Nearly all my books have been published in France, over the past 25 years. The first one, I think, was The Enormous Crocodile, the first Dahl picture book. But a lot of others, are nearly all published by Gallimard Jeunesse and in fact I actually talk to them when I'm doing the books, as well as to my English publisher, so a lot of books have… have been published there. And I've visited, over the past 15 years, I've visited quite a lot of schools in France, which is good for me because I can practise my spoken French, and… because they mostly don't speak English, except some of the children. And… again, so that I found myself in a situation that, at the same time that I was doing Children's Laureate, I found myself doing a book in the south west of France. Now, since I retired from the RCA, I've had a house there, and I spend two or three months there, in bits and pieces, each year, and I know a number of the local teachers there. And there was a meeting with them, arranged by… a local librarian, in which they said, we're really looking for a… we're looking for a author-illustrator of children's books who we can work with on a children's book. And… I fancied that. I was the only one in the room who was an author-illustrator of children's books, so I thought… thought they were looking at me, and I said, 'How interesting, what is it going to be about?' And… Genevieve Roy, who was the teacher, or educationist in question said, 'C'est sur l'humanisme'. And I thought, it's a book for eight-year olds about humanism, but that was the limitation of my French, because it actually means… they meant on humanitarian problems actually, it was all the things that… that… you know, like sort of: bullying, racism, war, pollution, and so on and so on. And could we do a book together with the local children? And… so I said, okay, and it was… I realised it was… there was an element of folly involved in it, but… and so I did some drawings of… I thought, how can a child… or it had to be two children, so there was a boy and a girl… encounter these different problems easily, and, since we were near the sea, I thought well, there was… there was a lot of fishing there, I thought, well make it a boat. So it was a sailing boat. But it was a sailing boat that would… I did some rough drawings, so it was a sailing boat that could… had wheels as well, so it could go on land, and it could float on water as a sailing boat, and it could also fly. And I just… you don't know how, I just said it could. And then the children were invited to invent bits of story about it, and how they… how these children would meet various contemporary disasters. They… they all wanted it to fly, curiously enough. It never sailed anywhere. It needn't have been a boat, except… I mean the idea of a flying boat is quite a sort of… a flying boat is quite a traditional thing in fairy stories.
