as a cauldron and it was in this room that magic really was made, for it was my father Alan’s studio and it’s here that he sat drawing some of his most intricate and fantastical work. Elton John’s Captain Fantastic album cover emerged from his pencil, as did the classic 1970s children’s book The Butterfly Ball – now being republished for a whole new generation of children to enjoy. At a long desk my father would sit for hours upon hours, lost in his own adventures. Many would say it was escapism. He drew so endlessly that the plastic of his propelling pencils moulded to the shape of his finger. I was in awe as I sat by his side and watched the drawings come to life, the characters on the paper becoming my bedtime stories.

My father was a seminal figure in the revolution that occurred in the world of graphic design in the 1960s. He was the leading force in the UK of the representation of psychedelia in graphic art. He threw a paint pot at the art departments of Penguin books and The Sunday Times Magazine and made everyone wake up. He put tits on covers and painted naked ladies for attention. As a jobbing graphic artist, he could not sit around waiting for a moment of inspiration but, instead, had to keep to deadlines as he had a constant flow of work to complete. All this left little time for normal family life and he certainly was not the average father. At school, I was endlessly teased about his long hair and rather dandy dress sense, of which I was secretly proud.

He worked extensively with The Beatles and created the book of Illustrated Lyrics for them. His work reflects an ongoing career which includes the iconic Hard Rock Café logo, the House of Blues logo, album covers for Pink Floyd, The Who, Cream and, lately, Tears for Fears and Incubus. He was, and is, brave and determined not to let any rules or convention stop his imagination from flowing.

The majority of his original work is brought together at the Design Museum for his first ever retrospective, aptly called The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes. There is also a book of the same name, and both will give the wider public a chance to see up close the breadth and depth of his artistic vision and the extraordinary amount of mind-blowing images he has put down on paper. It will also show how, throughout his long career from the 1960s to the present day, he has been able to draw out the magic elements from the ordinary world around him, in much the same way that, wizard-like, he transformed the quality of my Norfolk childhood from ordinary life into fairytale.

– The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes (Thames & Hudson, £24.95).
The retrospective is on now until 25 January at the Design Museum, Shad Thames, London SE1 (020-7403 6933; www.designmuseum.org).
The Butterfly Ball is out now (Templar Publishing, www.templarpublishing.co.uk, £14.99)

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