I have loved William all my life. When my sister Susan was six and I was three, my parents tried for a son and had, instead, triplet girls. Possibly to save my mother’s sanity, I was sent to the local infant school well before time. The health visitor thought of it merely as the simplest form of babysitting. But no one told me, so I learned to read along with the others, and have spent most of my waking hours since with my head in a book.
Susan was given her first set of William stories for Christmas in 1953. On its brick-red cover was the emblem of a cheery-looking William wearing his school cap awry. I don’t remember when I stole the book from her, and every other William book she ever had. But I do know that he at once became my own imaginary brother, my closest secret friend.
Richmal Crompton’s stories are rich, inventive and oh, so very funny. She had a gift for bringing to William’s village, on one pretext after another, a host of extraordinary characters, all of whom somehow end up tangling with William and his motley gang of ‘Outlaws’. A born leader steeped in unfailing optimism, William hurls himself wholeheartedly into every mad endeavour, amusement or new ‘career’. He is outraged when things go wrong. The disasters that dog him are never his own fault. ‘I was on’y tryin’ to help him. S’not fair to blame a person fr’only tryin’ to help.’
Ethel, his snooty elder sister, does her very best to pretend William does not exist. Or, when he manifestly does – usually coated in mud, sawdust or pond slime – that he has nothing whatsoever to do with her. His irritable brother, Robert, is infuriated by William’s well-meaning, but invariably catastrophic, attempts to help him court one after another of the neighbourhood beauties. Mr Brown clearly despairs. Only mild Mrs Brown tries to cling to a positive vision of this unruly member of her family, even mistaking his plea for stronger garters as concern for the neat appearance of his socks, rather than for their more effective use as catapults.
In these ten stories, we meet William forging a love ‘pome’, swaggering about with pockets full of caterpillars, delivering wild ‘lekchers’ to a band of Sunday School goody-goodies, even dutifully adopting a ‘norphan’ (only to fetch up with the once angelic-looking Clarence coated head to toe with cement powder). At a moment of great personal danger concerning a cucumber, we find him writing his own will: ‘If I di I leeve everythin’ to Ginger. Pleese let him have the mouth orgun you tuke of me.’
Adults, be prepared. Young readers will trail after you asking, who was the ‘infant Samuel’ and, what is an ‘antiphonic lament’. They’ll meet words like ‘negligible’, ‘stentorian’ and ‘unctuously’ (and know, from context, instantly, what they mean).
Best of all, they will meet William himself. He’ll be their friend for life, as he’s been mine.
Anne Fine