Starting to teach at the Royal College of Art was a rather strange experience because I trained as a teacher, but as a teacher of English not as a teacher of art and, in fact, although I'd been to an art school as a part-time student, which was Chelsea I had no art qualifications, as such. And properly… I still haven't actually, but I kept up contact with Brian Robb who had been teaching at Chelsea and I knew their… or rather he kept contact with me when, once or twice a year, he'd ring up. And then, after a while, he moved to the Royal College of Art and one day he rang me up and said would I like to go and set a project for the students, for the illustration and graphics students. And so I went and did that and I set a project about book jackets, I think, a thing which I'd almost never done, but it seemed that it was a sort of portable subject. And a fortnight later I went back and did a crit, you know, and talked about what they'd done, which was interesting to me, and then afterwards Brian said well come down to my little office and we went down there. And he said, ‘Would you like to have a part-time job here?’ So I thought about it for about five seconds and said, ‘Yes, that would be nice’, not knowing what I was saying yes to, at all. And then… until the beginning of the next academic year, of course I was just… waiting to find out what this really meant. I'd no idea. And when I got there, in a sense it was rather frustrating to begin with, because you can't do that kind of job unless you know the people who teach there and you know the students and so on. So, it's very slow to start and also I didn't really know how to do it. I had to learn how to do it after I got there.

What was the other thing that was unexpected about it which was on the positive side was that… I was there as a part-time tutor, I think that was two days a week. And I'd assumed that I was a sort of humble person who would come in for those two days and do a little bit of something and go home again and the great machine would move on. In fact, when I got there I discovered that… there were only three people teaching in that little department – there was only 30 students – but Brian ran it on a part-time basis, Sheila Robinson was a tutor there and I was a tutor there. We were the regular people so, in fact, I almost immediately moved into the position of being, as it were, Brian's lieutenant because Sheila came from Suffolk when she came, whereas I was just down the road so I was usually on the premises. That was a problem about… it was a great advantage to live near work because, sometimes on a day when I wasn't teaching, and I could go in, as it were, for half an hour to fix some little problem, and you'd find that you were there for the morning because there were lots of people who seemed to be waiting for you with their questions and you would leave after three hours, not having done the original problem at all. But anyway, it was wonderful being so near, I was within 20 minutes walk and the department was in the part of Graphic Design and was in the back regions of the Victoria and Albert Museum. So I could walk along there and… change my mode of thought to RCA as I was going there… and that's all I ever did, was to walk there. So that was very convenient.