The Day Gone By (18 page)

Some of the most popular light reading for children during the 'twenties and early 'thirties were the
William
books of Richmal Crompton. The only thing wrong with William is that he went on too long; up to the Second World War, into it and beyond. He was overtaken by a changing world. He ceased to be what he had begun as — an amusing, topical, satirical and at times even damaging reflection of the 'twenties, the days of short skirts, motor-bikes and Oxford bags, bobbed hair and long cigarette holders. Ah, and the tramps, whom everyone feared and too few pitied; the disguised Bolshevik spies; the local amateur dramatic societies, and the Seaside, and spiritualism, and the earnest ladies and the Band of Hope! This is what gave the early William books their authenticity and their sting. William himself, of course, was a gratefully received anti-hero, in the spirit of the times. The great thing was that he was no prig. Of all things he detested a prig. I have, in the past, said in print that William - dirty, sceptical, cunning and ill-spoken - was a much-needed antithesis to Christopher Robin, but if this was so, it cannot have been deliberate, for the first William book came out in 1922 and
When We Were Very Young
did not appear until 1924. No, I think the irritation that created William and ensured his popular success goes back not only to Little Lord Fauntleroy, but also to the whole notion - late Victorian and persisting well into the twentieth century — of children as beautiful, innocent little creatures, whose charming world must not be touched with the rough hand of grown-up reality. Lewis Carroll had a gentle go at this in the
Alice
books: for example, Alice, called upon by the Caterpillar to recite ‘You are old, Father William', comes up with a brilliant parody which has eclipsed the original. Yet Carroll himself, as he shows clearly, remained a member of the ‘fairy creatures' school.
Sylvie and Bruno
is not easy to swallow nowadays. If Richmal Crompton was consciously reacting against anyone, it was probably Rose Fyleman (‘There are Fairies at the Bottom of our Garden') and certain others like my Madeleine Nightingale, whose Tony O'Dreams is very starry-eyed and chivalrous.

After the First World War (though of course I knew nothing about this at the time) there was a general reaction against the accepted social values of pre-war days. It became fashionable for young people to be ‘rather fast'. There was much media attention to cocktails, divorces, female independence, Noel Coward, Chicago gangsters, fast sports cars, very long woolly scarves and so on. People called each other ‘Old Thing'. Along with these reactive features, society liked and bought William Brown. He was a logical part of the whole reaction, Jung's archetypal Trickster in person. The memorable illustrations, by Thomas Henry, reflect this perfectly. They are idiosyncratic, exaggerated, cartoon-like, reminiscent of illustrations to
Punch
jokes. Above all, they are of the period, the time when the full-scale ‘respectability' of Edwardian days and of the next decade were melting towards the ‘thirties; talking pictures, charabanc outings, hikers and the Slump. The whole point of William was that he outraged respectability - vicars, visiting lecturers, poets, rich war profiteers and so on. That is the joke, time after time, and I could enjoy reading it all right - up to a point. The characters were, perhaps, rather puppets. The stories tended to be repetitive, and similar situations used to recur. The dialogue lacked the bite of ‘Hullo! my covey, what's the row?' And the plots were often coincidental and contrived; you knew they were - like P. G. Wodehouse - but you went on reading, because it was easy. They indulged your laziness, really.

I think I would have to admit, if asked, that during my childhood I did become something of a book snob. I don't mean that I boasted about it - it certainly wouldn't have got me far with those about me if I had - but I did slip into the way of secretly giving myself credit for having read this book and that. (I thought I knew what was creditable and what wasn't: the credit depended upon what I had heard grown-up people say about a book. Whence else could it come? I knew I was just a learner.) I'm not at all sure that this ‘snobbery' was my fault; and come to that, I'm not at all sure it
was
a fault. My sister, now seventeen or eighteen, had grown into a true scholar: that is to say, she had set her sights on academic distinction. She was head girl at Miss Luker's and soon going up to Girton. I admired my sister, and was very ready to accept her taste and guidance (though she never cared to read Dickens; Henry James was more her mark, and him, of course, I never even attempted). She would say things like ‘Even little beastly Richard could read this, I should think.' (It might be Eden Philpotts, J. C. Squire or some such.) I would set about reading the book and determine to finish it one way or another. Usually I enjoyed it.

