Sometimes Those Early Reads just stick in the memory …

I’ve been chatting to writing colleagues about the books that fired our imaginations as children. You know the kind of books – the ones that made you want to crash through the rest of the author’s works in the shortest possible time. For me Enid Blyton provided an entry into reading, but it was Richmal Crompton with her Just William stories that made me hungry to read.

Crompton keeps William’s world small and relatively privileged. Variety to the wonderful characters in William’s gang, The Outlaws, is achieved by bringing visitors to the village – aunts from distant parts, new residents, itinerant workers. These characters add breadth to the stories, but it’s Willam who does all the heavy lifting. He comes up with the wild plans; he gets the Outlaws into scrapes; he finds those fudged solutions. William is resourceful, sometimes commanding, always adventurous. Back then, I was very keen to be William for at least one day.

Of course, these texts have dated a little. But as a nine or ten-year old, they plunged me into a world of fun, drama, irreverence and chaos. I learned a lot. But it wasn’t just Willaim’s journeys that hooked me – it was also the prose. I greatly expanded my vocabulary courtesy of Richmal Crompton. New words had to be checked in my bedside dictionary. I recall once having to look up the word sardonic, as in William allowing a sardonic smile to play on his lips (or something along those lines).

Of course, we all move on as readers and I soon found C.S Forester, Alexandre Dumas, Jack London and others who wrote of derring-do; of scrapes of quite a different kind. I don’t have any of their works on my bookshelf now. But I do have a set of the first four Just William books.