Just William 01 – Just William

Richmal Crompton's Just William is a set of comic stories for 8 year olds about a boy whose helpful ideas go catastrophically wrong.

What happens

William Brown is absolutely certain, at all times, that he is in the right. In the first story his aunt gives him a shilling. He spends half on sweets called Gooseberry Eyes and half on the pictures, and sits through five films in a row without moving.

Everything he does for the rest of that day is one of those films. He shoots imaginary pursuers with a pencil and charges straight into his father. He tells the little girl next door, in a low husky voice, that he has weak lungs. (He does not have weak lungs.) He carries a squashed rosebud to his sister's friend Jack Morgan with a message she never sent.

And because the painter in the comedy film burnt the old paint off a door, William goes upstairs with a lighted taper and a penknife and does the same to his bedroom door.

All the comedy sits in the gap between what William thinks he is doing and what everyone else sees. He genuinely believes he is being kind. His father, nursing a headache, believes his son is insane and says so at length. They are both sort of right.

It's an old book and it reads like one. There are maids in the house and aunts staying for weeks, a brother at college in agonies over a girl, and a father who takes William by the back of the neck before asking anyone what happened. Your reader may want a hand with a shilling, a taper and "sixpennoth".

The stories are short and each one finishes, so it works nicely as one at bedtime with a proper stopping place.

Is any of it still funny? The set pieces very much are. William on a bicycle he cannot get off, still wearing his hen feathers and a doormat, while half the neighbourhood runs after him cheering, is worth the whole book.

What to read next

If your reader takes to him, More William carries straight on. It opens on Christmas morning, with an aunt who has hung a card above his bed reading "A Busy Day is a Happy Day", a sentiment William distrusts on sight.