W.E. JOHNS · CAROLYN KEENE · FRANKLIN W. DIXON · RICHMAL CROMPTON · ARTHUR RANSOME
The Camels Are Coming; Biggles Defies the Swastika;
Biggles of the Special Air Police; Biggles Does Some
Homework; The Secret of the Old Clock; The Tower
Treasure; Just William; More William; William Again;
Still William; William the Outlaw; Just William’s
Luck; William the Dictator; William and Air Raid
Precautions; William and the Evacuees; William and
the Moon Rocket; Swallows and Amazons; We Didn’t
Mean to Go to Sea; The Picts and the Martyrs
THERE WAS ONE NOTABLE EXCEPTION TO THE TENDENCY of writers of the interwar period to turn away from the horrors of the First World War: Biggles. The ground war, as Lofting saw, was too horrific, too grinding, too static, and boring to make its way into children’s stories directly. But the romance of early aviation could, perhaps, be something around which a mythology of sorts could be built.
Nevertheless, the flyer we first meet in “The White Fokker” (a short story published in Popular Flying in 1932 and later collected that same year in the first Biggles book The Camels Are Coming) is not the carefree character he later became. He is described waiting on the ground at an airfield, in unspoken anxiety, awaiting the return of a patrol:
His deep-set hazel eyes were never still and held a glint of yellow fire that somehow seemed out of place in a pale face upon which the strain of war, and sight of sudden death, had already graven little lines. His hands, small and delicate as a girl’s, fidgeted continually with the tunic fastening at his throat. He had killed a man not six hours before. He had killed six men during the past month – or was it a year? – he had forgotten.
The story follows Biggles’s attempt to take out a white Fokker that has been ambushing British patrols as they limp home, and death, the fear of it and the feeling of responsibility for it, are strong presences in the story. When his first attempt to down the enemy plane fails, it costs lives and Biggles’s shot nerves send him close to the edge of reason.
‘I’ve lost Swayne and Maddison,’ he said grimly, as the others joined him. ‘I’ve lost Swayne and Maddison,’ he repeated. ‘I’ve lost Swayne and Maddison, can’t you hear me?’ he said yet again. ‘What the hell are you looking at me like that for?’
Aerial warfare was exceptionally dangerous, and the author W.E. Johns (1893–1968) – who served as an infantryman in Gallipoli and Macedonia before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps in the last year of the war – had personal experience of it, though he didn’t spend more than a few months in the air. Johns didn’t enjoy his hero’s virtuosity or luck. He is reported to have lost three planes in as many days to technical malfunctions and went on to lose two more by shooting off his own propellor. During a bombing mission over Germany in September 1918 he was shot down and taken prisoner.
As Johns was to write in an author’s note prefacing the first edition, “One could not exaggerate the stunning horror of seeing two machines collide head-on a few yards away, and words have yet to be coined to express that tightening of the heart-strings that comes of seeing one of your own side roaring down in a sheet of flame.”
Biggles’s flight path, over the decades that followed, was to take him a long way from there. It describes a trajectory away from a quasi-realistic portrayal of First World War aerial combat aimed at adults and older adolescent readers, toward the child-friendly series that endures in popular memory. Notoriously, a case of whisky was quietly swapped out for lemonade when one story was reprinted in the 1953 collection Biggles of the Special Air Police.
Biggles’s creator Captain W.E. Johns wasn’t actually a captain, but then Colonel Sanders wasn’t actually a colonel. You could compare their productions. There’s not much to Biggles nutritionally speaking, but there’s plenty of it: a vast series of highly disposable adventure stories set in a homosocial world of old-time pluck and gallantry. Biggles is on one level a superhero-cum-knight-errant. But with its nicknames, the absence of sex, and its institutional codes and hierarchies, the world he inhabits might as well belong to the tradition of boarding school stories. Biggles, Ginger, and Algy are the Stalky, Beetle, and M’Turk of the Royal Air Force – though they are far less anarchic than their predecessors.
