Ruby Tandoh on Brian Jacques author of the Redwall series

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1:07Ruby Tandoh:My guest came to prominence as the youngest competitor on The Great British Bake Off, and that was in 2013, since when she's enjoyed a stratospheric writing career with books such as Crumb, Eat Up and All Consuming. Welcome to Great Lives, Rupi Tando. And after that culinary introduction, I'm assuming you'll have picked someone who'll be cooking on gas. Tell us whom you've picked and why. So I have chosen an unlikely culinary inspiration for me, Brian Jakes, so a children's author whose books I read constantly when I was kind of 8, 9, 10. And this was in the late 90s and early 2000s. And he wrote these wonderful books about this crew of mice, hedgehogs, badgers, all going on adventures and kind of centered on this medieval style abbey, kind of going out, fighting rats and ferrets and stoats and things like that.

2:07The scenes that I remember, I remember almost nothing of the adventures, but I remember the feasts in the abbeys. And, you know, these feasts were spectacular. and he wrote about them with such care, things like meadow cream, elderberry beer, or soups and pies and things like that, all made by the moles and the hedgehogs and the mice. And, you know, it's not just me. There's actually a huge number of food writers who I'm friends with and chefs who I'm friends with who all look at the Redwall books and say, that really influenced the way I think about food.

2:40Ruby Tandoh:And it inspired you too, did it? It certainly did. I think it was maybe the first time that I had seen writing where the joy of reading words about food, the joy of just those syllables and of the meanings they evoked, was as rich as the joy of eating the food, and you could feel how much he enjoyed it. We ought to point out that he was a huge success in America. And, well, I suppose J.K. Rowling, but not many British children's authors have been so successful on the other side of the Atlantic. I guess his success there doesn't surprise me in a sense because I mean if you go to the United States they have like Renaissance fairs and things like that.

3:20They're very interested in this kind of sketchy vision of like medieval England. So I mean this must have been exactly the kind of thing they would be after.

3:28Ruby Tandoh:Take a look at this photograph. It's of President Obama buying Redwall books by Brian for his daughters. This is not a crossover event I would have expected. No, no. He looks as if he's really enthusiastic as well. He bought Redwall, Mossflower and Matty Mayo, is it pronounced? Oh, some of the classics. The first three books in Washington in 2014. How much do you know about his life, Ruby? Not a great deal. I know that he was born in Liverpool and loved the city. I know that he had a huge number of jobs. He wasn't someone who kind of studied English and then went into publishing and became an author.

4:09He worked as a milkman. I believe he worked in the Merchant Navy or something like that as a sailor. So he really got around. He came from this working class background. And he was a storyteller in a kind of very, I think he was like an oral storyteller often. and you can feel that rhythm and that kind of liveliness.

4:29Ruby Tandoh:As you say, he was much more than his book. So let's begin by hearing from the man himself. Here he is on the eve of the Milk Cup final between Everton and Liverpool in 1984. I suggest you cover your ears. He's pretty loud.

4:49A major upset? Well, judge for yourself. For the rest of the country, maybe. but to dwellers in the county of Merseyside it's good news for you and me. The fantastic Reds, the amazing Blues whichever religion or colour you choose it's high noon at the Plaza de Wembley for the mightiest of football clashes. Forget the Olympics, the snooker, the darts the Grand National or even the Ashes. For the first time in the history of football Everton and Liverpool FC are both going to walk through a storm. The Mill Cup final, baby, that's the name of the game. Well Brian was a thick set guy With muscles in his spit as they say Very very strong Because he'd done a lot of manual jobs in his life Bald but he tended to wear like a black cap And he had a little goatee beard He kind of swaggered He didn't walk, he swaggered into a room And he looked like he'd just come off the docks Or just come up from the coalyard The way he walked And he had a wonderful voice a very deep Scouse accent, old-fashioned Liverpool Irish accent, and I could listen to him all day.

5:57It's a Merseyside invasion, but when it's all over and gone, who will bring on the milk cup? Who'll be the lucky one?

