He doesn’t have a lot of experience of children but children are always appearing in his books, and he knows them, sometimes better than parents who have had ten of them in their own family! He sees every aspect, he’s always observing and listening and so he has empathy, which is also so important in his books.
The other part of the project involved the school dinner-ladies creating a lunch based on Dahl’s Revolting Recipes (which the children had been working on) in a local social centre. Blake entered into the spirit, trying the doubtful-looking dishes and staying at the school until beyond the end of the school day.
This was a true two-way creative relationship: Blake’s books sparking off brave, imaginative and diverse school projects which gave him the kind of illuminating feedback about the afterlife of books that most authors welcome.
Perhaps it was this experience that prompted Blake to accept the ambitious idea of a collaboration between himself, the teachers from the Charente-Maritime, and what turned out to be 1,800 French-speaking schoolchildren from around the world. Its end-product would be a children’s book, later given the title Un bateau dans le ciel by its publisher, Alain Serres , in which Blake would illustrate a text derived from children’s ideas on the chosen theme of ‘l’humanisme’. Blake remembers that for five seconds he inwardly questioned the notion of such a philosophical theme for a book for 8-year-olds, but he was soon informed that it was actually to be a book encouraging humanitarian values in the face of current problems such as racism, bullying and pollution. He remembers the rewarding sense of having helped to create something with schools, but whose effects went well beyond the walls of the classroom.
The success of the project was later celebrated in Rochefort and La Rochelle by a series of yet more inventive events culminating in a spectacular parade in honour of Blake, again created by Jean-Marc Sandeau and his Rochefort colleagues. This took place in a space which forms a magical natural stage opposite Rochefort’s seventeenth-century Royal Rope Factory.
In a marvellous, mixed-age extravaganza, children appeared as Blake characters such as Mrs Armitage, some carrying joyously coloured cockatoos from the book of the same name. Yet others tossed up into the air wonderful floppy clown puppets (after Blake’s own favourite among his books, the textless Clown) which appeared above the wall as if by magic. The fact that Blake still keeps one of these puppets at his home in France says a lot about what this day meant to him, and several people who were there describe being moved to tears by this public homage. The occasion was, to be sure, a celebration of Blake’s art, which had inspired the work in the first place, but also of his presence, the generous amount of time he gave to the project, and the permission he had de facto given to French teachers to knock down the fences of their rigid curriculum.
I also saw tears, including on Blake’s own face (a rare public occurrence) at the final event in La Rochelle. This was yet another transcription, this time of Bateau dans le ciel, which became a piece of musical theatre, performed by many of the local children who had helped create the book. This setting free of a book from its pages, like the flying boat that is its subject, was for him a moving recognition of how his work can unleash creative power in others. And the emotion of the day was crowned when, at the end of the performance, a six-year-old boy, on being told that Quentin Blake would be appearing on the stage, gasped, ‘Quoi? Le vrai Quentin Blake?’ (What? The real Quentin Blake?)
The real Quentin Blake has also appeared countless times in British schools – in his eighties he is still an active contributor to the life of his local primary school, Bousfield, attending the annual leavers’ assembly and regularly donating works and books. During his tenure of the Laureateship he realized he would have to curtail these visits since the demand would have filled his diary every day of the week. But being Laureate gave him the platform from which he could promote his views on the value of children’s books as tools for learning of all kinds: British children’s books are, he said, ‘among the world’s best . . . books are primers in the development of the emotional, moral and imaginative life – a celebration of what it is like to be a human being’. The page in the issue of the Times Educational Supplement of 14 May 1999, from which this quote is taken, had two tellingly juxtaposed headlines: the one on the article about the new Laureate titled ‘Drawing on the wealth of experience’ was accompanied by a photo of Blake reading one of his books with a group of children, who are poring over the pages. The other headline read ‘Heads fear they will miss their targets’ and dealt with a survey of primary-school head teachers, which revealed their anxiety about meeting the national targets set for literacy and numeracy. Without venturing into the territory of the wrongs and rights of education policy since 1989, this seemed a neatly expressive binary – the idea that education can be definitively measured versus the notion of the often unpredictable and ungraspable way in which children actually learn.
