Michael Foreman: The General

With its anti-war theme and Suffolk-inspired landscapes, The General is classic Michael Foreman. It’s also his debut picture book, reissued by Templar in a beautiful new edition.

First published, incredibly, 50 years ago, both story and art are of their time but remain just as fresh today. War, of course, has always been a central concern for Foreman, who wrote about his World War II childhood near Lowestoft in his autobiographical picture books War Boy and After the War Was Over.

He remembers being on the cliffs but not being able to go near the sea for the whole of the war. ‘You’re looking at the world from one side of the barbed wire,’ he observes.

Wartime paper shortages couldn’t thwart Foreman’s desire to draw; he made use of the paper linings of biscuit tins in his mother’s village shop. ‘You pulled it out and stretched it on the floor and it was four feet long. I’d fill it with marching bands and tanks and ships and horses. Nothing’s changed!’

When he met a teacher at the art school on his newspaper round, the course of his life was set. After initially taking Saturday classes, he was able to attend full-time when he was 15 rather than go out to work as his fisherman brothers had had to do.

'After a while I found I was getting more satisfaction from drawing stories than from drawing abstracts.’

He studied fine art, but learned illustration through working on the newspapers. ‘I got used to drawing to a story or an event. After a while I found I was getting more satisfaction from drawing stories than from drawing abstracts.’

Eventually he became tired of seeing his work being used as fish and chips wrapping and decided to write a book. He had the idea for The General but, lacking the confidence to write it, the task fell to his then wife Janet.

General Jodhpur wants to be the most famous general in the world. After getting thrown off his horse he lands on the grass and has a change of heart, becoming famous instead for making his country the happiest and most beautiful in the world.

There’d been this succession of wars,’ explains Foreman. ‘Every generation had been called up. Our generation was the next to be called up. We assumed it would happen – if we didn’t get blown up first. So it was uppermost in our minds. And it was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

'Everyone was confronted by this. It seemed daft that there was no book about this for children. And given the chance to do a book, why would you do a book about anything else?’

The illustrations are influenced not by other picture books but by artists he admired: the German expressionist George Grosz and the Lithuanian-born American artist Ben Shahn. ‘I like Ben Shahn’s working people and street scenes. I like his line. It was very jagged.

'I used to try and copy it using the wrong end of the pen, the wooden bit rather than the nib. You get unpredictable splatters. He drew lots of brick walls with graffiti on – I love the drawings of boys playing baseball in a vacant lot. It’s a kind of line that I use in The General.’

In the early 1960s, Foreman was part of a new generation of illustrators trained in fine art, who emerged at the same time as new printing techniques were leading to new possibilities in colour printing. It was only in retrospect that he realised that this was the period when the British picture book was coming into its own.

‘There was almost a kind of hunger to utilise that development,’ he says. ‘They went for new faces: Raymond Briggs, Brian Wildsmith. The other thing for me was that at the same time, roughly, the papers brought out their Sunday supplements and they also were hungry for colour and for new faces. So I had a contract with the Observer magazine.’ He produced a story for their Christmas issue; it was his first text and became his second book, The Perfect Present.

In The General and some other early books like War and Peas and Dinosaurs and All That Rubbish Foreman makes use of a lot of white space. He uses less now. ‘I think it’s because I want to make it more real, making something happen in a real place, where you don’t have white space. This is something I don’t like about computers.

How many people do you see walking around wearing a black line? It takes away the intimacy between the characters and the setting to be separated by this line.

He also dislikes the computer’s removal of some of the risk that is part of the creative process. ‘I like the materials. I like the paper, the colours, the unpredictability. You have to guess in a way what’s going to happen.

'It’s slightly unknown what happens when you put one colour on another and the one underneath is not dry, because the colours interact. That’s what’s fun; that’s the good bit. I think of the computer as like having sex with your clothes on: it’s not touchy feely enough!’

There have been times, he admits, when an unexpected blot on the page has forced a change of plan. ‘You have to adapt your initial idea and use it to your advantage. You can surprise yourself, and it can be better than if the accident hadn’t happened.

'If you look in the background and there’s sky and there’s a flock of birds going by, that might be because I dropped a brush. If it’s night-time I’ll put stars in. War and Peas is about a country that’s a desert, and in the distance you see the rich country. I made the rich country out of mountains of food.

The desert was a beautiful wash - until I sneezed. So I had to add the rocks. And the rocks make it much more desolate.

