RICHMAL CROMPTON AND THE PHARISEES

I sang in my chains.

                                                          Dylan Thomas

 

I have never been an unqualified admirer of the William books.  There are too many stories, and only so many situations in which a perennial eleven year old can find himself.  An element of tired repetition creeps in.  And the formula that worked for 1922 is uneasy in the era after World War Two.  There is an uncertainty about William in the modern world, and in the later books – for me, at least - the series loses its direction.

Crompton, also, was the victim of her own success.  The William series began life as books for adults about children.  Popularity turned them into books for children about children.  It is in these stories that the false note is most consistently struck: when William’s contrived stupidity and destructiveness  lead the reader – this reader anyway – into sympathy for the unoffending victims whose lives have been disrupted or whose property has been damaged.  Quantity becomes the ruin of quality.

But the quality is there: in Crompton’s oeuvre, it is well worth extracting the metal from the ore.  And in the best of the stories – those written for adults in the period between the wars – there is gold to be found.  In this world of Bolshevism and butlers, bohemians and Bands of Hope, there is vivid characterisation, acute social observation, acid wit, writing of a very high order, and a timeless message.

 

A striking feature about William is how far he is drawn to those outside his own social class: even, sometimes, to tramps and burglars.  He eagerly gives the earless and shifty Mr Blank (‘William’s Burglar’) the details of all the properties in the neighbourhood, including descriptions of the doors and windows of his own house.  Other heroes are the sweep, and the removal men (‘The Fête – and Fortune’) who swear at each other and give him a piece of cold sausage.  When William swaps clothes with Helbert, the gipsy boy, (‘William’s Extra Day’) William feels gratitude; although Helbert has by far the better deal. 

Taken to London (‘William’s Evening Out’), he responds with contempt to middle-class streets and shops.  What he yearns for is the glimpse he has had of “...a world of street urchins who fought  and wrestled and gave vent to piercing whistles., and hung on to the backs of carts, and paddled in the gutter, and rang front door bells and fled from policemen.”  

William’s choices – rejected by his family - for his Christmas party include the milkman, and Fisty Green the butcher’s boy.  Encountering Eglantine, the cockney chimney sweep’s daughter in ‘Not Much’, William is “blissfully happy walking along beside her.”

            When it comes to females, however, it is not simply the case that William is drawn only to the working class.   William likes – and is liked by - females with a particular kind of personality, who between them cover the whole social spectrum.

  In ‘William Below Stairs’ - when he is mistaken for the  new Boots in the household where his father is to dine - the kitchen-maid winks at him and giggles, and loves his conversation; but the house-maid treats him with contempt, and the Cook with hostility. 

            If William likes Eglantine, he also likes the quintessentially middle-class Joan from next door.  She, in turn, adores him.  So does Lady Barbara d’Arcey (‘Kidnappers’): “seven years old... fair, frilly, fascinating.”   So does Rosemary, daughter of Clarice Verney “the famous actress”.  (‘William the Showman’).

            Neither is William’s appeal to the opposite sex limited to those of his own age.  Grown up females of a certain type are also attracted to him: and he to them.  There is Miss Cannon, the love of Robert’s life, (‘William the Intruder’) whose face dimples when she laughs, and who prefers William to Robert; or Miss Holding, (‘William - The Avenger’) who cries with laughter at William’s revenge on her obnoxious suitor, Clarence;   or Miss Fairlow (‘William the Showman’) who gives William her butterfly collection, and makes fun of The Higher Thinkers.    All are very middle class; each one is a dreamer; each one has a glorious sense of humour; and each is, in her own way, a rebel against convention. 

            That, I think, is the conflict at the heart of the William books.  William and Joan give away the food for William’s Christmas party to a girl whose father has been newly-released from prison, and William and his Outlaws (‘William Advertises’) champion Mr Moss the sweet seller against the chain of Mallards sweet shops, but the prevailing tone is  not anti-capitalist, as such. The war in William is a war not against the middle class, but against middle-class respectability, and the ultimate source of this, I think, is not in Freud (despite the superego) nor in Das Kapital, but in the pages of the New Testament.

 Nothing is more typical of the spirit of the William books than the episode in Mark in which the Pharisees condemn the disciples for plucking ears of corn on Sunday.  In their defence, Christ cites the example of David, who gave his men the sacred bread to eat.  Even more calculated to awaken distaste in Pharisees of all eras – although Christ does not refer to it – would have been the episode in which David sang and danced before the Ark of the Covenant.  Regrettable religious ‘enthusiasm’. 