By the time we reach Biggles Defies the Swastika – which sees Biggles operating behind enemy lines after the Nazi invasion of Norway – there’s any amount of shooting and bombing and biffing, but nobody dies as it were on screen. Biggles’s nerves speak more of bitten nails, these days, than borderline PTSD. “‘Okay,’ agreed Ginger, ‘but I’m bound to say it sounds a sticky business to me,’ he added glumly. ‘All war is sticky business,’ Biggles reminded him.”
Johns’s writing is never more than workmanlike, as witness this contemplative moment for example: “The sun went down. Purple twilight, ever darkening, hung for a little while over the silent waters, and then gave way to night. Stars appeared, twinkling. Biggles munched a biscuit thoughtfully.” Reports are to be found “ringing” in ears, thoughts “flash” through minds, and when someone is shaken it’s apt to be “to his very core.” But the pacing is on point, the plotting is engagingly hectic as scrape succeeds scrape, and the chivalric code within which Biggles operates belongs as much to the games field as to the airfield.
Like any respectable superhero Biggles has an arch-enemy, in Erich von Stalhein, a monocle-wearing German intelligence officer who, oddly enough, at one point in the series goes over to the Soviets. Getting Biggles trumps ideology every time. Johns published around a hundred Biggles books, full of the cherishable squawks of surprise their detractors like to mock: “By thunder!” “By jingo!” “Holy smoke!” “Suffering rattlesnakes!” He was still cranking them out when he dropped dead in 1968. The unfinished Biggles Does Some Homework was published posthumously in 1998. Touchingly, it describes the ageless aviator preparing for retirement.
As the longevity of Biggles indicates, something else was going on in this period. Children’s publishing – the idea of a distinct children’s literature and a stable and sizeable market for it – was now fully established. By 1939 nearly half of Britain’s public libraries had a dedicated children’s section. Boys’ magazines like the Gem and the Magnet, and girls’ journals like School Friend and Schoolgirls’ Weekly, commanded readerships in the hundreds of thousands, churning out formulaic school stories and tales of adventure. In December 1922, a whole new medium for children’s storytelling – which would go on to become a competitor – launched in the shape of the first BBC Children’s Hour.
The ripple effects of mass literacy were being felt. In the sphere of children’s literature, that meant that you started to see not only many more children’s books, but the emergence of definite franchises. Fiction was turning into an industry, and children’s fiction was no exception. In the States that was taken even further. The Hardy Boys made their first appearance in 1927, in The Tower Treasure. 1930 saw the publication there of The Secret of the Old Clock – the first Nancy Drew mystery, in a series that would go on to encompass nearly two hundred novels right up into the twenty-first century. The publication history of these two teen mystery franchises – with their changes of publishers and endless reboots – is almost impossibly tangled: they really were industrial products. They were still selling strongly in my 1980s childhood, and I grew a long shelf of the primrose-colored Armada editions.
I was besotted with the plucky, red-haired girl detective. I would have no truck with The Hardy Boys, which I considered an inferior literary product: Franklin W. Dixon, author of the latter, was not a shred of the writer that Carolyn Keene, creator of Nancy Drew, was. What I did not know then, and learned only very much later, is that neither Keene nor Dixon existed. They were both pen-names adopted by the Edward Stratemeyer writing syndicate. The same group of hacks was turning out both book series, the differentiation being a marketing proposition. Mildred Wirt Benson (1905–2002), a journalist who lived in Toledo, Ohio, turned out all but seven of the first thirty books in the original Nancy Drew series and was paid a flat fee of between $125 and $250 per book. Dozens of others, also uncredited, would go on to write the stories.
