Just William 05 – Still William

Still William by Richmal Crompton is the fifth Just William book, and it is very funny indeed for 8 year olds who enjoy watching a plan go magnificently wrong.

What happens

It opens with a handkerchief crisis. Ginger has been sent an enormous silk one covered in green dragons. Within two days Henry and Douglas have got one too. William, who is the leader of this gang, is still carrying grubby white ones.

He works on his mother. Coloured ones don't show the dirt, he explains, and white ones are terribly tiring for the eyes. She carries on darning socks.

He works on his father, who is reading the financial column and agrees with everything without hearing a word of it.

Then his older brother Robert says he can have his silk one if he fetches the Bishop's handkerchief first. Robert thinks he is being witty. William takes it as an instruction.

The Bishop is in the village the next day to open the Sale of Work and give a talk on temperance. Everywhere he looks there is a small freckled boy staring at him with enormous seriousness.

The Bishop is rather moved. He decides the child has an earnest, questing sort of face and hopes his little talk helped.

The boy is in fact working out how far it is to the garden gate.

What follows involves a deckchair, a nap, a leafy tree and a bent pin on a piece of string. It is one of the best silly set pieces you'll read anywhere.

The joke never changes and never wears out. Every adult sees a solemn, well-meaning child. Your reader sees precisely what he is really up to. Being the only person in the room who knows is a terrific feeling when you are eight.

The one hurdle is the language. The English here is older than your reader is used to. Sentences run long, the narration is formal, and the first chapter alone has a Sale of Work, a temperance meeting and a good deal of darning. William's own speech is spelled the way he says it, all dropped Gs and jus' this and wun't that.

Some children fall straight into it. Others need the opening chapter read aloud once before the rhythm clicks, and then they're away.

It suits a child who likes being a step ahead of every grown-up on the page.

What to read next

For another old-fashioned comedy where a child has a plan and the adults haven't a clue, The Naughtiest Girl is worth a go. Elizabeth announces that she will be so badly behaved at boarding school that they'll have to send her home, and she means every word of it. It reads a little older than this one.