The Boy Who Sailed the Ocean in an Armchair

The Boy Who Sailed the Ocean in an Armchair by Lara Williamson is a story for 10 year olds about a boy who never got to say goodbye.

What happens

It is half past eleven on a Monday night. Becket Rumsey is sitting in his dad's fish van outside a hairdressing salon called Crops and Bobbers.

An hour ago Dad woke him and his little brother up, threw everything into boxes, strapped Mum's old armchair onto the roof of the van next to the plastic one-eyed cod, and drove them to the seaside.

They have left Pearl behind. Pearl is Dad's girlfriend and she is more or less their mum. They are not to ring her. They are not to say goodbye to her. She will understand, apparently.

Becket does not think she will.

So he salutes and says okay Dad, you're the boss. He calls this the bluff. Then he starts working out how to get Pearl back.

It is like being handed Becket's whole brain at once. He is funny in that eleven year old way where the joke keeps running off with him. Dad is a prawn short of a prawn cocktail. Billy talks nonsense ninety nine per cent of the time and the other one per cent is utter nonsense. Pearl loves them to the moon and back, which Billy made him measure, so he can tell you that is 768,800 km of love.

Underneath all of it he is very sad, and he does not always notice that himself.

There is something you should know before they start. Becket's mum died when he was four. She went into hospital to have Billy and did not come home, and he never said goodbye to her. He tells you this on the first page. It is backstory rather than something that happens in the story, but it is also what the whole book is really about, so it does not go away.

For a child who has lost someone, that could land hard. It could also be the opposite. Becket says the unsayable thing out loud in the first few paragraphs and then decides straight away to do something about it, which some children find a real comfort.

Dad comes off badly for a while too, and your reader is allowed to be cross with him. Becket certainly is.

What to read next

Dan Hope sounds an awful lot like Becket. A Boy Called Hope has him at eleven as well, keeping a list of things he wants to come true, and the biggest one on that list is that his dad would love him.