He applied for a grant to study art at Regent Street Polytechnic, but for several years was turned down, so he read meters for a gas company during the day and took life drawing classes in the evening. He received treatment, was institutionalised for a time, and made a full recovery, but perhaps his sympathetic visual treatments of Frankenstein's monster and Grendel, the monster from Beowulf, owe something to this period of his life. He returned to civvy street in 1946 with a profound depression and a belief that a head wound he had sustained had disfigured him on the inside as well as (temporarily) on the outside, and would cause him to turn evil like Dr Jekyll becoming Mr Hyde. When he turned 18 in 1942 he was called up and joined the Royal Navy as a radio operator. He and his older sister Grace wrote and illustrated stories as children on surplus newsstand placards brought home by their father. He grew up in a terraced house that housed three generations of the family, in an inner city environment of street markets and working horses that would inform his work his entire life. Illustration from the Childcraft Book 1972Ĭharles William James Keeping was born in Lambeth, London, on 22 September 1924, son of Charles Keeping senior, who distributed newspapers to shops and newsstands in the area and boxed under the name Charlie Clarke, and his wife Eliza, née Trodd.
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