He also completed two collections of short stories entitled The Ribbajack & Other Curious Yarns and Seven Strange and Ghostly Tales.

[4] At age ten, assigned to write an animal story, he wrote about a bird that cleaned a crocodile's teeth.

[4] He attended St John's Roman Catholic school in Kirkdale, where his favourite teacher was Austin Thomas, a former Second World War army captain.

"[1] Jacques left school at age fifteen, as was usual at the time, and set out to find adventure as a merchant sailor.

[1][4] He published a succession of humorous poems and short stories through the 1970s, and in 1981 won a long term Residency at the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, where his plays Brown Bitter, Wet Nellies and Scouse were performed.

So that the visually impaired children would be able to picture the scenes he was writing for them, he developed a highly descriptive style, emphasizing sound, smell, taste, gravity, balance, temperature, touch, and kinesthetics.

[7] It set the tone for the series as a whole, centering on the triumph of good over evil, with peaceful mice, badgers, voles, hares, moles and squirrels defeating rats, weasels, ferrets, snakes and stoats.

[citation needed] Redwall alludes to the surrounding human civilization - for example, with a scene featuring a horse-drawn cart.

The subsequent books ignore humans completely, portraying an Iron Age society from the misty past building castles, bridges and ships to the scale of forest creatures, writing their own literature and drawing their own maps.

Jacques was highly involved in the audio books of his work, even personally enlisting his sons and others to voice Redwall inhabitants.

Jacques was known to be old-fashioned in his living; he thought an old typewriter to be more reliable than a computer, and he was known to be not fond of video games and other modern technology, though he allowed an animated television series to be produced based on his work, which aired on PBS in the United States.

In the series, he introduced himself at the beginning of each episode and answered children's questions at the end, though the UK and Canadian airings omitted the Q&A session.