The UK didn’t have writing syndicates in the same way, but the idea of writing for profit – of publishing into this growing market for fiction – was taking hold of the middle-class imagination. “Everyone Can Write,” claimed the strapline for one of the countless writing classes and correspondence courses that burgeoned in the first half of the twentieth century. The young Enid Blyton grew out of this soil. The author of the William books, Richmal Crompton (1890–1969), like Blyton, had her start in 1922 and continued well into the second half of the twentieth century; but her defining volumes belong to these interwar years. Crompton was a lifelong spinster who taught classics at a girls’ school until she contracted polio in her early thirties and, invalided out of her profession, turned to full-time writing. She was at work on the 359th William story at the time of her death in 1969. She wrote dozens of novels for adults, but none of them is now remembered in the way the William books are. She called him “my Frankenstein monster”: “I’ve tried to get rid of him, but he’s quite impossible to get rid of.”*
The Just William books (all but one – 1948’s Just William’s Luck is a novel) are collections of short stories about the adventures of a middle-class boy of eleven called William Brown. If ever there were a final rebuke to the late-victorian ideal of children as paragons of virtue, William is it. You could see him in a tradition looking backward toward the unruly parlor-arsonists of E. Nesbit (or even further back toward Beatrix Potter’s Tom Kitten) and forward toward the catapult-wielding likes of Dennis the Menace.
William is extremely interested in: food (of all sorts, but especially sweets), animals (rats, mice and dogs to train; lizards to drop down the necks of enemies), get-rich-quick schemes and property damage. He is extremely hostile to: schoolwork, washing his face and hands, girls – except for his next-door neighbor Joan, an honorary Outlaw – and sitting still. “To William,” Crompton writes, “the fascination of any game consisted mainly in the danger to life and limb involved.”
William may be well-meaning, at least sometimes, but he’s not so much naughty or unruly as borderline criminal. His gang of friends call themselves “The Outlaws,” and his fantasy life principally consists of being a robber-chief or a pirate. The first book includes a paragraph sketching a typical morning’s activities:
They had engaged in mortal combat with one another, they had cooked strange ingredients over a smoking and reluctant flame with a fine disregard of culinary conventions, they had tracked each other over the countryside, they had even turned their attention to kidnapping (without any striking success), and these occupations had palled.
William is appealing because of his good heart, his cockney-style idiolect (he never says “and” when he can say “an”)* and his unbowed determination to overcome whatever footling obstacles – be they parental prohibitions or social conventions – the world puts in the way of his doing exactly as he damn well pleases. He’s an agent of chaos, and the books’ charm consists in quite how chaotic and how mortifying his antics are to the adults around him. The butler in a grand house into which William is mistakenly introduced as a new servant has his number: “‘Eatin’ an’ destroyin’ of ’is clothes,’ he said gloomily, returning to the kitchen. ‘It’s all boys ever do – eatin’ an destroyin’ of their clothes.’”
The series is remembered not just for its protagonist but for William’s most celebrated antagonist – the spoilt and lisping violet Elizabeth Bott, introduced in the fifth book Still William (1925) as the daughter of a family of nouveau-riche manufacturers. She’s a pre-teen Madeline Bassett crossed with veruca Salt. Here she is, as first introduced:
Violet Elizabeth’s small pink and white face shone with cleanliness. Violet Elizabeth was so treasured and guarded and surrounded with every care that her small pink and white face had never been known to do anything else except shine with cleanliness. But the pièce de résistance about Violet Elizabeth’s appearance was her skirts. Violet Elizabeth was dressed in a white lace-trimmed dress with a blue waistband and beneath the miniature blue waistband, her skirts stood out like a tiny ballet dancer’s in a filmy froth of lace-trimmed petticoats. From this cascade emerged violet Elizabeth’s bare legs, to disappear ultimately into white silk socks and white buckskin shoes. William gazed at this engaging apparition in horror.
