Just William – William and the Witch

William and the Witch by Richmal Crompton is a collection of comic stories for 8 year olds about a boy whose helpful ideas leave a trail of destruction behind them.

What happens

The first opens with William feeling his life has amounted to nothing. He's been a spy, a detective, a diver and a lion tamer, all in his head, and he's bored of the lot.

Then he overhears his older brother explaining what a psychiatrist does. You lie down, you talk, somebody writes it down, and you're cured. William works out that this is the easiest job in the world.

So he pins a notice to the door of the old barn. WILLIAM BROWN SEKKITRIST. MENTAL TRUBBLES KURED. THREEPENCE EECH. (The spelling is his own, and he's very pleased with it.)

And people actually come.

One hands over ten shillings, a fortune, so now William feels he ought to do something for it. The man said his house bored him. He said there was no colour in his life. William and his friend Ginger fetch four tins of leftover paint and fix that.

The stories stand alone, so your reader can pick one up and put it down again, which suits a child who reads in bursts. Each follows the same lovely shape. William takes a scrap of grown-up conversation he's only half understood, acts on it with total confidence, and the adults are left standing in the wreckage.

You never get inside his head the way you would with a modern narrator. You watch him from outside and work out what he's thinking, which is a slightly different reading skill.

The bigger thing is the age of the writing. These are mid twentieth century English stories. Money is in shillings and pence, the sentences are long, and words like "recumbent" and "pugnaciously" turn up without apology. There's a passing reference to a tribe of "savages" in one of William's daydreams that would not be written now.

A hungry reader will enjoy the vocabulary. A child still finding chapter books hard work will get more out of it read aloud, where William's grumbling delivery does half the job for you.

What to read next

If it goes down well there's a whole shelf of him. Begin with the first Just William book. It opens with a shilling from an aunt, sixpence of Gooseberry Eyes and a trip to the Picture Palace that gives him several ideas he really should not act on.