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.

William the Ancient Briton

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.