“Even at that tender age,” we’re told, “she possessed the art, so indispensable to her sex, of making her blue eyes swim with tears at will.” Her catchphrase, which she uses to bully William into including her in his games or going along with his plans, has passed into the stock of common phrases: “’F you don’ play houth with me, I’ll thcream ’n’ thcream till I’m thick.” For all his subversive behavior, the William stories tend to bolster the patriarchy. The worldview of Just William is characteristic of its age: little girls are made of sugar and spice, and little boys are made of slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails.
The Browns are a respectable Home Counties household equipped, at least in the early books, with a maid and a cook, but his parents – pointing, perhaps, to a social shift – are a presence in William’s life, and he in theirs. Indeed, instead of William trying to escape their influence, they are frequently trying to escape his. A standard set-piece has William chasing his older sister Ethel or his long-suffering father from room to room with pestering questions:
‘Father, what was the date of the Armada?’
‘Good Heavens! How should I know? I wasn’t there.’
William sighed.
‘Well, I’m tryin’ to write about it and why it failed an’ – why did it fail?’
Mr Brown groaned, gathered up his paper, and retired to the dining-room.
“Impossible to get rid of,” indeed. Here he is, for instance, in the middle of a typical school day:
He brightened, however, on remembering a lizard he had caught on the way to school, and drew it from its hiding place in his pocket. But the lizard had abandoned the unequal struggle for existence among the stones, top, penknife, bits of putty, and other small objects that inhabited William’s pocket. The housing problem had been too much for it… Finally the lizard was dropped down the neck of an inveterate enemy of William’s in the next row, and was extracted only with the help of obliging friends. Threats of vengeance followed, couched in blood-curdling terms, and written on blotting paper. Meanwhile Miss Drew explained Simple Practice to a small but earnest coterie of admirers in the front row.
That dry joke about the “housing problem,” and the poised archness of “earnest coterie of admirers,” indicate the key to Crompton’s mastery of tone in the books. You root for William, but you also see him with the jaundiced eye of the adults who have to deal with him. Child readers will relish the escapades of a child who goes much further than they would dare; adult readers will relish the mock-heroic framing: “Fate was against him in every way.” Or, when he’s told to read a book: “William walked across the room with an expression of intense suffering, took out a book at random, and sat down in an attitude of aloof dignity, holding the book upside down.” They are, at their best, extremely funny.
The books also gently guy the adult pretensions of the age. William is, above all, a disrupter – sometimes witting, sometimes accidental – of the orderly world of grown-ups. Here’s a secular descendant of the sentimental notion from the previous century that childhood innocence is a rebuke to the worldly and fallen world of the adult. A small boy won’t show your sinfulness up for what it is, Fauntleroy-style, but he will embarrass you in front of the neighbors. He is a creature of base and candid appetites, oblivious to the social niceties of civilization. He’s a little id in a scuffed cap.
Every long-running series of this kind has to make an accommodation with the passing of time. The William stories went on to take in the events of the Second World War (William the Dictator, William and Air Raid Precautions, William and the Evacuees) or the space race (William and the Moon Rocket). A television quietly appears in the Browns’ house, and the servants quietly disappear. But William remains eleven years old. There’s something rather winning, too, in the way Crompton never sweats the small stuff. The age of William’s comely older sister Ethel (whose suitors William tends to exploit or thwart) fluctuates, the physical appearances of recurring characters alter at random and William’s neighbor Joan goes through three different second names over the course of the series. I read that not as sloppiness, but as a sign of the lightness, the offhandedness, in which this long-running and charming jeu d’esprit was conceived.
Arthur Ransome’s (1884–1967) Swallows and Amazons (1930) – about the adventures of the four Walker children, Titty, John, Susan, and Roger, who spend their Lake District holidays messing around in boats – was the first volume of a franchise that ran to twelve books and remains one of the most popular children’s stories of all time. Its opening pages describe the arrival of the celebrated telegram – sent by their absent father – giving them permission to take the boat Swallow out on the lake: “BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN.” (“‘What does it mean?’ asked Susan. ‘It means Yes,’ said Titty.”)