6:07Ruby Tandoh:Brian Jakes reading his Scousers poem on the BBC, and the voice you heard in between was his old BBC Merseyside colleague, Mick Ord, who the producer spoke to earlier. More from Mick coming up. Also here, we're delighted to welcome Trevor Hyatt. And you, Trevor, knew Brian because of your involvement on the folk scene. Is that right? Yep. This illustrates the breadth of Brian. You've indicated that he had various jobs. You've left out docker, boxer, long-distance lorry driver, performer, singer, a lover of Italian opera, which his stentorian voice would offer the most sensitive arias with a Merseyside accent, a sound to behold.

6:52Ruby Tandoh:And you brought some of his early publications, including his Scouse Bible. What's that? Show us. Illustrated by Bill Tidy, a name that I'm sure you'll remember. I'm not sure you will, Ruby. No. He was a great cartoonist, had for years and years and years, had a daily strip cartoon in the Daily Mirror. He also featured, again, for decades in Private Eye. And what does that book do? What's it about? It is taking all kinds of biblical themes and making them very Liverpool. According to Jakes, Tell me a story, or read me a fact, of when Adam and Eve was both copped in the act, when the beer was cheap and the women was handy, and fellows aged nearly 200 were randy, when the walls got blew down, when pyramids got built, and prophets wore curtains and kings wore a kilt, when Samson with a jawbone gave him hell and Salome wiggled her bottom as well when life was one long biblical western with a cast of thousands and Charlton Heston.

7:53Ruby Tandoh:What do you think so far, Ruby? Is this the man you imagined him to be? Yeah, I think he sounds delightful. I think he sounds like a hoot. His son told us that he used to joke about being a 40-year overnight success. So let's go back and find out where that success came from. He was born in June 1939. His mother's family all had Irish roots. His father's side was from Lancashire. And Brian grew up near the Liverpool docks. Here's Mick Ord again. Well, Brian told me that the idea for Redwall came from a park, which is near where he lived in the Kirkdale area of Liverpool. It's called Stanley Park.

8:32And it's a big park that sits between Anfield, obviously Liverpool FC's ground, and Goodison, which used to be Everton's ground. and Anfield was a big old Victorian park and he used to play there as a kid and he said there was a red sandstone wall there and he always used to wonder what was behind it and he was a creative kid and he often told this story that he was about 10 and he attended St John's Roman Catholic Primary School and they all had to write a story and he wrote one about a little bird that cleaned the teeth of a crocodile and the teacher didn't believe he wrote it. Your dad wrote that, your mum wrote that, whoever.

9:12And Brian said, no, no, it was me. And the teacher didn't believe him and caned him. Obviously, an incident like that stuck with Brian all his life and it gave him a love of storytelling and particularly children's creativity. Quite often, the clock strikes 1.30am and I'm still in the pub with some hard-drinking men. Devotion to ale is our one cause in life. Then you've got to go home and face up to the wife. As I fell down our street singing Wild Irish Rose, exactly what time it was, God only knows. I made a rush for the door, which I thought was closed. She stood tapping her foot with me key up her nose.

10:00Ruby Tandoh:Brian Jakes, Beer in Hand on a long-forgotten TV show called Poems and Pints on BBC Two Trevor Hyatt, describe the man you first met was it in Liverpool or were you out on the road? No, I was working at Granada Television doing local news and I had a history of performing on the folk scene but at heart I was a journalist and because I have my folk music and folk scene connections I'd heard about Brian but hadn't met him. So I made it my business to go and meet him. And we met for a pint and a roll-up and we got on just like the cliché. And we performed together an awful lot because I was performing still, even though I was working as a reporter.

10:41He'd give me a ring and say, Trevor, I need some accompaniment. Can you come all over to Liverpool tonight? Yeah, and off we went. And we did a lot of gigs like that.

10:48Ruby Tandoh:And was he the imperturbably jolly, cheerful fellow that we imagine from hearing his acts? Yes, I mean, he was... I don't know what his inner life was like, but he was constantly on, as it were. A lot of driven people are. He was constantly on. Even he was walking down the road, always performing. But, of course, he was well-known around Liverpool, even before he appeared on television or on Radio Merseyside. And he was part of that burgeoning folk scene in Liverpool, which had the spinners, who he called the spanners, and all kinds of other folk around the scene there. He was part of that. And he and his brothers formed a folk group.

11:25called The Fishermen, and then his two brothers went off to New Zealand. So that's how he started his solo career. But throughout this, he was always writing. He was like the Marriott's Edgar of Liverpool.

