NICHOLAS FISK · ROBERT WESTALL
Grinny; Starstormers; Trillions; Monster Maker;
A Rag, A Bone and a Hank of Hair; Pig Ignorant;
The Machine Gunners; Fathom Five; Futuretrack 5;
Children of the Blitz; The Making of Me
IT’S ODD TO THINK THAT SCIENCE FICTION AND HORROR or ghost stories don’t really become visible in modern children’s writing until the second half of the twentieth century. They’re present in the deep past, and they’re present, here and there, in the nineteenth century. But for the first half of the twentieth century, they were thin on the ground.
Jules Verne’s prototypical science fiction undoubtedly had child readers. Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers had been presences in American comics since the 1930s, and Dan Dare appeared on the cover of the first issue of the Eagle in 1950. Boys’ short-story periodicals such as The Boys’ Friend kept up a plentiful supply of speculative tales from the end of the nineteenth century – from pre-steampunk airship adventures to tales of imperial defense. But it was only after about 1960 that science fiction took serious hold in published books rather than ephemera. In part, as often, the burgeoning of a genre in children’s writing accompanies or trails a vogue in adult writing. The great age of literary science fiction arrived in the mid-century – its booster rockets being the atom bomb and the moon landings – and bled across into children’s and young adult writing.
Then there’s horror, spooks, and things that go bump in the night. Ghosts and murderers have long played an outsized part in children’s ghoulish imaginations, and in adult anxieties about children. The oral tradition is full of them. Children formed a vast segment of the audience for the “penny-blood” publishing craze that reached its peak in the mid-nineteenth century – cheaply printed serial pamphlets about crime and violence distributed to the working classes at a fraction of the prices at which “respectable” novels were circulated. The great moral panic in the US that led to the introduction of the 1954 Comics Code saw William Gaines, the publisher of EC horror comics, testify before a senate subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency.
Where did all that fear go? To be a child, in any generation, is to be afraid: of the dark, of strangers, of being lost, of the unknown. Fairytales, which lie at the back of the whole canon of children’s writing, are substantially about the frightening and inexplicable: monsters, magic and transformation. Growing up is a process of getting your fears under control, or at least swapping them for different fears. Adult fear (or the type adults will admit to) is, by and large, rational. Childhood fear – where the world is still an unknown quantity, and the border territory between fantasy and reality is still contested – is peculiarly intense. You don’t know, as adults do, that monsters don’t exist.
In his fine book Danse Macabre (1981), Stephen King writes about how his storytelling imagination was fueled by a 1950s provincial American childhood filled with campfire stories, EC comics, urban legends, B-movie horror flicks. (King, if it’s not a paradox to say so, seems to me to be someone you could think of as writing children’s books for grown-ups.) The fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, author of the matchless Coraline, told Desert Island Discs in 2021 that childhood terrors fed his adult imagination, too. What was he scared of? “You name it, definitely the dark, shadows, witches, anything that really did exist and anything that didn’t… I couldn’t switch that off and I thought of that as my big weakness.
I didn’t realise that one day I would grow up and that would be my superpower.”*
Nicholas Fisk (the pen-name for David Higginbottom, 1923– 2016) shared that superpower. By now a largely forgotten writer of science fiction and fantasy for children, he was a major figure in the genre in the late twentieth century, producing a book or two a year between the mid-sixties and the mid-nineties. He was described in D.L. Kirkpatrick’s Twentieth-century Children’s Writers (1995) as “the Huxley-Wyndham-Golding of children’s literature.” Fisk’s books are marred by the odd of-its-time racial crassness (you’ll find “Jap” used casually) and by a sexism that is wearisome when it isn’t mildly alarming. But as a storyteller he has a lasting power, and a visceral ability to inhabit the worldview of a child.
His work, which explores human cloning, alien intelligence and time travel, has a disconcerting strangeness to it. The otherwise average Starstormers series, which describes the adventures of children who escape from boarding school in a home-made spaceship and take to the stars in the hope of joining their parents off-planet, has as its principal antagonist a planet of animate dust (does he prefigure Philip Pullman here?); and Trillions describes the panicky human response to an alien hive-mind whose moral status is almost indecipherable.
