Another of his teachers, Austin Thomas, was a less severe task master and encouraged Jacques to read Greek literature and poetry. Higher education was not the destiny for most children growing up among Liverpool's lower classes, however, and the young Jacques left school at the age of fifteen. What followed was a string of jobs in just about every occupation imaginable, from longshoreman and logger, to policeman and postmaster, to stand-up comic and folk singer for a group called The Liverpool Fisherman.
By the time he was in his early forties, Jacques had found his niche as an entertainer. He began a career as a radio personality, playwright, poet, and storyteller, and he now has a successful weekly radio show called "Jakestown," a program featuring selections from Jacques's favorite operas that airs Sundays on BBC Radio Merseyside. Jacques enjoys performing and giving humorous lectures before children and adults, and he explains that this was how the story of Redwall first came into being. "I did not write my first novel, Redwall, with publication in mind," he once commented. "It was mainly written as a story for [the Royal Wavertree School for the Blind in Liverpool,] where I am a patron.
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