Excitement and energy rose and fell in equal measure over the years. A low point came when the financial crisis of 2007–8 arrested the recently launched fundraising campaign. This led ultimately to the decision to lease rather than buy a property, which was a disappointment and in some ways a dilution of the original vision. As a founding Board member of HOI I am not an impartial witness to the course of the project. But I did see clearly how Blake managed to keep positive and pragmatic in face of the constantly changing realities of the situation, even in those times when he may have had private doubts about the need for some of the steps the Board felt had to be taken. For example, I remember him wondering about the need to appoint professional staff at an early stage, and whether a ‘branding and identity’ workshop was really what we had to do . . . But he always listened to the arguments carefully and there was never a time when we felt that he had lost enthusiasm. He has ensured its sustainability by (conditionally) pledging his illustration archive, and many rights to it, to the organization; he has given it huge amounts of precious time (many more Board and other meetings than he would have liked, plus numerous appearances at fundraising events), and very considerable financial support. He has diverted profits from various of his ventures to support HOI, for example designing Christmas cards for David Walliams and the late Lord Gavron which brought £24,000 to the charity. It would be hard to quantify the amount he has contributed and continues to do to this project, which does not have his name on it.
From ‘The Five Strange Brothers’ in Quentin Blake’s Magical Tales by John Yeoman
7 Including/cheering
In 2009 Blake was invited to make an unusual series of drawings for an exhibition called In the Picture, at the Foundling Museum in London. This was organized by SCOPE, the disability charity, and its aim was to challenge prejudice against disability with positive images of children with various disabilities. Blake’s brief was to draw children with mobility aids but who were also behaving like characters in a story. In the past, diversity wasn’t always at the top of Blake’s mind: in 1970 he illustrated a book called Doctors and Nurses for a Longmans series called Breakthrough to Literacy. ‘The doctors were all boys and the nurses girls – teachers had to put them in the cupboard in the end. I just didn’t know.’ And in 1996 while working at the National Gallery’s Education Department, I commissioned him to illustrate Children’s Way In, a gallery trail for young visitors. Blake drew a little gang of children to help the visitor discover selected paintings in the collection. I remember my then-head of department criticizing him (to me) for not including a black child in the group, and his ever-so-slightly dismissive reaction when I reported that back to him. He will answer a brief perfectly and beyond expectations, but he protects his artistic boundaries, strongly, if quietly. The point about this story, though, is that I think he had absorbed the message: ‘I’m very well trained now,’ he says. And there is plenty of evidence for this, including the fact that he illustrated David Walliams’ hit The Boy in the Dress, (2012), which was a prize winner in the city of Toulouse’s Première édition du Prix littéraire Jeunesse pour l’égalité Filles Garçons (First Children’s Literature Prize for Gender Equality).
The contribution to SCOPE had a kind of unintended consequence: a book, which shows that Blake had completely internalized the diversity concept, but, as ever, in an entirely original way; the next book, along with many others, is of course a good story, but it is also an expression of his supportive and empathetic nature.
In 2013, five years after the SCOPE exhibition, Blake decided to create a story eventually titled The Five of Us. The book had a protracted gestation: first Tom Maschler, Blake’s editor, failed to show enthusiasm for it, possibly because it seemed to have an agenda, something Maschler might have disapproved of. Next, Blake had originally decided on the title The Picnic but then had to rethink the name when he learned that Jonathan Cape was about to bring out a book of the same name by the illustrator John Burningham. The book, with its new title, was finally taken on by Roger Thorp, then at Tate Publishing, with whom Blake now has a strong publishing relationship.
Blake’s adventure stars a group of unrelated children of assorted ethnicities. Each child also has a disability of one sort or another: there is visually impaired Ollie, Angie who is deaf, Mario in a wheelchair, Simona, who those familiar with the disability might recognize as having Down’s syndrome, and a little boy called Eric – is he autistic, we might wonder, or perhaps an elective mute? Was Maschler right to detect an unwelcome political correctness here? But Blake’s genius is that he first describes the children in the text in terms of their positive abilities; their disabilities are absent: ‘Angie could see a sparrow sitting on top of a statue five miles away. She was amazing. Ollie could hear it sneeze. He was amazing.’ And he introduces them on the first page in little half-length portraits. So the reader starts with an entirely positive image of these children. It’s only in the next spread, when we attend to the illustrations, that we, adults at least, might notice the density of Ollie’s glasses, that Mario is in a wheelchair, and that Eric never looks very happy. (One four-year-old known to me was so involved in the narrative that he noticed none of these, though.) The story is of course redemptive: the five children together use their different abilities to save Big Eddie, their able-bodied carer, when he collapses. Eric has the key role here and he finds a powerful voice, which he uses to summon help from the top of a cliff.
The sources for this book are full of diversity themselves – they exemplify Blake’s extraordinary ability to squirrel away experiences for later use, from real life, from literature, film or from other visual forms, which he later retrieves for exactly the right purpose: the idea of the five children with special abilities comes from Quentin Blake’s Magical Tales, a book written by John Yeoman, Blake’s long-term collaborator. Yeoman had found a Chinese folk-tale, which he called The Five Strange Brothers, about five brothers with extraordinary skills – for example, the youngest could live without breathing and another had extendable legs enabling him to walk through rivers.