There, straight away, is the set-up: “Yes.” Here are four children between the ages of seven and twelve given freedom of action with an edge (a very slight, comical edge) of jeopardy. The children use this freedom to explore and make camp on Wild Cat Island in the middle of the lake, and they form an initially rivalrous friendship with the local Blackett girls, Nancy and Peggy, whose own dinghy is called Amazon. It is an adventure story, but it’s an adventure story that has been thoroughly domesticated.
Where many previous children’s stories, once the parents have been tidied out of the way, plunge children into quasi-adult perils, Swallows and Amazons does the opposite. Their freedom is the freedom of imaginative play. The geography of the real lake and its inhabitants becomes a palimpsest over which a fantasy world borrowed from children’s literature itself – Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe above all – is inscribed. The grumpy gentleman in a houseboat – first an antagonist, then an ally – is a retired pirate, “Captain Flint’; the children’s mother and their servants are “natives’; ginger beer is “grog.” A lakeside town is “Rio,” and a high promontory is “Darien,” so christened because Titty “had heard the sonnet read aloud at school, and forgotten everything in it except the picture of the explorers looking at the Pacific Ocean for the first time.” The book’s grown-ups – outstandingly Captain Flint, the stand-in for Ransome himself – connive willingly in the fantasy. It’s not a book about children exploring the adult world so much as about adults entering the world of children.
‘Hullo, Man Friday,’ said Titty joyfully.
‘Hullo, Robinson Crusoe,’ said Mother. That was the best of Mother. She was different from other natives. You could always count on her to know things like that.
Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday then kissed each other as if they were pretending to be Titty and Mother.
As Ransome’s biographer Roland Chambers argues, the war – which had claimed Ransome’s younger brother Geoffrey – is present in its absence no less than it is in the warm fantasy of Doctor Dolittle:
For those who had lived through the war, it was the promise Ransome made to himself that appealed most deeply: the promise of a world in which the rules had not been broken; in which parents loved and trusted their children; in which children, secure in that knowledge and in the excellent character of their guardians, set out on their own to discover new lands, engage in mock battles, and when the excitement was over, to return to warm beds, roaring fires, familiar faces and the prospect of repeating the adventure year after year, without fear of interruption or irretrievable tragedy, as though the real war had not been fought at all. Swallows and Amazons was a book about recovery…*
It’s a very wholesome, very reassuringly bounded world that the stories inhabit. It’s bounded in space by the shores of the lake (though later books in the series explore the Norfolk Broads), and it’s bounded in time by the school holidays; the flip side, perhaps, of the boarding school stories whose action is likewise bracketed by term dates but takes place on the other side of the brackets. The vigor of both those traditions indicates how defining, by the early twentieth century, the experience of school had become of childhood itself.
There’s a great delight in food (isn’t there always?): “The captain, mate, and the crew of the Swallow squatted round the frying-pan, and began eating as soon as the scrambled eggs, which were very hot, would let them. Mate Susan had already cut four huge slices of brown bread and butter to eat with the eggs. Then she poured out four mugs of tea, and filled them up with milk from a bottle […] Then there was a big rice pudding […] Then there were four big slabs of seed-cake. Then there were apples all round.”
There’s a great delight, too, in practical knowledge. The story was shaped by Ransome’s spending the summer of 1928 in the Lake District teaching the children of his friends Dora and Ernest Altounyan to sail. Their boat Swallow found its way into the story and three of the children (Titty, Roger, and Susan) gave their names to the Walkers. The technical vocabulary of sailing is lovingly reproduced – all sheets and painters and reef points. And though John, the oldest, captains Swallow, Ransome is admirably even-handed when it comes to gender roles: the girls are at least as resourceful as the boys, and it is Titty who single-handedly captures Amazon when the two crews are in competition.
