Johnny Maxwell 03 – Johnny and the Bomb

Johnny and the Bomb by Terry Pratchett is a time travel story for 9 year olds about a boy who knows exactly when the bombs are going to fall.

What happens

It opens in Blackbury High Street on a night in 1941. A policeman is walking his beat, cadging a mug of tea off the bomb disposal lads. There is no Paradise Street any more, not since last night, and there is an unexploded bomb sitting in somebody's cellar.

Then an old woman comes picking her way across the rubble, dragging a supermarket trolley.

Forty odd years later Johnny Maxwell is walking home from the Odeon with his mates, worrying. Johnny worries for a living. School, money, his dad pushing off, his mum sitting around smoking. Lately he has been having dreams about planes and bombs in the middle of the day, which is a new one.

His friends are busy arguing about whether you can change the past without wrecking everything. Bigmac would go back and shoot Hitler. Yoless points out you might accidentally stop yourself being born. Wobbler reckons you would have to be mad to understand time travel at all.

Then they find Mrs Tachyon lying in an alley, and her trolley.

It is extremely funny about extremely bleak things. The boys talk exactly the way boys talk. They insult each other constantly and not one insult lands anywhere near the truth. Yoless has three shelves of Star Trek videos. Bigmac has LOVE and HAT on his knuckles, in biro, because he fainted at the tattoo place.

Underneath all that, Johnny is the only one taking the war seriously, because he is the only one who can see it.

This sits at 9 in the library and it reads older. The soldiers in the first chapter swear. There is talk of looting and being shot for it. Johnny's family has come apart and the language about his state of mind is blunt and old fashioned, including the word mental and a school note calling him disturbed. One of his running worries is whether you can catch AIDS off the television. And the whole story rests on a real air raid in which real people died.

For a confident reader who likes history and dark jokes, all of that is exactly the point. For a younger nine it is a great deal at once, so read the first chapter yourself before you decide.

What to read next

Johnny turns up in Only You Can Save Mankind as well, with Wobbler next to him, this time in front of a computer game where the aliens send a message saying they would rather like to surrender.