Aliens, in Fisk, really are alien. The traumatized astronaut Blythe tells one of the protagonists in that book that space is:
‘Alone, Apart, Foreign. Unlike anything known to man. Alien.’
‘Alien good, or alien bad?’
It took a long time for Blythe to reply. At last he said, ‘That’s the puzzle. That’s the mystery. How can you tell? How can you begin to understand something completely alien? Good, bad, I don’t know. All I know is – alien.’
Space, for Fisk, is the haunted wood. His key work – and certainly, the one that made the strongest impression on this reader – is his 1973 novel Grinny, which brings the science fiction and horror genres together to startling effect. Its narrator is eleven-year-old Timothy Carpenter, who lives an ordinary suburban existence with his father and mother and seven-year-old sister Beth. In the very first paragraph, the doorbell rings and he answers it. On the step, “with two gi-normous trunks,” is a little old lady. “‘I’m your Great
Aunt Emma,’ she says. “‘You must be Tim.’”
She is rather a queer old party. Very short, with a hat with a veil, and gloves, and a way of smiling vaguely. Her teeth are very good (false?) and she is very neat. Her shoes hardly have creases in them over the instep, as if she never walked, yet she is quite spry considering her age and soon she and Mum were chattering away about the journey and so on.
The thing is that, while Tim and Beth are disconcerted by this unexpected arrival, whose name has never been mentioned in the family, their parents take her in immediately. One moment, Tim’s mother is asking: “Who? Great Aunt who?” Then the queer old party says: “You remember me, Millie!” At once, Millie exclaims: “Great Aunt Emma! Oh do come in, you must be freezing. Tim, help with the luggage.” Great Aunt Emma, in the manner of her arrival and in the immediate power she has over the hopeless adults, is the nightmare Mary Poppins.
Great Aunt Emma – or GAE as she is abbreviated in Tim’s diary – is billeted in the spare bedroom. Without discussion or warning, and with no end in sight, she is part of the family. And it soon becomes clear that there is something very strange about her indeed. But even as Tim and Beth come, bit by bit, to first notice and then (though only ever partly) to understand her strangeness, their parents remain completely oblivious. Even now, as Tim writes in his retrospective introduction, “Of course, I can never talk to my father and mother about Aunt Emma – they quite literally would not hear me.”
As Tim’s introduction explains, the diary entries that make up the main body of the text have been published at his urging by his writer friend Nicholas Fisk. Tim, now the book has been published, is fifteen: “I was too young to have done anything about Aunt Emma when she was with us because I was never sure what it all meant and even when everything got frightening and sinister I could neither have proved anything nor gone to someone for help.” What we’re reading, then, is the literary equivalent of “found footage” horror: a story unfolding in contemporary documents in real time. There’s no reassuring sense of an author making it up or shaping the story to make it make sense.
The diaries of this eleven-year-old boy – pretentious, loquacious, slangy, telegraphic – read like the diaries of an eleven-year-old boy. Any reader with a sibling will recognize Tim’s bickering and competitive relationship with Beth, and his scorn at the way his friend Mac likes to ingratiate himself with her. So the gathering horror of the situation jars with the tone, which at times has a flavor of Molesworth. “Taking the bull by the horns,” he says, “Well, cough cough, that’s enough swimming for me, hum hum, I think I will get out now.” “Got Beth over hogging black cherry jam – none left for breakfast. Kid stuff, but A Man Must Do What A Man Must Do.” The pages are filled with memos-to-self, rhetorical questions in parenthesis, daily trivia, multiple exclamation marks, tags like “Etc., etc.,” and abbreviations.
So Grinny isn’t full of the foreshadowing and foreboding that make lesser horror stories scream, paragraph by paragraph, that they are horror stories. GAE’s oddities are, at first, just that: oddities. Why does she seem to be nervous around electricity? How can she smoke untipped Gauloise after untipped Gauloise? Is that connected to Beth’s observation that – under the fag smoke – she doesn’t smell of anything at all? How come – such a sinister detail, because so unexpected and incidental and unexplained – the tops of her shoes are uncreased? Beth nicknames her “Grinny” because of her incessant smiling.
