Growing up in suburban Bristol in the Eighties and Nineties, my reading matter was of a suitably timeless disposition, even if it seldom, if ever, included any Enid Blyton. Amidst the colonial and deeply un-PC likes of Biggles and Rider Haggard, my trio of preferred characters never really changed: Jennings, Billy Bunter and William Brown. Of the three, Jennings was probably my favourite, being closest to my own life as a prep school boy of a vaguely similar appearance and age, and also because the situations were the most recognisable. Bunter I found uproarious but also rather tasteless and absurd, for reasons that have now, alas, become much clearer. And then there was William Brown: would-be outlaw, committed dog owner and perpetual enemy of soap-and-water, to say nothing of his perpetual nemeses, Hubert Lane and Violet Elizabeth Bott.
I enjoyed the books as picaresque stories of bad behaviour without seeing much of myself in William, or indeed his friends. Their author Richmal Crompton’s evocation of invincible pre-war suburbia — not so very far from a benign version of the half-idylls, half-nightmares portrayed by Orwell in Coming Up For Air and Patrick Hamilton in Hangover Square — was certainly compelling, but I was too young to appreciate Crompton’s social satire, itself considerably more piquant than anything that could be found in Jennings and Bunter, let alone the stiff-upper-lip fantasias of English manhood peddled by WE Johns with Biggles, Gimlet and the rest. All of them now sound to me like nothing so much as industrial-strength cocktails. Drink a couple, and you too will want to revive the Empire.
Yet now, a century after the first appearance of Just William, I reassess Crompton’s universe afresh, and so I respond far more warmly to her characters and creations. William Brown himself is an entertaining if undeniably two-dimensional figure, at his most amusing when he is required to fit into the adult world temporarily, as in the story William’s Truthful Christmas, when he causes social outrage and misery by offering an honest opinion of the gifts that he has received. But it is the rich panoply of figures around William who give the stories their interest and colour, and which make them as entertaining for adults to read today as they ever might be for their children. If, of course, eleven-year olds can be distracted from their iPads and Netflix and nefarious online activities long enough to enjoy the William books.
Leaving aside the children for a moment, the adult supporting characters in the unnamed village provide endless humour and intrigue. There is William’s neurotic mother, desperately saying of her son that “he means well” even as he is involved in yet another humiliating scrape. His father, meanwhile, is a hard-drinking Conservative whose cynicism at the world sees him reward his errant son with extra pocket money for his more outrageous actions, as long as he is not bedbound with “his liver”. Not for nothing is this stalwart representative of middle England named John Brown.
Then there is William’s would-be romantic elder brother Robert, desperately professing each of his girlfriends “the most beautiful girl in the world” until his eye is taken by another. Mr and Mrs Bott are a pair of arriviste millionaires who have made their money via “Bott’s Digestive Sauce”, a substance that William contends, probably accurately, has been constructed from squashed beetles. Needless to say, they take up residence in the nouveau riche establishment Bott Hall, where their social status irks them. (“We ought to have some ancestors, Botty,” said Mrs Bott. “We’ve got ’em, dear,” said Mr Bott after a moment’s thought. “We must have. Come to think of it, we shouldn’t be here now if we’d not.”) Floating around the periphery is Robert’s friend, the splendidly named Jameson Jameson, of whom Crompton writes, with caustic humour, “[his] parents had perpetrated on him the supreme practical joke of giving him his surname for a Christian name, so that people who addressed him by his full name seemed always to be indulging in some witticism.”
