Quentin Blake:

“The process begins with immersing yourself in it. You have to learn the book really and the book, the text, is the guide to the illustrator, that’s my view of it, but of course you start off, once you have read it a few times, you start off by drawing and its very interesting because there are some descriptions of the characters but you don’t really know them until you have drawn them so you start drawing and you sort of find out what they are like by drawing.”

Interviewer:

“Literally on the page not in your head?”

Quentin Blake:

No, no, no, you can do a bit in your head, but that’s probably wrong. It’s is a very strange experience because you start drawing, even with characters of my own, by the time I have got to the finished illustrations in the book, you can look at the early ones that you started doing and they are not the same and you think “Oh, it doesn’t look like him”. It is a very strange experience, you’ve got to know them like a person, but you have to do it by drawing.  You can think something but that does not really produce the appearance of that person and what they are like.”

Interviewer:

“Well Quentin, thanks for the moment.”

“Also on today’s menu, when is an Italian olive oil, not Italian olive oil? We’ll be looking into that little conundrum with Italian chef Genaro Contalto.”

“Yes, and of course, if there is anything you’d like to comment on in today’s programme...”

Interviewer:

“Now,  every year in the summer time, I sit in Roald Dahl’s garden at his family’s home in Buckinghamshire and read out some of his stories and poems to children who come from all parts of the world for this once a year opportunity to visit the place where all Roald’s famous talks were dreamed up and which is opened up for charity by his widow Lissy and when I hold up the illustrations, Quentin Blake’s, they literally cheer sometimes at plucky Charlie Bucket or amazing Matilda and you can seem them take delight in the fun and the positive images of youngsters like themselves with which they clearly identify and which will stay with them for the rest of their lives, I am sure. Rather as Ernest Shepherd’s illustrations of Pooh and Christopher Robin have stayed with me in mine. But even in today’s fabulously diverse world of children’s literature, there are still very few stories about, or indeed pictures of, disabled children. Well, a Big Lottery project is aiming to change that, led by Scope, the charity for people with cerebral palsy and Quentin you have drawn three pictures for this project, how did you become involved?”

Quentin Blake:

“Well, I was invited to take part and it’s interesting to me in two ways:  one is that one wants to do something about it, I mean it’s a natural feeling about it; the other is that it’s interesting, as it were, professionally because if you are an illustrator, you operate, in a sense, with signals, you know, in the old days, long after school masters had stopped wearing gowns, they always wore gowns in pictures because that’s how you knew they were school masters, so you have a set of almost clichés, or signals anyway, and of course, they get out of date and I have had that experience over time, I will break down and confess that many years ago I did a book about children in school being doctors and nurses and the doctors were all little boys and the nurses were all little girls. The teacher said “We just had to put them in the cupboard, we couldn’t use them”. Well, I share the blame with the publisher there but these are things one has to learn, so a little consciousness helps.”

Interviewer:

“Well, Tracie Linehan is also with us, she is Head of Early Years at Scope, and your project ‘In the Picture’ is about sending messages isn’t it?”

Tracie Linehan:

“It is about sending messages, it’s also about all children being able to recognise themselves in interesting, fun literature, right from the very beginning, as early as possible and for them to be able to recognise themselves in the characters that are written about.”

Interviewer:

“So what kind of images are you hoping to have and are there any that you would rule out?”

Tracie Linehan:

“I don’t think we’d rule any out, children are children and we’d like disabled children to be depicted as such.”

Interviewer:

“Even if they’re sad.”

Tracie Linehan:

“Absolutely. Disabled children get very sad. They are also naughty, get cross and angry and like anybody else, there is actually no difference in their personalities and I think that’s what we’d like to come across that is that disabled children’s personalities are the strength of children’s books and that’s one of the things the illustrations really need to depict in a very positive way.”

Interviewer:

“Well, nine year old Celine Matthews, is really the inspiration for this. Celine has cerebral palsy her mum Jean is on the ‘phone to us now from East Goscote in Leicestershire. It all started Jean, as I understand it, when Celine was just a toddler and you went to a Red Cross coffee morning.”

Jean Matthews:

“We did, yes and Scope were there and a lady called Susan Clow brought a book and the book was called ‘Two Left Feet’ and it’s about a little boy who has cerebral palsy and Celine thought it was absolutely fantastic because she thought she was the only child that had CP at that time and use a K-walker and she was over the moon to see that this little boy in the book had got cerebral palsy.”

Interviewer:

“And her twin sister doesn’t have cerebral palsy.”

Jean Matthews:

“She doesn’t, no.”

Interviewer:

“And you  have two other daughters as well, they don’t have it.”

Jean Matthews:

“No.”

Interviewer:

“So has it been helpful for them too to see images like this?”

Jean Matthews:

“Very much so. As a family, we have to do everything around Celine so that Celine can fit into what everybody classes as a normal life and we all help her in every way and she is quite a positive little girl and she’ll say “I can do that” and she’ll have a go.”

Interviewer:

“Tracie, what kind of difference does it make to have books that include characters with disabilities for children with disabilities?”

Tracie Linehan:

“I think it makes them visible, it makes them part of society, it makes them part of the activities, the fiction and the day to day stuff that goes on. It doesn’t exclude them and it’s very much about equality and being recognised for who you are, whoever that is, whether you’re a child who is going to be a truant, yes, even a child with disability can be a truant; those images should be there for you to recognise within children’s stories.”

Interviewer:

“Quentin, how explicit did you feel the depiction of the disability itself should be?”

Quentin Blake:

“Well I think you need to know it’s there but you don’t need to be very specific I think. One of the good things about illustration is that you can control the way you do it and so you can have one kind of illustration which shows exactly how this equipment can help children and works but if you are drawing them as a character, and that is what I was trying to do, it’s there, but you don’t have to insist on it.  What you are thinking about is what that child is doing, whether it’s enjoying it, what the expression on its face is, in fact the elements which it has in common with everybody else.”

Interviewer:

“So the equipment doesn’t define the character?”

Quentin Blake:

“Exactly, yes.”

Interviewer:

“And Tracie, how difficult is this idea to get more illustrations like this?  How difficult is it to get publishers on board with it?”

Tracie Linehan:

I think that’s been the more challenging part of the project because obviously it’s about, is it saleable? Are people interested in it? But I think with the huge drive nationally for all children to be included throughout our communities, then these books need to be available and they need to be easily accessible for everybody regardless of whether of not you have a disability and the important thing I want to state is that it’s not a separate strand of literature, that is stories about disabled children, it’s about disabled children being part of the make up of a story and in which case, hopefully, be in the background of an illustration or just happen to be in the swimming pool or playground or whatever.”

Interviewer:

“Tracie Linehan from Scope and Jean Matthews and Quentin, thank you all and the Roald Dahl Open day that I mentioned at the beginning is on Saturday, 27 July this year in Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire and I hope to see some of you there.”