I was wondering what to write about this month when I glanced over at a poster on my wall that I was given recently. It advertises the World of William exhibition at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green back in 1990. I’ve mentioned before that there are places in Arthur Ransome’s books that seem as real to me as my memories of real places. The village where William Brown lives with his family has a similar place in my mind.
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Probably, this is because my life as a child wan’t so very different from William’s, at least once I was out of the house. And even the house William lived in was familiar in a way. Even though we didn’t live in a big house ourselves there were plenty of roads in our neighbourhood where there were large detached houses in spacious gardens and where, amazingly, servants were still employed.
When I was in my teens I had a succession of weekend jobs as a garden boy in those big houses. My mother had taught me how to weed and, perhaps more importantly, how to tell a weed from a carefully cultivated plant. I also knew to ask if I didn’t know. And eventually I worked for a couple of years in the garden of a stockbroker who could easily have been Mr Brown, William’s dad. The stockbroker employed a full-time gardener named Bert, a cook called Dorothy, and a succession of maids. I got on well with Bert and eventually I graduated from washing pots in the greenhouse to pushing the giant lawnmower back and forth across the immaculate lawns, but best of all were the coffee-breaks where we were admitted to the kitchen and sat with Dorothy and the maid while Dorothy, who was getting on a bit, lamented the state of the modern world. She was especially worried about the effect of the moon landings on the weather. She would have been a sucker for internet conspiracy theories today.
So, William’s world, or a version of it, still lingered on in my neighbourhood, and I was able, just like William, to go off with my friends at the age of eight exploring the village and the countryside around it. We went to village fêtes where I actually heard a vicar once say, on a hot summer’s afternoon, ‘Phew, what a scorcher!’ We attempted to dam the River Misbourne, collected frogspawn and sticklebacks, explored haunted houses and scrumped in the orchards. And at the same time as we were doing all this, I discovered the William books which have been part of my life and the lives of my children ever since.
My daughter was about eight years old in 1986 when we spent a couple of weeks in the summer holidays driving around France and camping. We crossed from Portsmouth to Caen and the weather wasn’t that great so we decided to head south to look for the sun and we ended up driving a long way with Emily in the back seat. She didn’t mind because she had with her a stack of William books and, crucially, a dictionary. One of the great benefits of reading William books is that it expands your vocabulary. Richmal Crompton was very fond of a long word.
And then there were the Martin Jarvis readings. In 2000 we were in Los Angeles visiting friends. We’d just picked up their children from school and were driving home when the story William Holds the Stage came on the tape-player. Within minutes everyone in the car, adults and children alike, were laughing so hard that we had to pull over and wait for the story to finish. This is the one, in case you’re wondering, where William is cast in the school production as a non-speaking attendant but decides that he is going to play the part of Hamlet himself. The story is in William the Pirate (1933), a book which also includes the wonderful story William and the Triplets in which the Outlaws lose a baby they’re supposed to be looking after (Henry’s) and try to replace it with others that they find. William, being the youngest in his family, lacks Henry’s experience with infants and is convinced that all babies look the same and ‘You can’t possibly tell any difference.’
‘I can,’ protested Henry. ‘When you know them very well there is a difference, and I tell you, this one isn’t ours.’
But my love of William isn’t simply about nostalgia for that vanished world where babies were routinely left out in the street in their prams (as I was). What I love most is William’s passionate engagement with the world around him. He’s always trying to make the world a better place, whether it’s by trying to save rats from extermination or campaigning for children’s rights – like the right to work in coal mines or clean chimneys – or helping orphans and tramps. Who knows what he would have become if his creator had ever allowed him to grow up? But from the moment William made his first appearance in 1919 until his final bow in 1970, the year after Richmal Crompton’s death, William never got a day older.
And, what’s more, he never will.
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| A great overview of William’s career in publishing. |