The idyllic quality of Ransome’s Lake District, and its intense Englishness, is given special emotional force by counterpoint. In a 1958 note, he wrote that the book had its origins in the summer holidays he and his siblings spent “on a farm at the south end of Coniston”: “Going away from it, we were half drowned in tears. While away from it, as children and as grown-ups, we dreamed about it. No matter where I was, wandering about the world, I used at night to look for the North Star and, in my mind’s eye, could see the beloved skyline of great hills beneath it. Swallows and Amazons grew out of those old memories.”
Ransome, in adult life, did plenty of wandering about the world. As a young journalist he reported on the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Comintern and – dismayingly – became one of its most enthusiastic Western cheerleaders. In fact, there’s very strong evidence that he may have been a Soviet spy: he met Trotsky and Lenin, became close friends with the latter’s propaganda chief Karl Radek, and at one point smuggled thousands of roubles worth of diamonds out of the country for them. MI6, after much pestering by Ransome, signed him up – but it’s hard to make out whether he was spying on the Russians for the Brits, the Brits for the Russians, or a bit of both.
He was a weak, prickly and unhappy man. IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN will have had a slightly sour resonance for a writer who recalled in his autobiography his father’s attempt to teach him to swim by throwing him off a boat (sink or swim? Arthur sank). “I was a disappointment to my father in many ways,” he wrote.* That disappointment calcified when Professor Ransome died when his eldest son was just thirteen. Commander Walker – trusting, authoritative, absent – became an idealized version of his father, just as the capable and manly John became an idealized version of the younger Ransome himself, who had been homesick, short-sighted, academically inept and much bullied at school.
In young manhood, Ransome was an ardent but scattergun suitor – he proposed to practically every girl he knew until one, seemingly much to his surprise, said yes. His marriage in 1909, blessed on April Fool’s Day, appears in the chapter of his autobiography titled “Disasters”; his wife, Ivy, was highly strung and his mother-in-law, whom he ungallantly described as a “blowfly” leaving “poison germs wherever she set her foot,” was even worse. The man who, in Ian Jack’s words, “gave England its jolliest idea of Utopia”*, fled his marriage into an affair with Leon Trotsky’s secretary Evgenia Shelepina – who only after a protracted and painful divorce became his second wife.
Evgenia treated him better than Ivy, but she was a bossy soul and nicknamed him “Charlie” because he walked like Charlie Chaplin when his haemorrhoids were bad. She’s thought by some, indeed, to have been responsible for the premature end of his career, when she gave him some rather direct feedback on the eleventh book in the series, The Picts and the Martyrs (1943): “I finished reading your book and I think it is hopeless […] the book as a whole is dead […] pale imitations of something that happened many times before […] imitation and rehash […] even your faithful readers […] would find it dull.” Her complaint was that “if the Swallows were not allowed to grow up, if they are put into the same background with the same means of enjoying themselves as they have done holidays after holidays – they can’t help repeating themselves.”† Which is, of course, exactly to miss the point. Like Carroll and so many others before him, Ransome was seeking to capture something out of time. That jolly utopia was a refuge from adult life, not a stepping-stone toward it.
* BBC radio interview, 1968.
* He joins a long line of children’s books in which the imperfect or malapropic speech of the child protagonists is reproduced phonetically for the benefit of adult readers. Before the twentieth century this tended to be for sentimental reasons, as in the work of Mary Louisa Molesworth (1839–1921); latterly, more often for comic effect. It goes on to this day – see, for instance, Lauren Child’s Charlie and Lola series (first instalment: I Will Not Ever Never Eat a Tomato, Orchard Books, 2000), which in turn seems to take its cue from Kay Thompson’s Eloise books.
* Roland Chambers, The Last Englishman, [p].
* Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.), The Autobiography of Arthur Ransome.
* Cover quote for Roland Chambers, The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome (Faber & Faber, 2009)
† Letter to Ransome, August 1942, quoted in Chambers, The Last Englishman, [p].