To listen to more of Quentin Blake’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXEQD04SfK8&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzikY39jQAAIV7oeXKjEK73
British illustrator Quentin Blake was born in 193
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2. He had his first work published by 'Punch' magazine at the age of 16. Since then, he has illustrated books by a variety of different authors, most famously many by Roald Dahl. [Listener: Ghislaine Kenyon; date recorded: 2006]
TRANSCRIPT: It was a was culture shock indeed. You know, I was 19, or something like that. And the army was completely, a completely alien world, and I can remember for instant going to… I think I started off in Oswestry, in… is that Herefordshire? Shropshire, I think, and I can sort of have some pictures of… I can see myself, as it were, from a distance, as though in some dreadful film in… because one was issued with kit, and I've a sort of vision of myself staggering along, you know, way behind everybody else, carrying this stuff. Also, when they gave it out, they gave you a jacket, sort of battledress jacket, and I thought, but I've got two jackets already they've just given me, I couldn't understand that. And then after a bit I realised they were shirts, but they weren't the sort of thing, shirts that I was used to wearing, and I think I was sort of shell-shocked really, having to get up at five o'clock in the morning, and go off and learn to fire cannons, and things of that kind. But… I then went… that was three months basic training, and I then went into the Royal Army Education Corps and I did I think it was 12 weeks’ training, in Beaconsfield, in Buckinghamshire. There was a big white house there, which was the sort of headquarters, but we all lived in Nissen huts, and it's very strange because there were three companies, so that they trained you on a sort of rotation system. And the company I was in, I think it was K Company, and it was run by a man called Archie Wavell, who was a major, and he was the son of Field Marshal Wavell who'd been the Viceroy of India, and so on, so he was really a completely professional soldier, but very interesting. And in some ways, I did more things there, in that 12 weeks, it was… because the other people were there, the sort of people that one was going to meet later on at university, and in a sense I was less inhibited about doing things then than I was later.