Quentin Blake is the latter kind of learner/teacher. Perhaps there is not such a distance between the five-year-old Blake pondering the quality of the drawings in Chicks’ Own Annual and the 70-year-old artist who has watched and unconsciously committed to memory the hunched pose of a sad person, and who draws it, months or years later, in Michael Rosen’s Sad Book and tells us something about ourselves; or the man who illustrated Voltaire, a literary French author, and built a bridge to him for English readers; or the person who invented Mr. Magnolia to teach very young children to count. This is learning and teaching dissolving into each other.
Despite his own relatively privileged and formal education, in the end it does seem that it is Blake himself who has probably been his own most effective teacher. He clearly always realized what he needed to know when it came close to him. He is a learner who grabs with great certainty at the passing opportunities; in this respect he is, to use the poet Keats’s terminology, more like the flower than the honey bee: ‘Let us not therefore go hurrying about and collecting honey, bee-like, buzzing here and there impatiently from a knowledge of what is to be arrived at: but let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive’.14 He receives these things and simmers them (he would probably use the French word ‘mijoter’ for this) and offers them to his audiences in the works which so closely represent his person.
As for those he has taught, they are now far more numerous than the handful of Lycée pupils and the few hundred RCA and other Higher Education students – they are every one of his readers and gallery visitors. As the teacher Annie Simon said to me, with deep understanding of the powerful work that the best teachers of all kinds are capable of doing: ‘I think if you took all of Quentin Blake’s books you could solve every problem in the world with them.’
Lending his name
There is a nice coda to this story of Blake’s life in learning and teaching:
On 24 October 2002, the weather in Berlin was cheerful – Kyle, a storm-system, was beginning to drift away northwards, to be replaced by a small area of high pressure (‘ein kleines Hoch’) called Quentin.
This was the same moment when another benign Quentin, Blake, appeared in Berlin, although the affected area was limited to a primary school in the southern suburb of Dahlem. The occasion was a big one for the school, though: a new ‘State Europe School’ had been opened, where teaching is bilingual, in English and German, and it was celebrating its naming day. Part of an ambitious project to create bilingual schools after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this one had been affiliated to a state primary, the Erich-Kästner School, named after the best-selling author of Emil and the Detectives. Now it had a new site and needed a name with a more Anglophone connection. Keeping the children’s author link seemed to be sensible (although, like Blake, Kästner in fact wrote for adults, including a wonderful book of poetry to cure every condition, Doktor Erich Kästners lyrische Hausapotheke – Doctor Erich Kästner’s Lyric Medicine Chest), and the name would be decided democratically by all the staff and children of the school, voting for their favourite author
writing in English. This turned out to be Quentin Blake and he was a good choice for many reasons, first the fact that he was alive (other contenders for the name included Roald Dahl).
It is not a coincidence that four educational institutions or places of learning (so far) have asked Blake to associate his name with theirs. Today most public buildings which bear the name of living people do so because of the large financial contributions they or their family trusts have made to the organization; welcome and necessary as these are, naming opportunities have a high premium, and are readily for sale. But the Quentin Blake-Grundschule, the Quentin Blake Building at Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School, the Bibliothèque Quentin Blake (the newly refurbished children’s library at the Institut Français de Londres), and (not a building, but based in a college) the Blake Society at Downing College, Cambridge have all been given the Quentin Blake name because these organizations seem to want to connect with something more than a donation. They understand what the values of Blake’s work and his person can bring to places of learning, undidactic and unconnected to official education policy as Blake’s stance undoubtedly is.