11:36Ruby Tandoh:You're listening to the great life of Brian Jakes, poet, playwright, boxer, sailor, milkman, and it was on his milk delivery round that his new life began. As I understand it, he used to deliver to a school in Wavertree, And according to his son, David, he got friendly with one of the teachers and began reading his stories to the children. It was a school for the blind. Did you know Ruby? I knew a tiny bit, yeah, that this is how he came to be so kind of evocative and descriptive in his writing. Being in front of the children, gauging their reactions in real time. You can almost feel him actually, even on the page, accelerate at certain points as though he's getting to the exciting part of a story and telling it in real time.

12:19So you really still get a feeling of that, where it all began. And he was magical with the kids. I did accompany him a couple of times, and that was really good because I would just accompany him on my 12-string guitar, and then we'd go into a song, he would sing it, and then he'd talk. Very sensitive to the fact that the kids couldn't see. And he loved words, as we established. He was writing from the earliest days and getting a local publisher to publish his stuff. And when it came to writing the Redwall stuff, rather inspired by the blind school, he showed me his first draft, handwritten in what was called full-scab, and it was immaculately written.

13:03He had lovely handwriting. He made sure that it looked nice on the page, and it was beautifully rhythmical, rather like some of the words themselves,

13:11Ruby Tandoh:aesthetically, to look at them. Beautiful. I remember Wind in the Willows, and I remember it being read to me by my mother. Can you, Ruby, remember when you first read a book rather than listen to somebody else reading a book? Oh, gosh. I mean, I can't remember the first, but what I would say, and this feels very on topic, is that my parents had a lot of recipe books and I sat there with those when I could barely read and I looked at the pictures and I tried to make out the names of the recipes. Oh, how interesting. So there are some recipe books that I think my mum still has where I've kind of written, like scrawled over like this one or something, put in my requests.

13:53So it was a very short jump from that to the Redwall books. The other thing is he spoke in Technicolor, vibrant and rich. And I found that was what was so good about the Redwall stories. Tell us about the books. When did you first read them? So I probably first read them in the late 90s. I was about eight. So my imagination was kind of ready to roam. And yeah, there are loads of them. And I kind of powered through. Lots of them had already been written by that point, although he continued writing. I kind of picked them up as I got a little bit older. but I'm interested in this folk scene connection because for me when I read the Redwall books I see a real interest in well what was England like at another time what kinds of foods were being eaten what kinds of oral traditions were being continued yeah it makes sense that this was part of a broader interest for him in kind of folk traditions and so on and I think also because he was such a can-do person having no springboard into anything in life he just went there and he had a great self-belief which you can tell from the fact he was always having books published even though there were little more than pamphlets he was always writing, always writing because he didn't have a great voice he didn't have anything other than a kind of you're alright, whack!

15:12he was very in your face but of course that's very beguiling to have someone who is there taking you with them and also he made everything entertaining I mean he ran a club just off the city centre just up from the docks just off the Albert Docks and the pub was called the Gazebo which always called the Gaspio and he would announce that wherever he is don't forget come to the Gaspio on Saturday it would be performance, entertainment and scouse there'd be a huge bloody bucket of scouse and you'd get your bowl of scouse and people would perform Brian would perform I would sometimes perform all kinds of other people from Liverpool who were folkies and or actors at the Gaspio once a month in this pub.

15:57Ruby Tandoh:And he had energy, which he had no right to have that much energy. You're describing a life and soul of the party kind of person, a happy, a jolly, a funny man. Was there a more passionate side to his character? What were his politics, for instance? Well, his politics, we never taught politics, other than the general sense that you might discuss attitudes. Yeah. But, I mean, a lot of his friends in Liverpool were on the left, notwithstanding the fact it used to have Tory MPs and there also was a period in the 70s when it was known as a Liberal stronghold with Jones the Vote, was the leader of the Liberals there but on the other hand his best friend was a bloke called Pete McGovern of whom I suspect no one else has heard but he wrote a song you might have heard which is called In My Liverpool Home and Pete was a railway man but also he's an active communist, he was in the Communist Party and he was one of Brian's closest friends until he died watching his beloved Liverpool football club on match of the day one evening.

