THERE once was a little, old, married couple who told stories for a living. They would recite rhymes, sing songs and entertain children and the parents of children and the grandparents of children and quite possibly the great-grandparents of children with their stories of witches and animals and princesses and wizards and a creature called The Gruffalo.

And, sometimes, now and then, when they didn’t have anything better to do, they would even tell their stories to visiting journalists.

“There once was a very hungry king who needed a cook like anything,” the little old lady begins.

Her little old husband takes up the tale, reciting the King’s lines: “This egg is runny, this meat is tough. Too hot. Too cold. Too sour. Too smelly.”

The King speaks in a voice that is not unlike Gregg “Masterchef” Wallace, it may be noted.

“I don’t want a sausage inside my jelly.”

Me neither. Thankfully, that’s not on offer this morning.

I am sitting in the Edinburgh flat of the husband and wife who are, now I have a proper look at them, not that old (this is the 21st century when 70 is the new 50, after all) and, certainly in the husband’s case not that little. They are definitely married, though. That part of the story is true.

Who are they, you ask? Well, yes, where are my manners? They are Julia Donaldson MBE, who you might know as the author of The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom and The Snail and the Whale and many, many other much-loved children's books, and her husband Malcolm, who has spent most of his professional life as a consultant paediatrician but who has been known to help Julia when she goes to perform her books. Or sit in their living room reciting Julia's latest book, The Cook and the King.

Performing is what they do together. It’s what they have always done together since they met at the tail end of the 1960s at Bristol University. And it is what they will be doing at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

They’re quite excited by the idea. An actual Fringe show. With a director, a composer, a set designer and everything. And an inflatable dragon. Oh, and puppets, too.

But, really, the most important part of it will be Julia and Malcolm. A couple who have been together – as partners and performers – for the best part of 50 years.

Edinburgh in June. The hot weather hasn’t properly kicked in yet, but it’s bright and airy in the couple’s New Town flat. After 25 years living in Glasgow, where they brought up their three sons, they moved to England in 2014, but they have retained a bolthole in the Scottish capital.

You join us as Malcolm is making the tea. He’s cheery and boisterous and clearly the natural performer. He’s also aware that he must leave within the hour to drive to Glasgow to visit a medical student (his "retirement" would appear to be largely theoretical).

Julia is more reserved, quieter, but opinionated when she has to be. What’s Malcolm’s best feature, I ask her while he is in the kitchen? “He’s very kind and generous and very entertaining. Very funny.”

And his worst? “Maybe the same. He’s always treating people to things and I feel people might take his generosity for granted. I’m a bit more penny counting … which sounds awful.”

She remembers something else. “Unpunctual,” she says. “I’m naturally unpunctual. I was always late for school, but because I’m with Malcolm … One of you has to remedy the joint faults. And I’m now very good at time-keeping. But, always at the last minute, he’s going to the loo or fiddling about looking for something. That drives me mad.”

Malcolm returns with the refreshments. What’s Julia’s best trait, Malcolm? “Being genuine.” And her worst? “Oh, nothing.”

“You have to say,” Julia tells him.

“Oh, well, perhaps being a bit impatient …”

“When he’s in the loo …”

For the following hour this is how it is. The two of them have a conversation that is occasionally prompted by myself, one that ranges across their lives together. Julia talks about the years she spent writing songs for the BBC; Malcolm talks about his years as a paediatrician.

“We sometimes say Malcolm’s in charge of their bodies and I’m in charge of their minds,” Julia says.

Malcolm “retired” in 2012, partly so he could help Julia in her second year as Children’s Laureate. “But I’ve kept up teaching. I do a lot of international teaching. I do quite a lot of research still and I do a clinic in Brighton once a month which doesn’t sound a lot, but it keeps me busy.

“I have three wives. Julia’s the first wife obviously. The second wife is the guitar and the third wife is the laptop. And sometimes I’m on my third wife too much.”

As the tea is poured I look around. Near the window there is a photograph of Julia and Malcolm back in their youth. Malcolm has a guitar, Julia is singing. The pattern for their life together was set early.

