Just William 03 – William Again

William Again by Richmal Crompton is a very old-fashioned, very British comedy for 8 year olds, and it opens with William deciding to write a play and star in it.

What happens

He's eleven. He's watched the village amateur dramatic society, thought they were marvellous, and settled on a career on the stage. Nobody can tell him how you actually get on one.

So he'll write his own instead. All he needs, he tells his mother, is ink and paper and a few old clothes.

She asks whether a pencil would do. William is appalled. Did Shakespeare write in pencil?

He produces the thing lying on the floor of the summer house with a bottle of Orange Ale on one side and an apple on the other, getting ink over his hands, his clothes and most of the woodwork. His father notices the strange peace in the house and says he hopes it's a nice long play.

Then he casts it. Ginger is the hero. Henry is the hero's friend. Douglas is a crowd of outlaws. Little Molly Carter is Lady Elsabina. William is the villain, and also the stage manager, and also the prompter.

There's one grimy exercise book with everyone's part in it. His solution is that they take turns sitting in the middle.

The costumes are where it really takes off. His sister Ethel has locked her entire wardrobe because she knew perfectly well what date the performance was.

So he makes do. A silk petticoat off the kitchen clothes horse. A lace curtain. The dining room tablecloth. The wastepaper basket, worn as a hat, with a feather pulled straight out of the cock's tail. His father's top hat, which is safe enough because his father is out chairing a political meeting that evening.

William himself gets the drawing room rug and a large black china fern pot, which rests on his ears and gives him what he feels is a sinister and commanding appearance.

Rehearsals he isn't bothered about. Real acting people, he explains, don't waste time on those.

Watch the political meeting, by the way. There's a Great Man coming down from London specially for it, and the chapter is called "What Delayed the Great Man". You can see the crash coming from a long way off and that's half the fun.

Now, the language. This is a properly old book and it reads like one. The narrator is a dry grown-up using words like histrionic and perfunctory, while the children talk in dropped letters and "jus'" and "gotter". The gap between the two is where every single joke lives.

A confident reader who likes old books will love it. Everyone else will get far more out of it read aloud, where somebody else does the unpicking and you can do the voices.

What to read next

If your reader wants more of him, William's Happy Days starts with William realising on the first morning of the Christmas holidays that presents go both ways, and that he hasn't got any money.