Grinny asks odd questions. Is she being funny when, after the children mention a championship-winning “cast-iron conker,” she seems to expect it to be made, literally, of iron? She doesn’t seem to know how humans reproduce: Beth, whose teasing of her becomes ever more pointed and probing, tells her that she won’t be able to have a baby until she’s “nine, or even ten,” and Emma answers, “Yes, of course.” When she comes in on the family bathing naked in the swimming pool they nickname “Muscle Beach,” she stares, oblivious to the idea that they might be embarrassed at being seen undressed.
Then, the reveal. Grinny slips on ice and breaks her wrist. Tim records Beth’s horrified witness to the incident:
‘The skin was gashed open but there was no blood. The bones stuck out but they were not made of real bone – they were made of shiny steel!’
[…] She said there was no blood, no blood at all, the skin was just split open. I asked her what colour the skin was and she said the same colour outside as in. I said, well, there must have been meaty stuff where the bones were, but she said no. There was nothing but the steel ribs and that the skin was just a thick layer ‘like the fat on a mutton chop before it is cooked,’ but with a tear in it.
As the children come to realize with deepening terror, Grinny is the scout for an alien invasion. Flying saucers appear. At one point Tim goes into Grinny’s room at night:
Grinny was lying flat on her back on the bed, with her arms by her side above the covers. She was rigid and still, like a corpse or an Egyptian mummy. But she was luminous. There was even a faint glow through the bedclothes.
I went closer – I wasn’t frightened yet – and saw another thing: her eyes were wide open. She was staring at the ceiling, staring at nothing. And her eyes were lit up from inside. Like water when you put the lens of a lit torch in it. Her mouth was open. She was grinning. I don’t mean she was making the movement of smiling, I mean her mouth was set in a grin. And from her open mouth I thought I heard a slight fluttering, twittering sound. But it might have been my own pulses. I think it was the reflection of her luminosity on her teeth that made me give a sort of scream.
Isn’t that lit torch/water image virtuosic? And that fluttering, twittering sound – which in my imagination resembles the unworldly blips and squawks of a tape drive or a dial-up modem – is the language that the children come to call “Grinnish.”
What makes Grinny so effective is its extreme oddness and the specificity of that oddness. We are in the territory of what Freud called the unheimlich. The root of that word – heimlich literally translates as homely – points to why it is so disturbing in this context. The call is coming from inside the house: Grinny is inside the home, inside the place that in most children’s literature is the locus of comfort and security, and which children leave to have their adventures and return to at the end.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the anxiety that underpins two of the most enduring genres in horror, vampires and zombies, is that of home invasion; think of the threshold festooned with bulbs of garlic, or grazed survivors frantically nailing planks over windows while green-gray hands plunge and clutch through the gaps. The adults, who in most children’s literature are the guarantors of the home’s comfort and security, are no use at all. Grinny has them hypnotized. Did you ever have one of those recurring dreams where you were running from monsters, and you reached the safety of your mother and father – and then they reached down to their chins, and slowly pulled off their masks…? (No? Just me, then…)
The novel gives so deep and memorable a scare because so little is explained. We know Grinny is a threat, an existential threat – not only to the planet but, more viscerally, to the safe order of childhood experience itself. We have a series of irreducible nightmare images – a bloodless wound; a sheaf of steel spokes; a watery light in the eyes; luminous teeth; uncreased shoes; and in the climax a dull metal “torch thing” “as busy and unstoppable as a rat, never pausing from its nibblings and humped-up scurryings and lunges and tugs.”
It’s possible to wonder whether the steady rise in science fiction and dark fantasy or horror material was kick-started, in part, by the experience of real-life horror: that it in some way refracted the experiences of a generation of writers who had experienced the war in their own youth or childhood. That generation produced a body of work not of consolation or wish-fulfillment, but of anxiety: of the everyday butting up, just as in Grinny, against the alien and the unknown.
