Richmal Crompton William the Ancient Briton (1965)
I never developed any particular attachment to William as a kid. I had William and the Space Animal - a book my father passed on from his youth - but I only recall looking at the pictures. I came across this one in an antique shop when visiting England and bought it for my stepson on the grounds of his being named William, and because he has fixated on certain aspects of my homeland. He reads more than I ever did at his age, but mostly because he's obliged to do so by his school. I didn't read much, but what I did read was usually read because I wanted to read it. Hypocritical though it may be, I really wish my stepson would read for pleasure rather than wasting time and brain cells on shitty games and YouTube wankers.
'Here,' I said, having just sat down and pulled a few things from my bag following more than twenty hours in transit. 'I got you this.'
I placed the book on the corner of the table in the front room. He looked at it, then looked at me, then started to tell his mother about some new fact he'd just learned from the internet.
Because we're a somewhat slack family, William the Ancient Briton was still there on the corner of the table in the front room one month later. 'Is he even going to look at the thing?' I asked my wife.
She relayed the question next day whilst giving the kid a lift to school. Of course, was apparently his reply, adding that he certainly wasn't one of those people who fails to appreciate a gift. The book remained where it was for another three weeks, at which point I reclaimed it; and now, three years later, I'm getting around to reading it so that someone has. There doesn't even seem much point in being disappointed in the boy. I was never a big reader at his age, and Crompton's William Brown is an outdoorsy sort of kid who has adventures, and I think our gamer would be out of his depth.
I have a theory regarding the cultural differences which divide England and America, and one which is thrown into sharp relief by Crompton's William. We grew up with Dennis the Menace, the Bash Street Kids, and of course this guy, chuckling as our heroes got away with it, or were else punished for misdeeds whilst remaining gleefully unrepentant. America grew up with the Hardy Boys and Superman, wholesome boy scouts who righted wrongs and taught us how the coolest kids are those who brush their teeth and obey the rules. This is a massive generalisation, as Enid Blyton is my witness, but I firmly believe there's something in it, and that these formative and quite different attitudes to authority reflect how the rest of us got here - how someone as relentlessly cuboid as Trump could ever be regarded as rebellious; or even that Boris Johnson has ascended through somehow passing himself off as one of Lord Snooty's pals for that matter. Anyway, this is a debate for some other time.
William was not originally written as a children's book in the strictest sense, which explains the tone of the stories collected here - wry, sardonic, and expecting readers to keep up rather than simplifying anything. Mostly they are short, sharp bursts of absurdist slapstick of the kind to which Arthur Askey and others almost certainly aspired, but the kindly yet long-suffering narrative voice conveys a wit which might be seen to foreshadow much of Peter Cook's career. William himself is a pain in the arse for sure, but not actually a bad lad, and is allowed to get into all sorts of trouble without anyone having to learn a lesson at the end because Crompton clearly trusted her readership to have developed a moral code without requiring that it be spelled out in primary colours. These are therefore lessons in idiocy featuring a wise fool who tends to come out on top through finding himself pitched against persons more idiotic than himself, often adults but not always.
Some of the tales work better than others. The story which lends its name to the collection as a whole is a little underwhelming, but elsewhere we have William Enters Politics, William is Hypnotised, and other gems approaching near Dadaist levels of peculiar brilliance. The former features himself spying on a local council meeting by pretending to be a portrait painting hung on the wall, which he effects by leering through a hole in the aforementioned wall whilst holding a gilt picture frame around his face; and in William and the Campers, our boy is scheduled for a scrap with a neighbouring gang even as his own group is perilously reduced to just himself and Ginger. He swells the numbers with otherwise pious, well-behaved children from a visiting Sunday school by fooling them into treating the scrap as an exercise in cultural anthropology. This he achieves by delivering a lecture about tribal traditions, pretending to be a visiting speaker by agency of a false beard, having somehow managed to derail the lecture the Sunday schoolers were supposed to have received.
I gather this collection is something of a greatest hits featuring material written as far back as 1924 - William's Extra Day which first appeared in William the Fourth - which itself speaks well of Crompton's ability and the versatility of her creation, which, if something of a one joke character, is at least a joke which survives endless retelling.
