William and the Space Animal

 

Richmal Crompton William and the Space Animal (1956)
This is yet another book I had as a kid, and I'm pretty sure it had been one of my dad's books from when he was a kid which eventually found its way into my possession along with a stack of Eagle annuals; and yet I never actually read it, the words to illustrations ratio being incompatible with my attention span at the time even though it looked kind of interesting and I remember wondering what happened in the story - or the main story, William and the Space Animal being one of the five assembled herein. Remember kids, next time some shiny-eyed arsehole tells you how such and such a piece of garbage at least gets kids reading, this usually means the kids in question will try to read as much Doctor Who, Harry Potter, or Clifford the Big Red Dog as they can get their hands on. It doesn't inevitably lead to Crime and Punishment.

Anyway, I sought out a new copy because I felt I owed it to my five-year old self, the illiterate little bollix; and because the other William book I read was fucking great.

I don't do spoilers - as the youngsters call them - because if the pleasure you take in reading a book can be diminished by the revelation of its ending, then books probably aren't for you; so I'll reveal that the space animal is nothing of the sort. Nevertheless the narrative path leading to its discovery and ultimate explanation is a thing of ludicrous beauty and masterful wit, as I've come to expect from Crompton. The other stories are of equivalent standard, but the greatest is probably William the Tree-Dweller wherein our man returns to the wild, turning his back on civilisation through it having responded so poorly to his experiments with rocketry. The experiments in question, undertaken in hope of aiding the space program as was, entail lit fireworks launched by means of bow and arrow.

'Well, what I thought was that if we could get a specially strong firework an' fix it to the end of this new arrow of mine an' let it off—the firework, I mean—jus' when I'm shootin' off the arrow, it'd go up jolly high an' then when we'd got into the way of it we'd put another firework on an' then another an' then another an' so on till we'd got it strong enough to get there.'

German fireworks maker Johann Schmidlap invented the two-stage rocket back in 1591, proposing a system wherein a first stage projectile carries a smaller rocket to the heavens, so unfortunately we can't credit Crompton with that one; but as for rocketry in works of fiction, I'm pretty sure everyone else writing in 1956 was still thinking of rockets as boats which land on the moon then fly back, all in one piece - and this is merely the preliminary set-up to William the Tree-Dweller.

William comes fairly close to being a work of genius - improbable and riotously funny stories grounded firmly in a reality I just about recall from my own childhood, no button pushing, no condescension or assuming the reader is an idiot - even though I may well have been - and sharp as a razor blade. Had I managed to read this when I was a kid, I've a feeling my life would have been very different, and certainly not worse.