Just William 12 – William’s Happy Days

William's Happy Days is Richmal Crompton's set of separate William stories for 8 year olds, each one a plan that goes gloriously and completely wrong.

What happens

The first has William sent into town to buy fish. That is the whole errand. Fish.

What actually happens is that he gets off the bus early to climb the scaffolding on a half-built house, steals a lump of putty, meets an old man who finally teaches him how to cut a whistle out of a reed, and decides the only proper way to say thank you is to walk into a tobacconist's shop and take back the penknife the old man's brother has been keeping on his desk.

Then he is chased, and hides in a shop window, standing very still in a row of wax dummies with a price label pinned to his jacket.

A woman stops outside and tells her daughter the dummy on the end has an ugly face. A group of small boys arrive and explain to each other that the shopkeeper catches real boys after dark and dresses them up.

He gets home with no fish at all. He also gets the shilling, for reasons entirely outside his control.

That is how these stories work. William's reasoning is watertight and completely wrong, and the narrator stays calm and slightly amused about him the whole way through. Your reader gets to be inside his plan and see the flaw in it at the same time.

In the next one he receives the worst school report of his life and is walking home with it when his father's aunt gets lost in the woods. He tears the report into tiny pieces to leave a trail and saves her life, obviously, at great personal cost.

The two at the front are complete in themselves, so this is one your reader can dip into. There's no plot to lose.

Now the honest bit. It is ninety-odd years old and it reads like it.

William speaks in dropped letters throughout. Ext'ordin'ry. Jus'. 'Stead of. A confident eight year old will still trip over a page of it, and the money is shillings and sixpences, and the world runs on bus conductors, errands and closed-on-Wednesday shops.

Read the first few pages aloud before you hand it over. If your reader enjoys the sound of it, they'll be fine, and it is genuinely funny. If they are working hard at reading already, this one will cost them more effort than it gives back.

What to read next

For a child who takes to him, start at the beginning. The first Just William book has him spending an entire shilling at the picture palace and coming home convinced he is a simple country lover with weak lungs.