I never developed any particular attachment to William as a kid. I had William and the Space Animal - a book my father passed on from his youth - but I only recall looking at the pictures. I came across this one in an antique shop when visiting England and bought it for my stepson on the grounds of his being named William, and because he has fixated on certain aspects of my homeland. He reads more than I ever did at his age, but mostly because he's obliged to do so by his school. I didn't read much, but what I did read was usually read because I wanted to read it. Hypocritical though it may be, I really wish my stepson would read for pleasure rather than wasting time and brain cells on shitty games and YouTube wankers.
'Here,' I said, having just sat down and pulled a few things from my bag following more than twenty hours in transit. 'I got you this.'
I placed the book on the corner of the table in the front room. He looked at it, then looked at me, then started to tell his mother about some new fact he'd just learned from the internet.
Because we're a somewhat slack family, William the Ancient Briton was still there on the corner of the table in the front room one month later. 'Is he even going to look at the thing?' I asked my wife.
She relayed the question next day whilst giving the kid a lift to school. Of course, was apparently his reply, adding that he certainly wasn't one of those people who fails to appreciate a gift. The book remained where it was for another three weeks, at which point I reclaimed it; and now, three years later, I'm getting around to reading it so that someone has. There doesn't even seem much point in being disappointed in the boy. I was never a big reader at his age, and Crompton's William Brown is an outdoorsy sort of kid who has adventures, and I think our gamer would be out of his depth.
I have a theory regarding the cultural differences which divide England and America, and one which is thrown into sharp relief by Crompton's William. We grew up with Dennis the Menace, the Bash Street Kids, and of course this guy, chuckling as our heroes got away with it, or were else punished for misdeeds whilst remaining gleefully unrepentant. America grew up with the Hardy Boys and Superman, wholesome boy scouts who righted wrongs and taught us how the coolest kids are those who brush their teeth and obey the rules. This is a massive generalisation, as Enid Blyton is my witness, but I firmly believe there's something in it, and that these formative and quite different attitudes to authority reflect how the rest of us got here - how someone as relentlessly cuboid as Trump could ever be regarded as rebellious; or even that Boris Johnson has ascended through somehow passing himself off as one of Lord Snooty's pals for that matter. Anyway, this is a debate for some other time.
William was not originally written as a children's book in the strictest sense, which explains the tone of the stories collected here - wry, sardonic, and expecting readers to keep up rather than simplifying anything. Mostly they are short, sharp bursts of absurdist slapstick of the kind to which Arthur Askey and others almost certainly aspired, but the kindly yet long-suffering narrative voice conveys a wit which might be seen to foreshadow much of Peter Cook's career. William himself is a pain in the arse for sure, but not actually a bad lad, and is allowed to get into all sorts of trouble without anyone having to learn a lesson at the end because Crompton clearly trusted her readership to have developed a moral code without requiring that it be spelled out in primary colours. These are therefore lessons in idiocy featuring a wise fool who tends to come out on top through finding himself pitched against persons more idiotic than himself, often adults but not always.
Some of the tales work better than others. The story which lends its name to the collection as a whole is a little underwhelming, but elsewhere we have William Enters Politics, William is Hypnotised, and other gems approaching near Dadaist levels of peculiar brilliance. The former features himself spying on a local council meeting by pretending to be a portrait painting hung on the wall, which he effects by leering through a hole in the aforementioned wall whilst holding a gilt picture frame around his face; and in William and the Campers, our boy is scheduled for a scrap with a neighbouring gang even as his own group is perilously reduced to just himself and Ginger. He swells the numbers with otherwise pious, well-behaved children from a visiting Sunday school by fooling them into treating the scrap as an exercise in cultural anthropology. This he achieves by delivering a lecture about tribal traditions, pretending to be a visiting speaker by agency of a false beard, having somehow managed to derail the lecture the Sunday schoolers were supposed to have received.
I gather this collection is something of a greatest hits featuring material written as far back as 1924 - William's Extra Day which first appeared in William the Fourth - which itself speaks well of Crompton's ability and the versatility of her creation, which, if something of a one joke character, is at least a joke which survives endless retelling.
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