Nicholas Fisk was born in 1923. He was of a generation of writers who were too young to have experienced the first war, and old enough to have experienced the second not as a disruption in their adult lives but as the defining grounds of it. If you accept the premise that children’s writing most often sees writers mining their own childhoods – writing both from, and often to, the children that they themselves were – you’d expect the traumatizing experience of war to inflect not the children’s writing of wartime or the immediate post-war period but two or three decades afterward.* That is what we see here.
In a short memoir published as part of Walker Books’s Teenage Memoirs series, Pig Ignorant (1992), Fisk described his adolescence and young manhood in the run-up to the Second World War. It has as its epigraph a line from Victoria Wood: “I believe we all have a certain time in our lives that we’re good at. I wasn’t good at being a child.” Much of that short book narrates his attempt to leave his childhood and find a secure identity as a young adult: “For Nick, school is over! He’s free! He’s his real self at last!”
But the child is never quite left behind. Fisk’s narrator self introduces us to his adolescent self as “a walking, talking, breathing solid ghost. Not the ghost of someone dead. I am still alive. His flesh is my flesh, his heartbeat is my heartbeat. Because he is me. But so long ago…” This Nick – tall, gawky, pink-faced – both is and is not the boy jeered at by bullies as “muvver’s darling” (like the protagonist of Monster Maker). But the furniture of his identity is unstable. He affects to smoke a pipe because a girl he fancies (Pig Ignorant seethes with remembered lust) doesn’t like men who smoke cigarettes. He gets a job as a receptionist and typist to a theatrical agent. He finds his shy, faltering way into the jazz clubs where he would come to moonlight as a guitarist – and witnesses frightening eruptions of a world still alien to him: a fight with a cut-throat razor, sex, gin.
But over all this hangs the war. One image from the aftermath of an air raid, of Fisk and a warden finding someone half-buried in the rubble, chimes with that horrible scene in Grinny:
It is an elderly man, very thin, wearing a sort of striped waistcoat. The ghastly face is masked in plastic dust. A butler? ‘There you are, mate, coming along nicely, soon have you out, you’re all right.’
But the man is not all right. There is only the upper half of him left… Shiny wet tubing…
In another of Fisk’s works, the remarkable A Rag, A Bone and a Hank of Hair (1980), the pre-war world of that memoir is given science-fictional framing. Its protagonist Brin lives in a dystopian near future in which the birth rate has plummeted globally after a nuclear catastrophe. Its ruling gerontocracy hopes to save humanity by cloning “reborns” from the genetic material of people who died before the disaster, and whose fertility will be unimpaired. Brin is set the task of testing the reactions of some of these reborns in a Matrix-like “scenario”: two children and a housekeeper live the same day over and over in a two-room stage-set designed to replicate the downstairs of a house in 1940. Brin is to share this space with them.
The unreal 1940 is, of course, far more real-feeling than the antiseptic science-fictional furniture of the “real” world outside. Brin is startled by the rawness and appetite, even the violence, of his new housemates. The boy, Brian, “seemed big, raw and animal. His knees were grey with dirt, red with a cut, white where the skin had been scraped.” In Brin’s world everyone wears implants that make aggression not just impossible but barely thinkable. Yet this animal world has its comforts – not least the discovery that it contains toast and Marmite cut into soldiers; the way to a child reader was ever through his or her stomach. It has a degree of linguistic living color, too, that the story’s “present” entirely lacks. The scientists supervising the experiment marvel at the catchphrases the reborns spout: “Barmy. Nuts. Super. Gosh. I say. Soppy. Ridic. Nark it. Gertcher.”
Why 1940? Among other things, it’s because children then were frightened; because they were less entitled; because they were less likely to try to leave the house and discover that the world they thought they were living in was an illusion; in 1940 “you were stuck in your home, once darkness fell, because there was no point in going out.” When Brin wonders why the experiment couldn’t have been done for 1960, he’s told: “By 1960 or 1980, children wanted all kinds of things – and got what they wanted! They expected freedoms and possessions and excitements. So later children wouldn’t have done for us.”