The Quentin-Blake school on that October day had planned a grand two-part Quentin Blake-fest. It was the kind of shared-experience event that primary school teachers who have some freedom with the curriculum and a lot of imagination can excel at: an occasion with input from everyone to honour Blake but with much reward for the participants as well. It started in the VIP lounge at Tegel airport with a welcome from a crowd of expectant children, dressed as characters from his books, with their parents and teachers. This was followed next day by a naming-ceremony attended by the British Ambassador and various city representatives, at which Blake spoke, planted a tree and presented the school with a drawing of the logo designed by him.
Each class had prepared a performance based on one of Blake’s books, including a version of Mrs Armitage in which a teacher with a terrifying resemblance to the character pedalled onto the (outdoor) performance space, complete with a Breatspear lookalike dog in the basket.
Theresa Heine, the teacher who led the naming project, remembers:
Quentin’s warmth and friendliness, the way he gave everyone his complete attention, from the British Ambassador down to the small child wanting his autograph, was amazing. No other name could have been a better choice and it was with much emotion we bade him farewell. The staff and children had had an extraordinary experience, and although it must have been quite exhausting for Quentin, he remained upbeat and smiling!
It was exhausting, and although Blake would prefer not to fly anywhere, and Germany is not natural territory for him (‘You can’t sniff it, like you can France or Italy,’ he says), out of typical loyalty he has returned to Berlin twice since then, bringing more pictures; each time new generations of children get to know the person behind the name of their school and an archive is added to, which will communicate to future students what the current head teacher Angelika Kuntzsch calls ‘the school’s “Quentin Blake spirit”’.
This spirit was surely one of the factors that prompted the Institut Français de Londres to propose that their newly refurbished children’s library should be given Quentin Blake’s name.
The Institut felt that the unique way that Blake promotes literature to young audiences through the medium of illustration, together with his generosity towards the library (described in Part 2) in terms of his time and his art, not to mention the way in which he embodies a strong Franco-British bond, made him an obvious choice for the honour. The Blake name and a Blake artwork will appear at the library in London’s South Kensington in late 2015.
The bond between young people and visual art was the motivation behind Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School’s appropriation of the Blake name. This was, as we know, Blake’s secondary school but it no longer occupies the modernist building at Crittall’s Corner, which it did in the 1940s and 50s when Blake was there. In the 1960s, after Blake had left, it moved to Hurst Road in Sidcup, serendipitously more or less opposite Blake’s childhood home. This location is better suited to a school: it’s a generous site, secluded from the unrelenting traffic fumes of the A20 which swirl round Crittall’s Corner. It has good sports facilities and many new buildings and is a school which still offers the broad curriculum that Blake enjoyed when he was there. When the time came for a new art and technology building, the then-Head Dr Joe Vitagliano thought that the alumnus whose name belonged most fittingly to the building was Blake. Of course many schools now turn to alumni for support in new capital projects, but in this case the offer came after the building and was unconnected to fundraising. As such it was a way of recognizing Blake’s contribution to the wider world rather than just to the school.
Not long afterwards a group of humanities students at Downing College, Cambridge decided to start something called the Blake Society – an arts and humanities society which would connect students with the arts in college through talks and events. They too looked to an inspiring alumnus for a name and he naturally did more than this, and also drew them a logo. The Annual Blake Society Dinner is something Blake makes a point of showing up to, even though it means dusting off his version of a dinner-jacket. Blake says that for the inaugural dinner in 2010 he had mistakenly (and touchingly) believed that undergraduates would no longer feel obliged to dress up in dinner suits and black ties and he turned up in a lime-green cotton number . . .
Blake is clearly always warmly welcomed at these events and, as a Blake Society blogger writing in 2013 about the other famous Downing alumnus called Blake (George, the spy) said: ‘He was also (I think) at Downing before Sir Quentin, but perhaps we ended up being named after the better Blake?’