Next to that photograph is another, that of their son Hamish who killed himself in 2003, after years suffering from a schizoaffective disorder.

Theirs is a story like everyone’s story; full of highs and lows, elations and sorrows. But some sorrows are private and that’s not the story I want to hear today. I’ve come to ask them to talk about their lives as husband and wife. About how they met and why they are still together.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then let us begin.

Malcolm Donaldson, retired doctor (or so he says), some-time guitar player, very good Gregg Wallace impersonator and husband of a famous author is remembering the very first time he saw his future wife in the tea room at Bristol University where they both were students back at the end of the 1960s.

“I saw her sitting having tea with a colleague being very serious and in intense conversation,” he recalls. “She was the year above me, so it was almost like seeing royalty. The thought that I might actually speak to her didn’t even enter my head.

“And then the next time I remember seeing her was when she was the chief tree in a play called I’m Not the Eiffel Tower. My room-mate Colin Sell, who now plays piano on Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue, was doing the music and because we were sharing a room I came along to the show.”

At this point the famous author joins the conversation. “The trees all had to wear different colour miniskirts and tights. I was wearing red.

“I was made chief tree, so the others had to copy me. Once my bra strap snapped and I sort of went …” She throws her arms up in the air and lurches to the side. “And all the trees did the same.”

“I wasn’t at that rehearsal unfortunately,” Malcolm notes slightly wistfully.

After the play and the bra strap incident, Malcolm and Julia joined Colin and another girl to go around the pubs of Bristol singing Cole Porter tunes and Beatles songs for Rag Week. But love didn’t blossom straight away.

For good reason. “You had a boyfriend,” Malcolm points out.

“Yeah, I did have a boyfriend,” Julia says. “But then I had to go to France with this other girl, Maureen, because I was doing French. We got this letter from Malcolm saying: ‘I’m coming to join you. Here’s a list of all the songs I’m going to perform.’

“We were already busking, but we could only play a few chords.”

“I hitch-hiked and joined you in Avignon,” Malcolm says, taking up the baton. “But I had been to a private school, an all-boys school. I had absolutely no idea what girls are like. That sounds infantile, but I couldn’t imagine how you could be friends with a girl without being in love with her. I knew you could, but I didn’t quite get it.

“With Julia and Maureen, we were such good friends. We spent our time acting out sketches and laughing and taking the piss out of the French. That’s really the first time I blossomed socially.

“And we would have remained very good friends, I think, if you and your boyfriend stayed together.

He breaks out into a smile. “That’s another story.”

This would have been at the end of the 1960s I remind them. So, I want to ask, on a scale of Mary Whitehouse to Mick Jagger, how 1960s were the two of you?

“Oh, probably Mary Whitehouse,” says Malcolm. “When we busked, I would have one glass of beer that night. We never touched marijuana because we thought it made people silly.”

“Which it did,” adds Julia. “Plenty of people had it and then, if you wanted to play with them, they’d be getting in their costumes just giggling …”

“No,” Malcolm concludes, “we were very straight.”

“Well, when you mentioned Mick Jagger …” Julia begins.

“Oh yes, she was in love with Mick Jagger,” agrees Malcolm.

“I was totally obsessed with Mick Jagger when I was a teenager,” Julia continues. “We were very into the Stones. It wasn’t that we were square in our tastes. But we weren’t into drugs.”

For Malcolm, some of that might have been down to his strict Christian upbringing. He moved away from his faith in his late teens and early twenties. “But when we started having babies I came back to it. I’m now a much more committed Christian than when I was 18. But hopefully much more compassionate and understanding and less censorious. The 1960s were a very, very long time ago culturally.

“The ethos I was brought up in was that ‘British was best’. Nobody said that being white was better but … We owned half the world which we were generously giving back. I was brought up to believe that homosexuality was a disease. The idea that women were equal was laughable. As a doctor the idea of telling patients what was wrong with them was quite novel.