Foreman’s art graces over 250 books; he has written the text for 70 of them. He has illustrated classics, chapter books and picture books and is working on his first board books. He is also starting his twenty-fifth collaboration with Michael Morpurgo, but first the pair have a new book coming out, Not Bad for A Bad Lad.

‘This idea came from a conversation with a plumber. He’d just bought himself a country place in Suffolk. I vaguely knew of the village. It was next to the prison. It was a prison from 200 years back. There’s always been this tradition of some of the prisoners working with the farmers breeding Suffolk punch horses. It’s therapeutic for the prisoners.

'I thought “Horses? Must be Morpurgo!” He has a way of hooking a child of today into something that may have happened 50 or 500 years ago. And he writes great pictures too. He is very visually driven. There’s not a lot of talking heads, which is great for an illustrator.’

Foreman is also working on a full-colour edition of Kensuke’s Kingdom at his second home, in Cornwall.  ‘Colour is affected by being there, by the light. The book is set on an island. That kind of vibrant colour of the ocean is very much the sea I saw the first time in Cornwall. The sea I grew up next to in Suffolk was brown!’

‘Before Michael told me he’d written the story, he asked what I thought of the work of (the Japanese artist) Hokusai. I was surprised by the question because Hokusai is one of my all-time favourite artists.

'I said, “I absolutely love him!” He said “Good, because I’ve done this story and there’s a little chap in it who likes to work like Hokusai.” It was a freaky thing that he should come up with that name.’

‘When Hokusai does sky he does sky the way a child does the sky. He puts a strip of blue right at the top of the picture and it fades away to the horizon so it pulls the top of the sky over your head. That’s what a child does, and I realised that’s what I’ve been doing for fifty years without really knowing it until I looked again at the way Hokusai uses colour.’

Many of his own books draw on places that are important to him, whether Cornwall, Suffolk or further afield.

‘The place, the location is an important character,’ he says. ‘Some ideas work better in a particular location.’ Others don’t work at all until he gets the setting right.

It took him over a decade to find the right location for Land of Dreams, which took shape as an idea on a farm in Denmark. ‘In the evening we’d play hide and seek with the children. One evening I was in the orchard, hiding in a tree. And from this tree I could eat apples, pears and plums because all the branches were enmeshed. Underneath it was thick with brambles.

The children were crawling about looking for me. It was like a dream. I thought that in the brambles bits of dream might get entangled – the bits of dream that you don’t wake up to, when you wake up before the end. What happens to those bits you don’t get to? They must be somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered.

I tried to write it and it didn’t work. 14 years later I was in the Himalayas. The mountain I was on was surrounded by cloud – it was like an island in the sky. It was cold and you could see your breath, so things that were normally invisible were suddenly visible, like these lost dreams – not lost in Scandinavia in the brambles, but lost in snow drifts at the top of a mountain.’

A similar image appears in Foreman’s 2009 book A Child’s Garden: a Story of Hope. A child on each side of a barbed wire fence tends a vine which grows to entwine with the tendrils on the other side.

I remember in America I was going around some of the reservations in the south west and they were selling in antique shops little bundles of barbed wire from when it was fenced off. So this barbed wire has that kind of potent memory because it’s to do with particular times, parcelling up the world, dividing things.

The story and landscape evoke the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but A Child’s Garden was originally about Bosnia. ‘As the thing developed Bosnia receded and Gaza came up. But I tried to make it as international as possible. I didn’t want children running around looking like they were from a particular culture. It’s about war but it’s about nurturing as well. And that things will pass.’

He dedicated the book to his friend Martin Bax, who Foreman met fifty years ago when they were waiting in hospital for their sons to be born. Bax, an eminent, recently retired doctor, is editor of Ambit, a literary magazine and labour of love, and Foreman has been its unpaid art editor for 45 years.

It was a third pictures, a third poems and a third short stories. I had to get friends to illustrate the stories for nothing, and my mates at the time were Peter Blake and David Hockney and people like that. So Ambit was probably the first magazine to publish David Hockney. The next issue is the 200th.

A Child’s Garden features in the War Boy exhibition, which is on at the National Army Museum until April. ‘Children can see the barbed wire and make the connection. They see that this old bloke was a little boy and what happened to this little boy has a very direct effect on what he does. This exhibition brought home to me how much what I’ve done is because of what happened to me at that time.’

‘Despite all the gloom and doom, I’m also kind of optimistic. When I first went to America the southern states were segregated. And I used to make a point of sitting in the back of the bus, as you do. And now there’s a black president. So there is hope.

The General was written during the Cold War, and so forth. Children of that period were the people who pulled down the Berlin Wall. Each generation can have a very big effect.’