I believe that on balance the frame of mind I had is defensible. I wouldn't mind a child of mine reading for inward prestige (one did, I rather fancy), provided she wasn't just wasting her time and going cross-eyed with perplexity. I think that probably most people feel secretly proud of having read enduring books and a bit regretful about the ones they haven't read. Faced with the literacy of Sir Angus Wilson or my friend John Wain, I feel I have to some extent wasted my reading life: I wish I had read more. As to privately felt ‘snob-value' reading in childhood, my defence is first, that everyone knows that it takes a certain amount of determination and persistence to read a book that extends you, and if you don't read books that extend you, you never learn or progress at all. Secondly, you have to get new ideas from somewhere, and open your horizon: also, you hope to develop a sense of style and to become able to distinguish between good writing and bad; between old writing and new, too, e.g., Defoe and, well - Alison Lurie. A child ought to feel himself in credit for having voluntarily tackled a book that stretches his mind and capacity. That's one thing. I
don't
approve of parents giving a child a book-list and pressing him or her to work through it. I know one man who has grown up a virtual non-reader on account of just that sort of thing.

I might add that for anyone considering an academic career, especially in the humanities, a developed ability in adolescence to read and grasp a book recommended by one's schoolmaster or tutor is virtually essential.

I don't know whether or not I was taking on too much when I accepted
The Pilgrim's Progress
before I was nine. It came about in this way. I had, of course, heard a lot about
The Pilgrim's Progress:
that was unavoidable. In those days most educated people would nave been ashamed to admit that they had not read this enormously influential book. They would often quote from it, consciously or unconsciously, in daily speech. ‘Now you mustn't get into a Slough of Despond.' ‘Honestly, it's a real Vanity Fair down there.' Paul Fussell, in one of his books about the Great War, includes a passage about the influence of
The Pilgrim's Progress
on the war poets — Graves. Blunden, Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg. After the Bible, it was the obligatory devotional work: I knew that. But I knew something else, too. It was a
story;
a story about a man and a journey. So if it was a story, you could read it. The way people talked, you ought to feel privileged to.

However, for some reason or other there wasn't a copy in the house; I don't know why.
The Pilgrim's Progress
finally came into my hands through Thorn the gardener. Thorn was a nice fellow - what used, in those days, to be called ‘steady and reliable' - a chapel man and a teetotaller. (As I grew older my father used to let him take me to football matches: to watch Reading, who were then in the third division south, I rather think, and frequently lost.) Thorn used to read a good deal, and I would often find myself chatting to him, as he dug up potatoes or planted out wallflowers, about Sir Nigel and the White Company, or the Time Machine. One day he offered to lend me ‘the most wonderful book in the world'. It turned out, of course, to be
The Pilgrim's Progress,
in a little, green-cloth-bound edition measuring perhaps four and a quarter inches square. I took it gratefully, noticing amongst other things that it wasn't very long.

It was full of pictures and conversations! The pictures were marginal, indenting the text. They were some sort of engraving, I suppose. Each was about half an inch square, and some were certainly frightening. I remember one of - is it Ignorance? - pitching over the sheer cliff in the thunderstorm. Apollyon was disturbing, too. But Christian always came out on top, ho! ho!

The doctrinal conversations, of course, were what effectively split the book in two, as far as I was concerned. The narrative I could follow easily enough and enjoy: it was highly imaginative and gripping. The conversations were rather wearisome, and I personally still think the book could do with fewer of them: they lack the invention, excitement and vividness of the narrative. All the same, I had determined that I was going to read the book, and through these dialogues I conscientiously ploughed. One day, my sister was kind enough to read some of it to me, and after reading a fair piece of one of Christian's doctrinal set-tos with the unworthy, suggested that we should skip it. I said no.

