The Otterbury Incident

C. Day-Lewis's The Otterbury Incident is a post-war town adventure for 10 year olds about a broken window and what it ends up costing.

What happens

George is writing this down because Rickie, the English master, told him to. He starts, as instructed, with the morning Nick kicked a football through the classroom window next to the Headmaster's study.

Before that there's a battle. Two gangs of boys, Ted's company and Toppy's, fighting mock wars over a bomb site they call the Incident. There's a tank built in the school workshop out of wood and old bicycle wheels, sticky bombs made with somebody's chemistry set, and dustbins used as a roadblock.

Then the football goes through the glass and a real problem starts. Four pounds fourteen and six for a new window. Nick hasn't got it. He's already lost his nerve and told his uncle somebody else did it.

So the two gangs sign a peace treaty, on parchment pinched from the art room, with proper sealing wax. Then they go out to earn the money. And somewhere in the middle of earning it they get tangled up with two men in the town who are up to something.

George is very good company. He shows off, he forgets what he's meant to be telling you, he stops to explain that he always skips the bits in novels where they describe people and then describes two people at length anyway.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Nick is the way he is because a bomb fell on his house and killed his parents, and he was dug out of the rubble. That's stated plainly in the opening chapter as the reason the other boys look after him. Later, cornered about the money, he says he'll run away and then that he'll kill himself, and Ted tells him to pack it in and punches his shoulder.

None of it is drawn out and the book doesn't linger. But it's a lot to meet in the first few chapters, and a child who is sensitive to that will need you nearby. There's casual swearing of the "who the hell are you" sort, and beatings from adults get talked about as though they're normal.

If your reader can take all that, what they get is a very good gang indeed, doing something decent and getting in far deeper than they meant to.

What to read next

For another set of children in an English village who work it out before the police do, The Mystery of the Missing Necklace is in the library. A gang of jewel thieves has set up in Peterswood and the Find-Outers are on the case, mostly to annoy the local constable.