For many, the mention of “Just William” evokes a nostalgic pastoral from interwar childhood: one of revolving maypoles on sleepy village green, presbyteries frequented by well-meaning, curious parishioners, games of conkers and knock-down ginger leading to the twilight is played. The reality, of course, is that few readers have experienced such queer youth: the carefree, sugar-coated gleam of a vanished Britain. As a friend of mine puts it, the freedoms William enjoyed in a safe and rural universe contrasted sharply with the reality of her own childhood: ‘You could go alone to the fields or the fair. There wasn’t that much parental control.”
It’s a childhood that feels strange now, the stories packed with action: the boys torment stray cats, make “drop water”, swing homemade catapults, walk miles across fields and through hedges, climb trees, fall into ditches and draw the wrath of their schoolmasters , candy store owners and local farmers, and sometimes all at once. It’s worth noting that the “Just” from “Just William,” the title of Crompton’s first official book of William stories, published in 1922, is not a nod to his moral character, but rather a sort of shrug: take him or leave him, he won’t change.
“I often call him my Frankenstein monster,” Crompton said in a 1968 radio interview. “I’ve tried to get rid of him, but it’s really impossible to get rid of him.”
The evil does not come from malice: it is usually a product of benign misunderstanding. And yet, in a world of Blyton books, filled with “well-to-do” kids embarking on heroic country adventures or slumping boarding school, the William stories can feel outrageous, even dangerous. The author’s ambiguous name, especially in the early years of the series, added to some female readers the exciting implication — normally limited to more moralistic dishes — that these were “boys’ books.”
Perhaps this appealed to Crompton himself. The daughter of a vicar and lifelong Conservative, Crompton was born in Lancashire in 1890 to a comfortable middle-class family. She taught classical languages at a girls’ school until she was 32, when she contracted polio. The illness left her disabled and, forced to stop teaching, she took up writing. Over the next 50 years, Crompton would publish more than 300 “Just William” stories, as well as 40 adult novels (none of which turned out to be a lasting literary legacy). She was halfway through her 359th story at the time of her death, in 1969.
Of course, William did not enter the 21st century unscathed. One story, “William and the Nasties” (1935), was deemed to have anti-Semitic undertones (though intended as an allegory of fascism) and has been removed from reprints. Certain twists and turns and instances of “going black” and playing “Cowboys and Indians”, as well as the treatment of animals, have been reviewed by the book’s publisher, Macmillan.
