Just William 07 – William the Outlaw

William the Outlaw by Richmal Crompton is a very funny story for 8 year olds about four boys who decide that school is unreasonable and that they will go and live in a wood instead.

What happens

It's a lovely afternoon. The sun is out. They are walking to school for geometry, and every one of them has been kept in for something already.

William works himself up into a proper speech about it. Miners get trades unions and strikes to stop them working too hard. Boys get nothing.

Ginger goes one better. His conscience, he explains, is telling him to go and get some fresh air, which is really his duty, so his parents won't have to pay doctor's bills.

And that's it. They turn round and off they go to Ringers' Hill to be Outlaws for the rest of their lives, living on blackberries and roots and rabbits they'll catch themselves.

Half an hour later it isn't going well.

Douglas has eaten a heap of unripe blackberries and can think about nothing except his own insides. Ginger has bravely tested a root and says the taste is getting stronger rather than weaker. William has used every match on a fire that won't light, and then Douglas blows it out.

Henry comes back from hunting rabbits having chased them about and caught none.

The comedy is in the gap between the plan and the afternoon. Every boy is sure he's the one suffering most. They argue about whose martyrdom counts for more while the fire sits there, out.

Then they look down the hill and see the headmaster coming up it, with the second master behind him, and several more behind that.

Your reader should know that this one is old. Money is in pennies, school is run by masters and prefects, and writing lines is the punishment. The songs the boys bawl on the way to the hill are songs nobody has sung for a very long time.

The sentences are longer than a modern book's too, and the boys' speech is written the way they say it, all dropped letters and squashed words.

None of that slows the joke down. William is completely certain about everything, right up to the moment he isn't, and that hasn't dated at all.

What to read next

If your child wants to know how running away is supposed to go, Five Run Away Together has a girl planning exactly that, down to the food to bring, on an island she thinks of as her own.