Just William 08 – William in Trouble

Richmal Crompton's William in Trouble is a comic classic for 8 year olds about a boy who cannot leave a single thing alone.

What happens

It opens with an archaeological dig in the village. A real Roman villa, real Roman coins, and a small white haired gentleman with a beard supervising the trench.

William is not impressed. As far as he can work out, the ancient Romans spent their entire lives burying pots and then breaking them, and their language is enough to put anyone off before you start.

He gets bored watching. He takes out his catapult, announces he can make every coin in the heap jump, and hits the old gentleman in the back instead. The old gentleman goes head first into the trench.

The Outlaws run. Douglas, who is the pessimist of the four, is quite certain they will all be hanged.

So William has one of his great ideas. If they cannot go back to the real dig, they will find a Roman villa of their own.

What follows is the best part of the book. They filch four gardening tools from four households with wildly varying success, choose a ploughed field, and William buries six halfpennies and two deliberately smashed flowerpots for his workers to dig up at intervals.

Then he strides up and down beside the trench with a stern frown, doing an impression of the archaeologist, and the bored schoolchildren watching the real excavation begin drifting over to listen to him instead.

He informs them the pot fragment is King Julius Caesar's teapot. Somebody objects that Caesar was not a king. William offers to fight him about it. The boy, who has fought William before, decides Caesar was a king after all.

The pleasure of these books is how completely seriously William takes himself. He is never embarrassed, not once. He is fluent, confident and wrong, and nobody can shift him.

Two fair warnings, both about fit rather than content. The dialogue is written in dropped letters, so a lot of the page looks like "somethin' fishy about those Romans". A confident reader falls straight into the rhythm. A reader still working hard at decoding will find it slow going.

And it is a 1920s world. There is a housemaid, a cook and a gardener in the background, the boys are at a school with masters and Latin, and Douglas can seriously believe that knocking a man into a trench will get all four of them hanged.

What to read next

William is at it again in William the Outlaw, dragging himself and the other three to a geometry lesson on a beautiful afternoon and deciding, out loud and at length, that afternoon school is simply all wrong.