Eric hollering from the cliff top, came, Blake remembers, from a moment in a film in which a group of people are stranded in the Alps after a plane crash; one of the group, an Italian opera-singer (played, Blake recalls, by the sinister Francis L. Sullivan), manages to make some contact with the world outside by using his huge tenor voice from the top of the remote peak. And the idea of disability being represented in stories came with the 2006 SCOPE project itself where, in addition to the pictures Blake had made for the exhibition, he worked with a group of disabled children to re-draw some images from his books so that disability was included.
These are the ground elements. But Blake always goes further. Talking about The Five of Us in a web interview for Booktrust he says: ‘The idea was already there when I once again saw a reference to introducing children with disabilities into children’s books; however this time I thought: “The hell with it, why can’t they just be the heroes?”’
To those children with these and other disabilities, books like these really do make a difference.
In The Five of Us each child does act heroically, but they achieve something because they act together. If there is a message in this book it is that one; the disability issue is incidental. And as Blake said at the publication launch of the book in 2014: ‘All I hope is that when we have a reprint of this book in five or ten years it won’t be necessary to mention disability.’ There was a little coda to this speech, which it is worth mentioning here only because it suggests that, as much as Blake is able to give through his work, he also knows how to receive, which always makes the giver feel better:
One curiosity of this book: it’s the only book that I’ve seen that is dedicated to two fictional characters, Loopy and Corky, who appear in another book of mine called Angel Pavement. But in fact these characters are based on real-life people: one is Emma Chichester Clark . . . and the other is the artist Linda Kitson . . . they’ve be
en wonderful encouragers and supporters and I wouldn’t be where I am without them.
There are three other books (at least) from the Blake canon that have similar possibilities of therapeutic effects for readers.
The Story of the Dancing Frog (1984) is an extraordinary book, and its genesis provides another illuminating little glimpse into Blake’s creative process. Giving a talk to a group of teachers one day, he found himself speaking about the need for imagination to be retained in the drawing process. ‘You can,’ he told them, ‘draw a realistic frog’ (and here he drew one) ‘or you could draw one dancing!’ This image, he says, stayed in his mind and ‘crossed over’ with other simmering ideas. Like all the best works for children, it is to be appreciated at many levels: ostensibly aimed at primary-age children, its underlying themes include death, widowhood, suicide, ageing, single parenthood, feminism and disappointed love. It is a serious piece of parallel storytelling, which manages to hold the narrating mother’s story alongside that of Aunt Gertrude’s, who as a new widow finds a new life for herself as an impresario for an extraordinary dancing frog. At the same time, the drawings are full of Blake’s wit and magic; its covert (to children at least) cultural references range from Maurice Chevalier and Mistinguett to Isadora Duncan. One of the things Blake does with such brilliance here is to interleave the coloured illustrations to the dancing frog story with five sepia-tinted drawings: here the mother tells the story to her child Jo (neither the name nor the drawings makes it clear whether Jo is a boy or a girl – making the story more inclusive).
These drawings are some of most sensitive and communicative in all of Blake’s work, certainly in his book illustrations, and these images provide a reassuring framework to contain the tough themes. The first one is a skilful piece of scene-setting: Blake gives us all of the following information in a few pen-strokes: the two figures are probably related, they certainly have a warm, trusting relationship; family seems important to them (the shelf in between the two figures is full of photographs); the briefcase by the chair suggests that the mother goes out to work (later Blake quietly hints in the text that the father is no longer around); and the child is a reader who has put her book down to hear a story from her mother: all children love stories but the best kind is the one that someone you love tells you – and all this comes before we have read a word of text. The penultimate one takes account of the time involved in storytelling – cups of cocoa have been made and drunk, biscuits eaten; there is a kind of rapt closeness between the two which anyone who has shared a story with a child will immediately recognize. The last picture is, together with the last few lines of text, a marvellous piece of post-story reflection:
‘No one could really catch a frog and put it on the stage?’
‘You can do all kinds of things if you need to enough.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
Such images seem to test the limits of description or criticism: how is it possible for an artist to communicate in a drawing the concept of a child thinking about a new, important idea, a powerful life-skill?
The second life-saving book is actually about death, and it is the only one of these three that was not authored by Blake; but it is a book in which his understanding of the feelings expressed in the text make the drawings live in an exceptionally powerful way. Michael Rosen’s Michael Rosen’s Sad Book (2004) is not fiction, but a true account of the author’s reactions to the unexpected death of his teenage son, Eddie. The text is brutally honest: ‘What makes me most sad is when I think about my son Eddie. He died. I loved him very, very much but he died anyway,’ and: ‘Sometimes I don’t want to talk about it. Not to anyone. No one. No one at all. I just want to think about it on my own. Because it’s mine. And no one else’s.’
And the illustrations all show how deeply Blake has addressed the question of how a feeling such as the last one might be expressed visually.