Here’s a writer reflecting on the shift in the experience of childhood between the age in which he grew up and that in which his readers have grown up. What’s more, Fisk recasts his own childhood as a provisional, threatened, illusory world, charged with uncertain meaning, whose inhabitants barely understand their own reality. Brin discovers, as the novel goes on, that he doesn’t understand his own. Again, home is not a safe place; and, again, there’s a reality behind the surface of things that is far stranger than we can imagine.
* * *
A writer who gave a more direct voice to wartime childhood was Robert Westall (1929–1993). His novel The Machine Gunners (1975), which won the Carnegie Medal, drew on his own experiences under German aerial bombardment in Tynemouth, where he grew up. The area, renamed Garmouth in the book, is recognizably the shipbuilding working-class north-east of England.
Originally, Westall had no thoughts of publication. He wrote it longhand, in school exercise books, in the autumn of 1973. “It was written solely for my son, Christopher, when he was twelve, to show him how things had been for me when I was twelve, in the war.”* That is as direct as possible a statement of how so much children’s writing comes from one child to another. As his partner Lindy McKinnel was to write suggestively after his death: “He wanted to share childhoods with his son.”† The Machine Gunners is a tremendously exciting, tough-minded and subtle piece of writing that describes not war itself, but the way in which war presses in on childhood – and the way that children, resiliently, bravely, naively, absorb it into the permanent scheme of their worldview.
When we first encounter its protagonist Chas McGill, he’s waking in an air-raid shelter in the grey of dawn, and the narrative relays what could have been remarkable and frightening with the matter-of-factness of ordinary life: “Everything was just the same: same whistling milkman, same cart-horse. But there was too much milk on the cart and that was bad. Every extra bottle meant some family bombed-out during the night.”
He witnesses, again matter-of-factly, adult trauma:
‘You remember that lass in the greengrocer’s?’
‘The ginger-haired one?’ said his mother, still bending over the stove.
‘Aye. A direct hit. They found half of her in the front garden and the other half right across the house.’
But for Chas, the war is more like a treasure-hunt. It doesn’t mean terror and loss. It is made sense of through the prism of schoolboy one-upmanship.
Chas had the second-best collection of war souvenirs in Garmouth. It was all a matter of knowing where to look. Silly kids looked on the pavements or in the gutters; as if anything there wasn’t picked up straight away. The best places to look were where no one else would dream, like in the dry soil under privet hedges. You often found machine-gun bullets there, turned into little metal mushrooms as they hit the ground. Fools thought nothing could fall through a hedge. As he walked, Chas’s eyes were everywhere. At the corner of Marston Road, the pavement was burnt into a white patch a yard across. Incendiary bomb! The tailfin would be somewhere near – they normally bounced off hard when the bomb hit.
Chas is looking for those “little metal mushrooms” in the same way Tom Brown shins up a tree in search of birds’ eggs. And isn’t “normally” – in the context of sheared-off tail-fins and strikes from incendiary bombs – a masterful psychological touch?
The novel’s action centers on the discovery of the ultimate war souvenir. In a thickly overgrown copse, Chas discovers that missing tail-fin. In it, still hanging from the straps, is the body of a German gunner and, half wrenched from its mounting but intact, the plane’s tail gun. Secretly enlisting the help of his friend Cem, he sneaks up and saws the machine gun off with his father’s hacksaw, then squirrels it away in an old sewage pipe in a disused builders’ yard. When the authorities realize that this dangerous piece of equipment has gone missing, they hunt for it. These very adult children confound and deceive them like veteran spies in enemy territory.
In due course Chas, Cem, and a couple of other children play soldiers for real. They establish the precious machine gun in a dugout facing over the cliffs in the direction from which the bombers come in the air raids, hoping to shoot down a German plane. They don’t, quite – but they have a part in the string of events that leads to a German gunner baling from his plane and ending up their prisoner in the dugout.
