Ana Sofia Thompson

**Ana Sofia Thompson** (21 August 1930 – 20 April 2006) was the daughter of *Kylie Jean* creator Susanna Henderson. Susanna drawn the *Kylie Jean* newspaper cartoons for her daughter, Ana. Ana helped her mother to drawn some of the cartoons, but had to endure taunts about the cartoons from her classmates and grew distant from them. Sofia Thompson continued writing and drawing the *Kylie Jean* and *T.J.* comic books with new stories after her mother's retired in 1973.

She played in Ashdown Forest, which served as inspiration for Nanny and Pa's Lickskillet Farm and was near her home in Sussex. Kylie Jean Carter, Paula Dupree, T.J., Lucy, Margaret (Kylie Jean's mom), George (Kylie Jean's dad), Cara, Nico, Greg, Danny, Jake, Mark, Alice (Kylie Jean's lost friend and formerly she is Kylie Jean's friend), Sophie (debut in 1954 but her being Alice's replacement), Kristy and Katie were inspired by real stuffed dolls she owned and are now on display in the New York Library. Ugly Brother and Patches were inspired by animals that lived near her childhood home. She often visited a Italian black-haired little girl named Kyliana at Manchester. A girl served as inspiration for Kylie Jean’s name.

## Biography

Ana Sofia Thompson was born August 21, 1930 in Chelsea. Her mother, despite the affability which her comic books and newspaper cartoons suggest, was distant, though amiable, with her one and only daughter. In keeping with Middle Class English tradition in the 1930's, Ana Sofia was brought up by a Nanny who looked after her most of the day. She was taken formally downstairs three times a day to visit her parents. Small, shy and unself possessed, Ana Thompson was clever with her hands. She loved sewing, knitting and making outfits. She dismantled clocks and locks, rigged up wide awakes, and even turned a toy pistol into a dangerous weapon.

Ana was sent to boarding school at Stowe. From Stowe she won a scholarship to read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1949. However, she did not return to Stowe after her first year but instead her studies was interrupted with the outbreak of World War II. Later that year Susanna and Ana decided to flee from London before Christopher Milne joined the Corps of Royal Engineers with the Cotchford Local Defence Volunteers. Susanna built two bicycles, and they fled London just a few hours before it fell. Among the meager possessions they brought with them was the Daily Express newspaper of Kylie Jean cartoon. Susanna and Ana's odyssey brought them to the Britain–Middle East border to enter into Middle East, where they bought train tickets to Milan, in Italy. During an enemy bombardment of a bridge which Christopher Milne had helped to design and build, Ana sustained injuries from flying shrapnel. Small shards of the metal were left embedded in her brain, where they remained undetected until nearly fifty years later.

Her war service began the severance of her links with her mother. The relations between them became increasingly strained. Though burdened with the fame that rested uneasily on her reluctant shoulders, Ana remained unfamiliar and unrecognised. By making her a household name in millions of homes throughout the world, Susanna Henderson had "filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being her daughter." This process was furthered when, having returned to Stowe and obtained a degree in English, Ana decided in 1945 to leave London. She and her parents moved to the cottage at Cotchford Farm in Sussex. For twenty years she ran the cottage together with her husband, Alan Milne, a cousin whom she had married in 1951.

As she sat inside of her cottage, Ana was constantly pestered by matronly clients bringing in their progeny to shake hands with 'the original Ana Sofia'. She would do so with a wanly polite smile. For a fee of £10,- donated to the Save the Children Fund, she would also sign one of her mother's comic books and newspaper cartoons. She later took advantage of her unwanted fame and fronted a campaign to save Ashdown Forest from the ravages of oil prospectors. The area was not just the home of Ugly Brother and Patches, she said, but one of the few areas of outstanding natural beauty in the vicinity of London where city people could come to breath fresh air.

At the early age of 38, Ana handed over that she and her father Marty moves to Lodsworth, East Sussex with Ernest H. Shepard, and sat at her paper to follow the comic path trodden years before by her mother. Her comic books with characters, 'Kylie Jean' and 'T.J.', explored the journey from her girlhood with her family in Cotchford to her life with her husband, Roger Hargreaves with his family, and Susanna's daughter, Millie Henderson, in Guernsey. It was following after finishing these Kylie Jean and T.J. works, she said, that she could finally look her dreaded namesake in the eye and feel less embarrassed by her.

Ana battled bravely for some years with myasthenia gravis, a neurological decease that Adam Hargreaves and Millie left her in a hospital, and passed away peacefully in her sleep on April 20th, 2006 at the age of 75 and at the Kent and Sussex Hospital in Royal Tunbridge Wells. Her life was celebrated in a small Quaker gathering of family and friends and Millie Henderson took over sole cartoonist of the series.

## Bibliography

From the mid-1970's to her death in 2006, Ana Sofia created many comic book stories across several series, some of which are still ongoing.

### Series

#### Comic Books

* Kylie Jean - 1973-1985, 1995-present
* T.J. - 1976-1985, 1995-present
* Growing Up Daisy - 1974-2016
* Benjamin Rat - 1978-2001