‘The Storyteller’, drawing for ‘Life Under Water: A Hastings Celebration’, Jerwood Gallery, 2015
3 Speaking, reading, writing
The French ambassador’s gracious residence in Kensington Palace Gardens. A gala fundraising evening is taking place in aid of the new children’s library at the Institut Français (in 2014, while England is busy closing libraries, France is still doing the opposite). Black ties, the chef’s latest artful canapés, smart French chatter, and the items to be auctioned, a Dior watch, an opportunity to pilot a plane, nice vintage wines, all laid out to raise the temperature of desire and the cash. And then there is Quentin Blake, shuffling to the microphone, managing to make even formal dress look informal, apart from the sharp bow-tie, which, he says, the assistant in the Jermyn Street shop knotted especially for him. In yet another gesture of generosity he has agreed both to speak in the cause of children’s libraries (and so inspire donations from the assembled wealthy) and also later to live-draw, and to donate the resulting picture to the auction, all without a fee. It is a rare example of Blake actually using a text to speak from: as I have witnessed many times, his speeches are at once completely worked out and completely freewheeling: ‘Friends,’ he begins, ‘I’m not sure if I’m too nervous or too relaxed, but I know I feel slightly embarrassed because I’m aware that most of what I have to say to you, you will know very well already.’ This is a good self-deprecating start which the audience likes. He continues:
Although a ‘bibliotheque de jeunesse’ may be relatively small and cheerful it is nevertheless extremely important. It’s an amazingly effective implement of education because it invites children to make their own explorations into reading, pursue their own tastes and initiatives – it’s like a machine that creates its own energy.
The audience can imagine this Blakean machine – it would be some combination of Mrs Armitage’s bicycle with Captain Najork’s womble-run – and Blake goes on to talk about the particular benefit which books bring to children, and you feel that he is actually describing his own books:
Roald Dahl describes in Matilda some of the effect of the wonder of books, the access to new worlds. I think we need to say that they also have – and I feel I want to say this in French – an aspect philosophique. They speak of the way people live and
by implication how we ought to live. An apparently simple album, mine de rien (roughly speaking ‘you wouldn’t think so’ in English), will have some moral dimension, however simple.
And then, for a few minutes, the drawing. Another of his favourite flying books, which allows him to conclude with, ‘I suppose you could call it a “livre magique” – but then all books are magic.’
These words, leavened as always when Blake is in French company by impressively authentic French phrases, are delivered with undemonstrative conviction; the appreciation is warm. The whole speech seemed to be something that came ‘directly from the heart and touched everyone in the room’, as one audience member described it to me later.
Quentin Blake is world-famous as an illustrator: his style is recognizable (and widely imitated) and his drawings embody in readers’ minds many favourite children’s books from several decades. But this chapter is about another Quentin Blake, the man of words, the stylish communicator in speech and text, and the constant and wide-ranging reader, who can also read aloud. This identity seems both to underpin his visual output and to set him apart from many of his fellow illustrators.
Speaking is what we learn to do first with words, and some children do grow up absorbing the speech of their wordy and articulate parents. But Blake was not raised in such a home, nor did he come from a large talkative family; he seems to have been a rather silent boy. Effectively an only child, his brother Ken being 11 years older, he didn’t really experience domestic sibling chit-chat; one imagines him as self-contained, with a lively and strong imagination; perhaps a child who didn’t need to relate to the people around him all the time. This way of being is sometimes confused with shyness – an adjective which people often attach to Blake, even today; but that word has an adolescent connotation, a fear of ridicule behind it, which I don’t think describes him accurately. Reticence may be closer – those who knew him at the RCA say that something like this was in evidence in the early part of his teaching career. But Blake’s friend the artist Linda Kitson, a student of his who later taught alongside him, says that things changed quite quickly: ‘When you’re a teacher, as I was with him, you become very fluent and articulate and interested; being a teacher compels you to be articulate . . . and therefore to live up to the students’ expectations.’
Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination Page 9