Blake’s answers come in images such as this one, where the grey figure of Rosen stares down at the bleak shore of a muddy river, where crows pick over debris; most of the picture space is taken up by the blank, grey-yellow-coloured river wall. Everything is designed to capture the overwhelming nature of such a feeling.
The honesty of the text-with-illustrations has been widely recognized as being of therapeutic use by professionals in the field: I once saw the book shelved on the ‘pastoral theology’ section of a religious bookshop, and it is to be found in such places as St Joseph’s Hospice in Hackney, in counselling sessions for children who have lost family-members. But it has also been named as one of the 100 Modern Children’s Classics by the Sunday Times (2014), suggesting that its message is for everyone. The illustrations together with their text were shown in a recent exhibition of Blake’s work, Inside Stories (2014), at the House of Illustration. The book took up the whole of the last room of the show and at the planning stage there was some debate about whether it would be right to finish what was a largely joyful show in such a minor key, and Blake did ensure that the walls in that room were not painted in a dark colour. Some visitors feel the need to return to the more cheerful sections, though, and I saw many leaving that room in tears. In some ways, the book is as unbearable as the situation which gave rise to it; but the tears seemed somehow also to be tears of relief that, thanks to art and to literature, such feelings can actually be named.
Clown appeared in 1995. It is a textless book, which tells the story of a discarded toy clown in a gritty urban setting. The drawings are mercurial and the layout organized in an almost filmic manner, with rapid changes of pace and long ‘stills’ where the moment requires more reflection; but here we can look at it as a marvellous representation of empathy. Because there are no words, our emotions are engaged directly by a combination of the fast-moving narrative scenes, and the full-page images at key dramatic moments such as this one where Clown is thrown into the air, with a gloomy city backdrop behind him.
Like many children’s picture-books Clown has a 32-page portrait-format; it starts with an image of rejection: a small toy clown is taken to the dustbin along with other unfortunate unwanted animal toys by a disapproving woman. In the first image she holds out the wretched bundle at arm’s length, her pointed nose expressing sneering disgust. The second picture is a perfect example of Blake’s ability to show us a situation from the perspective of the protagonist: we see something Clown would have seen and experienced: a brutal pair of pink hands in the act of throwing, followed by the sad faces of the creatures in the bin. Clown is sharp-eyed and resourceful and soon makes his escape, thanks in part to the natty striped trainers that he finds in a pile of rubbish. These give him the kind of feet he needs in order to get on with his main concern: to rescue the other toys, still hopelessly stranded in the bin. But to do this he needs help from the human city-dwellers. The children delightedly recognize a fellow small person, but the adults see him only as a piece of rubbish and he is discarded, sometimes violently. In spite of this, Clown is not distracted from his mission: the book is punctuated with drawings of him remembering his left-behind friends. As the story progresses, Clown’s urban experiences become more dangerous – a vicious dog corners him in a rubbish-strewn street and its equally thuggish owner tosses him, this time not out of, but into, the window of a miserable third-floor flat. Here he surprises a little girl trying in vain to cheer her screaming baby brother. As ever with Blake, the few details in the picture are all we need to understand the situation: the single light-bulb, peeling wallpaper and tipped-over saucepan on the floor – the potatoes and puddles of water poignantly suggesting the girl’s hopeless attempts to prepare a meal.
Needless to say, the benign Clown helps her with the chores, giving her time to return with him to the bin and rescue the animal friends, who are more than happy to find a new home. They all get back in time for the girl’s downtrodden mother to return from work; tearfully joyous she finds a tidy flat, a scrubbed and shining baby, and the meal (potatoes back in their pan) ready on the table, now decorated with a
bunch of flowers, which Clown has naturally freecycled from another bin.
Without words, this book nevertheless has many things to say: in the subtlest way possible it speaks about rejection, homelessness in the city, the powerlessness of children and, more than anything, about a kind of compassion for people in need – a compassion which is normally most keenly felt by those who have experienced the same thing themselves, but in Blake’s case this is achieved vicariously.
There is quite a bit of Quentin Blake in Clown. Blake is not particularly tall and he notices things. This helps him to know what it is like to be a person in many situations he hasn’t been in himself. He doesn’t quite do handstands to cheer people up but he has a wonderful equivalent gesture and he is very good at rescuing. When he is aware that a friend might need a bit of rescue he will act immediately – in practical and generous ways ranging from financial help to long-term emotional support. A small example of this is the time when Blake understood straight away the difficult situation Geneviève Roy, the otherwise highly skilled French teacher, found herself in when she arrived in London to work on the Bateau dans le ciel project, described elsewhere:
I went to London for Bateau dans le ciel. I was completely lost, because I didn’t speak the language, it was terrible . . . I was panicking and Quentin just helped me, I mean really helped me! He came to fetch me at the station, found a place for me stay [with a friend], then he took me back to the station. He looked after me as if I was his little sister, because life goes much too quickly when you don’t speak the language . . . he saw I was panicking and he looked after me . . . it was crazy, he has other things to do but he does [things like that]. (Author’s translation)
Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination Page 19