16:56It was a real melting pot of views

16:59Ruby Tandoh:and experiences and attitudes. So this is a much broader and many-stranded man than one might think. Does this come out in the books? I mean, I was very curious to hear about this from you, Trevor, because revisiting the books recently, I realised that there is so much that kind of... For example, the rats often come in from the sea. It's this invasion of rats and they're inherently bad. You know, they're not kind of grey morally. They are just like bad creatures. My understanding is that he used these things as very simple and easy to understand moral lessons for children, certainly, because he wanted it to be straightforward in that way.

17:37But yeah, I was curious about whether any of that came from his own worldview or kind of almost nativism of like, this was in England long ago. I think he was a romantic, so there may well have been some view of, ah, the glories of the past. But on the other hand, as I say, he's mixing with the likes of Pete McGovern on the one hand. But in 1979, he didn't tell me as such, but I'm totally convinced he voted for Mrs. Thatcher. He changed his view in the 80s and was less keen on Mrs. Thatcher by then. But the reason I tell you this is that he wasn't an ideologue in the old fashioned sense. He judged things on their merits.

18:14Perhaps the reason why some of his books kind of haven't lived, you know, they live on in the hearts of people who kind of read them at the time, but they haven't really lived on to kind of be received by future generations is that they are quite simplistic in a really beautiful way. I think they speak to good and evil.

18:32Ruby Tandoh:Yes. And communal living and things like that. And it's easy to age out of that. And it's easy to ditch that for a kind of more complex, gritty tale of like adolescence or something like that. It's quite Manichean, isn't it? Darkness and light.

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19:51Ruby Tandoh:Here from the book is something perhaps you would read for us, Ruby. Mm-hmm. Okay. Tender freshwater shrimp garnished with cream and rose leaves, deviled barley pearls in acorn puree, apple and carrot chews, marinated cabbage stalks steeped in creamed white turnip with nutmeg. That quote is actually used in a review in the London Review of Books. What do they have to say about it? I have to have it here. There's somebody called Catherine Rondell. She did an article for the London Review of Books called Why Children's Books? And there's a bit here. The food in Redwall is the thing most of its readers remember.

20:35It gives the story the rich shine of desire. You might, were you a Redwall mouse, have a feast of tender freshwater shrimp garnish, blah, blah, blah. So the recipe you've just given. The esteemed, the august London review of books has taken to not only Brian's work itself as a work of fiction,

20:53Ruby Tandoh:but also the recipes that he's conjuring up. And delight in food is quite often associated with hunger. I've been told that it was his experience of food rationing during the Second World War that sort of led to this obsession with rich descriptions of food. Is that right? Yeah, that's what I've heard as well. That's certainly how he describes it. But I've also, there's something I've never quite understood about all of this, which is growing up near the docks in Liverpool, I find it hard to believe that what you're fantasising about is tender freshwater shrimp garnished with cream. And so I'm curious, where did he come up with these references?

21:33He's always talking about foraged produce. He's talking about herbs and flowers, elderberries, things that I doubt he had a huge amount of exposure to. So where did that come from? The short answer is I don't know. But I'm younger than him, but nonetheless, I do remember rationing very keenly. So I can imagine how his fertile imagination would go into these areas. But where he got the precise recipes from, I don't actually know. What about the baking in his books? Oh, there's a lot of baking. Yeah, yeah. He's fantastic on pies and tarts and cakes and biscuits and scones and things like that. I've even got something here, a fowl of warm barley bread.

22:13That's just one thing. I'm looking at some of these quotes or hazelnut and almond bread. There's a lot of that. And I think one thing that's really interesting is his kind of loyalty to time and place in that, you know, this is roughly a medieval style abbey. you will not find a tomato here. You will not find kind of new world ingredients, for example, except for potatoes seem to be smuggled in somehow. But yeah, you know, it's wonderful. This is hearty food. It's heavy food. It's the kind of food that you would crave, I think, if you were hungry and a child daydreaming in that way.

22:48Ruby Tandoh:The whole Red Wall series, and I can't stress this enough, was fantastically successful. And when you look back in the archive, you discover that Brian was on some sort of television show almost all the time, from political discussion to Blue Peter to live and kicking. Here, for example, he is on CBBC in 2003. OK, now, fellas, our special guest, Sean and Stephen, are incredibly large fans of yours. They read your every written word. They've got a couple of questions for you. So, Sean, if you'd like to... Go on, lads. Even when you were young, did you want to be a writer? No, I didn't want to be a writer, Sean.