The only thing I liked about school was the weekends and the holidays. At art college, one of the tutors said: “You don’t know what you want to do, do you?” And I thought: “I just don’t want to work.” When my mother died at the age of 95 she was still waiting for me to get a proper job. I think she would have loved me to have been a bank manager.
When you think how people used to work before portable music and the rest of it, they’d go into the fields and be alone, working all day without speaking to anybody. A lot of people would find that very difficult now. I still like silence. Well, there’s never total silence. There’s always birds, or cars. The wind in the trees. Beautiful noises.
I was brought up on the edge of Dartmoor. Even when I was very young I used to walk alone on the moor. It was a different kind of life. There was no TV, no telephone. I’m still like that. I don’t have the internet, I don’t use a portable telephone. I’m a dinosaur. Like all old people, I find myself saying that things have changed, but they really have changed enormously.
I have no idea why I drew Elmer as an elephant. I just liked drawing elephants at the time. People like elephants. They’d much prefer to be in a room with an elephant than, say, a spider or a mouse.
People who are writers, especially storytellers, we’re just receivers. A story comes through us and we transmit it. The danger is that the more you put into a story, by way of effects and music and all the rest of it, the less you demand of the imagination of the viewer.
I didn’t know that Elmer was popular with the LGBTQ+ community, but I’m quite happy for anybody to use him as their icon. Elmer is about accepting who you are.
The number of times I’ve heard teachers say that they’ve got a child with a problem who rushes into the library and takes out the Not Now Bernard book and claims it as their own special book... The child understands that we all have a monster inside us, which we have to control, and if we’re badly treated and put in the wrong conditions, then the monster eats us up. They understand that the monster is Bernard.
All the attention that’s been given to Elmer has been an incredible compliment. But compliments are dangerous because, if you’re not lucky, you could start taking yourself too seriously. I wouldn’t like to be serious. My life is very quiet, I hide away. I like that.
The 30th-anniversary edition of Elmer is published by Andersen Press in hardback (£14.99) and paperback (£6.99) and is out now. Go to guardianbookshop.com
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