“I’ll never forget when I was a houseman I was doing my surgical job at Bristol and one patient said to me: ‘Mr Donaldson, I know this is none of my business, but can you tell me what operation I’m having tomorrow?’”

Another world.

Julia, meanwhile, had been brought up near Hampstead in London in a big house full of family members (mother, father, sister, aunt, uncle, grandma) and a cat called Geoffrey.

“Later, my sister said: ‘Of course, daddy was atheist and mummy was agnostic, but they never said it.’”

Julia and Malcolm married in the early 1970s, began a family and while Malcolm started his medical career Julia began to write songs for special events and eventually for BBC Children’s programmes such as Play School.

It was, she says, a very up and down existence throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. And then a publisher decided one of her songs would make a good book. A Squash and A Squeeze was published in 1993. She was 45 at the time.

Some six years later, in collaboration with illustrator Axel Scheffler, she would publish The Gruffalo and suddenly she was “Julia Donaldson, children’s author.” A name that could be mentioned in the same breath as Shirley Hughes or Judith Kerr or Raymond Briggs.

“It’s a bit unfair, really,” Julia says. “You sneak into that love between the parents and their child. Bedtime is always a special time and if you’re reading a book that you both enjoy you feel like you love the book.”

Did success change her? She gives me a look and points out children’s publishing is hardly Hollywood. Well, no. But even so, did she ever get a big head, Malcolm?

“No and Julia still goes in shops and gets the best value oranges. She’s very thrifty. We’re post-war babies. We never, ever throw food away.”

What, I wonder, is the secret of a good marriage? They are initially reticent to take the question too seriously. “I think we’re incredibly lucky,” says Malcolm.

“I’d say: ‘marry the right person,’” Julia adds. The conversation wanders on for a bit and then she returns to the idea. “I am serious when I say that. I’ve had some friends in the past who have been incredibly sensible people when it comes to choosing the right washing machine or something like that and they madly get married. Women in particular, because of the biological clock, rush to marry someone they barely know. That might go wrong.”

“With us, we were friends before we got married.”

It’s almost time to go. Malcolm really must go to the hospital. It’s possible that he will be late. Julia has her own things to be getting on with, too. She is working on a poetry anthology for younger children and a storybook on caterpillars and moths. “I’ve noticed when I go to schools that children don’t even know what a buttercup is or a bluebell or a daisy or an oak leaf,” she says. “Even their teachers sometimes don’t recognise a hazelnut.”

Time for one last question. Is age just a number?

“I think life begins after 40,” says Malcolm. “I think your appreciation of life is greater after 40, especially if you’re a late developing male like me. I think it’s wonderful. And retirement means you get to do what you like. Of course, every day you are one day closer to death, which is a slight problem.”

He realises where he’s heard his line before – an old Pink Floyd tune – and starts singing: “One day closer to death.”

Not today though. There are stories still to tell. This is not the end.

The Gruffalo, the Witch and the Warthog with Julia Donaldson is on at the Underbelly, George Square, Edinburgh from Thursday, August 2 until Monday, August 27 (except Wednesday, August 15) The Cook and the King, by Julia Donaldson and David Roberts is published by Macmillan, priced £11.99.

Julia Donaldson on the screen

The Gruffalo, by Julia Donaldson, has become a well-known and loved children’s classic. But in recent years Daonaldson's stories have found a new home on television, with many being adapted into short animated films by the BBC.

The adaptations kicked off with a version of her best-known book in 2009. Robbie Coltrane, no less, provided the voice for the Gruffalo. James Corden and Helena Bonham Carter also provided voiceovers.

Other adaptations have included Room on the Broom, narrated by Simon Pegg and The Highway Rat featuring David Tennant, which premiered on Christmas Day in 2017.

And there’s more to come. BBC One, in collaboration with Magic Light Pictures, has already announced an adaptation of Zog, Julia and Axel Scheffler’s story of a young dragon struggling to find his way in the world, for this year’s festive season.

Sophie Mclean