‘But, Richard,' she protested, ‘I could go on reading the same bit over and over again and you wouldn't even notice!' I still begged her not to leave anything out. I suppose it was a case of ‘Don't treat me like an infant! Treat me like a grown-up!' Since I was so much younger than anyone else in the family, this was a constant feature of my childhood: I hated thinking that allowances were being made for me.

Katharine went on reading, and after a bit I realized that she
was
reading a passage over again and said so. To spot it was no credit to me: it was an obvious line: ‘Do you think I am such a fool?' All the same, I decided there was a lot of sense in what she said, and for the rest of the book I went rather lightly through the dialogues.

I'm not sure whether
The Pilgrim's Progress
is worth reading when you're eight (though when I came to re-read it, some ten years later, I found I had retained the incidents of the narrative well), but I'm sure enough that it's worth reading. The story is unique - as far as I know there's nothing at all like it in English literature. It is memorably inventive and very well written; and it constitutes a kind of forerunner of the English novel. C. S. Lewis, Ronald Blythe and Sir Christopher Hill have said a great deal more in its praise. For a child, I think, its main quality is that it is about a hero who has thrilling adventures, and wins.

It must have been about this time that I became aware that I had a godfather, and that he was a godfather both to admire and to like. His name was Colonel Richard Elkington, and I am named after him. He was a close friend of my father and lived out at Adbury Holt, a mile or two south of Newbury. A story remained popular in our family of how, one day at the Newbury races, my father was wearing a pair of brightly coloured socks, with which he was rather pleased, when Colonel Elkington came up to him and said ‘Hallo, Flash Alf!' After this coloured socks, in our family, were always referred to as ‘Alfreds'.

However, there was a whole lot more to Colonel Elkington than coming up with snappy cracks at the races. His tale is a strange one. I am not sure that I recall it with complete accuracy, but I will tell what I believe I was told. At the outbreak of the First World War, Colonel Elkington - a regular officer, of course - was commanding an infantry battalion. The battalion formed part of the British Expeditionary Force - the Old Contemptibles - and took part in the battle of Mons and the subsequent retreat.

One evening during the retreat, Colonel Elkington had carried out orders in placing his battalion in and around a French village, prepared to defend it. There was still a fair amount of light left when a German officer came to battalion headquarters under a flag of truce. (At the beginning of the war, there was less sheer hostility between participants than later: everyone has heard of the fraternization of Christmas, 1914.) The German officer suggested to Colonel Elkington that he might quite practicably re-position his battalion half a mile back, out of the village. It would, he thought, make no difference whatever to the battalion's strategic advantage (or to anyone else's near them), but it would make a lot of difference to the village full of civilians, because as things stood the Germans were going to have to shell it.

Colonel Elkington, a humane man, thought it over and decided that the German officer was about right. As he sat thinking, no doubt he could see the girls and the children in the streets, making friends with his soldiers, as they always do. I don't know how long he had to make up his mind, but anyway he took the battalion back to a fresh position behind the village.

The result of this, at the conclusion of the 1914 campaign, was a court-martial. I don't know what the sentence was, but as the story was told to me, Colonel Elkington left the army. It may very well have been his own decision. He joined the Foreign Legion and served in it throughout the rest of the war. However, he was not without friends who knew his worth, and when the war was at last over there was pressure to get the case re-opened. Finally, the whole thing was reviewed and the Colonel was reinstated without a stain on his character.

The Elkingtons were a well-known local family and I have always felt proud of my godfather, who never failed, by the way, to come down handsome at Christmas and on my birthday. His nephew, Sir Richard des Voeux, commanded 156 Parachute Battalion at Arnhem, where he was killed.

Being a doctor's son, I naturally had a certain amount to do with the hospital, which was a mile away from our home, at the foot of Wash Hill. My father, of course, was always in and out, and not infrequently I might be with him. The hospital was a thriving one. Entirely privately supported, it was the pride of Newbury. Every ball, every fete, every Boy Scouts' melarky was in aid of the hospital. The doctors, the matron and the sisters were local personalities. It was an integral part of Adams family life.