Child’s play and real danger mingle. This is, if that makes sense, a profoundly realistic book about fantasy. The climactic episode of the book is a German invasion that never happens. That is a fantasy: an adult fantasy. In fact, the children in the book are in some respects closer to the reality of the war – harboring as they do the downed flyer Rudi and coming to know him as a human being – than the adults whom they at every turn outwit. The war has turned the relationships between adults and children upside down. Chas plays the child at various points, but strategically. And his friend Clogger – a Glaswegian boy from a broken home – lives outside the nuclear family altogether.
Sexual awakening, or sexual anxiety, runs as a thread through the book, as does Chas’s introduction to real violence, real fear, real danger: “Chas felt very strange. He had prickles up and down his spine. He felt bigger and stronger than ever before, and yet more frightened at the same time.”
As ever, it does to pay attention to the food. It looms so large in childhood, as in the writing about childhood (think, for instance, of the unspeakable porridge in Orwell’s Such, Such Were the Joys), and the memory of wartime cuisine clearly stayed with Westall no less than with the toast-loving Fisk: “Chas cheered up. Two whole slices of fried bread and a roll of pale pink sausage-meat. It tasted queer, not at all like sausage before the war. But he was starting to like the queerness.” “School dinner was a kind of self-discipline: the potatoes and the thin translucent custard tasted so queer that they required an effort of will to eat.”
Here’s one of the funny things about children’s writing: there is a sort of generational lag in the way that it processes the material of history. An adult, writing for adult contemporaries, will take the stuff of his or her own personal or historical experience and turn it into fiction to be consumed by an audience that will often share that experience. But an adult who writes for children from his or her own childhood is writing for a generation who won’t have had the first-hand experience: those readers don’t compare it to the fiction; they experience it through the fiction.
Westall was writing for an audience for whom The Machine Gunners and the books that came after shaped a mythology of wartime Britain. He tried, too, to share as many childhoods as he could, anthologizing in 1985’s Children of the Blitz the letters and stories that had been sent to him by readers of The Machine Gunners about their own wartime childhoods.
Westall’s own life was marked by tragedy. His only son Christopher, for whom he had written the book that started him on his career, died in the summer holidays of 1978, at the age of eighteen, in a motorcycle accident. In the mid-1980s, Westall lost both his parents in short succession and following a breakdown took early retirement from his work as a teacher. His wife Jean, who had suffered serious mental and physical illness, was heavily medicated and hospitalized at various points, and by 1987 their marriage had ended. Jean took her own life in 1990 and Westall himself died from viral pneumonia in 1993. He was only sixtythree. But he left behind a canon of work consisting of dozens of novels for children: many of war, in the realistic mode of The Machine Gunners including its sequel, Fathom Five (1979), but also tales of the supernatural, and science fiction, such as Futuretrack 5 (1983). A posthumous memoir, The Making of Me, was published in 2006.
Westall’s service to children’s literature doesn’t begin and end with his books. After his death his partner Lindy McKinnel donated £100,000 from his estate to what was to become the UK’s only dedicated center to children’s writing, Seven Stories in Newcastle upon Tyne, not ten miles from Westall’s own birthplace.
Seven Stories is a place where the value of the written word is affirmed in the age of television. In its collections you can see what the writers of this period demonstrated once again: that it’s possible to take archetypal story-shapes and give them new life; that the fantastical or magical can exist just a breath away from the workaday world; and that the childhoods of the past and the childhoods of the present, in a story, can touch hands.
* Desert Island Discs: Neil Gaiman, BBC Radio 4, 3 December 2021.
* Ian Serraillier (1912–1994) was one of only a tiny handful of writers to address the Second World War soon after it had happened. His The Silver Sword (1956) was set amid the refugee crisis and told the story of three children roaming Europe in search of their parents. But as a book written by someone who had been an adult (and a non-combatant) during the war years, that fine book occupies a slightly different category.
* “About The Machine Gunners,” in The Machine Gunners (Macmillan Children’s Books, 1975), [p].
† “The Life of Robert Westall 1929–1993,” in The Machine Gunners (Macmillan Children’s Books, 2015), [p].