Sir Lenny Henry talks about bullied at school and how it inspired his new children’s book

The young Henry realised that making the bullies at his school laugh stopped them attacking him, so he used his wit as a crafty defence. And now the comedian has included bullying in his new children’s book, The Boy With Wings, in which the hero is targeted by school bullies – but realises saving the world is a bigger priority than his waste-of-space tormentors.

“I was bullied at school – mainly because of racism. At one point in my school career I was bullied every day and it went on for ages,” Henry remembers. “But I discovered if you make jokes about the bully and being bullied, you might get people to be on your side. Jokes are like a sword and a shield, you can defend yourself with them.” In Henry’s book, which is aimed at children from the age of about nine years, the hero, Tunde, sprouts wings and learns he is all that stands between earth and total destruction. “Tunde, who’s bullied because he’s black and he has a beaky nose, makes jokes,” says Henry. “But he’s good at sport and he can run, and he’s got friends who back him. If you can, you need to be able to communicate and make friends, because that makes a big difference – I did that through humour.”

Henry strongly believed his central character should be black, because none of the characters in the books he read looked like him.

“I grew up reading things like Just William, the Famous Five, the Secret Seven and Jennings,” he recalls, “and although I enjoyed those stories and I could put myself in them in my imagination, there was never anybody that looked like me in them – there were never any Afro-Caribbean British kids in them. I was very aware, although I didn’t really care at the time, that there wasn’t anybody like me in those stories.

“So cut to me with my daughter, reading all these stories to her almost every bedtime, and realising that even in the Nineties there weren’t very many stories with black kids in them. So when this opportunity came, I just decided there was going to be a black protagonist and he was going to have friends of colour, and someone was going to be in a wheelchair – it was going to be an inclusive story, so kids could go ‘Wow, I’m in this!’”.

Henry “loved” writing the book, which took him about a year, and says it “just poured out of me. There’s more stories where that came from – I love the process.” He has already started penning his second children’s book.

The 63-year-old comedian, who co-founded Comic Relief and is now also an accomplished actor – has spent much of the last two years filming Lord of the Rings in New Zealand, and is currently filming the prequel to The Witcher.

Like many children’s books, The Boy with Wings subtly carries a handful of important life lessons that children would do well to absorb, including that bullying is wrong and it’s important to be kind. But Henry certainly didn’t want to ram any moral codes down kids’ throats, stressing that escapism and adventure are the important things about his book.

“You have to try and grip the kid as quickly as possible with the story, and if there are any messages in there like ‘be kind to people’ and ‘don’t bully people’, it should be submerged – you don’t want to be doing that in the middle of an adventure story,” he stresses. “You don’t want to be saying ’Don’t forget to wash your hands kids!’ in the midst of an adventure – kids just want to know what happens next, although hopefully at the end they’d say ‘Hey, you said that thing about washing your hands…”.

The Boy With Wings by Lenny Henry is published by Macmillan, £12.99.