If there is a ‘message’ in the William books, then it is the reply - “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” - that Christ gave to the Pharisees for their oppressive and meaningless rules.  Crompton’s war was a war with the Pharisaic spirit of her own era.  When William responds to those whom his mother describes as “common”, he is drawn not to their class, but to their vitality: those who, being unrespectable, have not had the chance to be frozen by respectability.

William is like a new version of The Lord of Misrule, traditionally appointed on Twelfth Night: briefly turning the established order of things on its head until the restoration of normality.

At his worst, William is simply an agent of chaos; but at his best he is an agent of joy: bringing life and colour and liberation to the dead and grey and stifled world of social convention.  Thus the morose and silent parrot of ‘Not Much’ that screams with excitement when William is in view.

William works his magic on the old.  In ‘The Cure’, Great-Aunt Jane is revived from a potentially-fatal illness when – her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright – she watches William and Francis fight each other at her bedside:  ‘“Go it William!  ...Get one in on his nose!”’

            In ‘Aunt Jane’s Treat’, another Great-Aunt Jane finds temporary liberation from the narrowness of her upbringing in the fun of the fair.  Comparably, in another story, Grandfather Moore, whose only recourse to defiance is a refusal to go to bed when he should, compounds his rebellion by sneaking off with William to the circus. 

Even the great and famous fall under William’s spell.  In ‘What What Delayed the Great Man’, a member of the Cabinet, due to address a political meeting, finds his way instead to William’s play in the stable.  William’s father, investigating the noise, discovers that “A wistful-looking old man was an absorbed spectator of the proceedings.”   And in ‘William Advertises’, The Duke of  Ashbridge is bored almost to tears by the vicar’s wife and the  Sale of Work committee.  Encountering The Outlaws, “With a lightening of the heart he recognised more entertaining company.”

In contrast to the self-imprisoned, there are those unfortunates that have imprisonment thrust upon them.  There can be no more potent image of imprisonment than a parrot on a perch. The William books are full of liberated animals:  parrots that fly out through open windows, dogs that escape their chains, cows that escape their fields, insects that escape their boxes, wild animals that escape their cages.  Very often, William has played a part in bringing about the situation.

            The other great image of imprisonment in the stories is that of that of hapless captive audiences: bored and dispirited recipients of the improving material – whether total abstinence, or nut cutlets, or some aspect of high culture - relentlessly foisted upon them.    

            In ‘William and the Early Romans’, there are three groups within the audience.  “Some there were who had come to sleep and had already attained their object.” Then there are those who “... knew that to be really cultured you had to make yourself see beauty in things you knew in your heart to be ugly.”  But the majority experience “a sudden glorious conviction that something was wrong, and from their faces the expressions of boredom were disappearing as if by magic.”  The Professor’s last words are drowned in the general hilarity.    In one story after another, one audience after another is rescued by laughter from some new diminution of its capacity for joy. 

 

Richmal Crompton was a survivor of polio and breast cancer: illnesses with consequences you live with, rather than change.  Enduring the status quo, rather than being able significantly to alter it, seems to be the political viewpoint of William.  In ‘William Enters Politics’, the Liberals and Conservatives both want to reduce the price of bread, and William, deciding there is nothing to choose between them, ends up dismissing both groups with contempt.  In ‘The Weak Spot’ Jameson Jameson’s flirtation with Bolshevism ends when the members of the younger generation claim the possessions of their older siblings.   For Crompton, I think, the social condition is the human condition.  To be alive is to be in prison; the best you can hope for is a temporary escape. 

            For every instance of escape in Crompton, there is also an instance of return.  Great Aunt Jane returns to the self-imposed restrictions of her Plymouth-Brethren upbringing. Ginger’s aunt’s parrot - after disrupting a temperance meeting with ribald comments and vulgar sniggers, and driving the Outlaws to frenzy by its ability to evade capture -  voluntarily returns to its cage.  Toto, the diminutive missing dog of ‘The Outlaws Deliver the Goods’, is found – though “jaunty, abandoned and debauched-looking” - on his way home.  Dog and parrot both know who feeds them.  Even William, after his night out in London, returns “to the bosom of outraged respectability.”

            On the other hand, all those who escape find renewal in their temporary freedom.  Each infuriated workman who pursues William down the road with curses, returns refreshed to his task.  Sir Giles Hampton, the great actor, likewise returns to London “cheered and invigorated”.  As with Crompton’s mocking parrots, how well you cope with life’s imprisonment depends upon your state of mind. 

 

Richmal Crompton’s war was with the officious, whereas the threat to us today is from the official.  Developments in technology have given officialdom unprecedented powers to interfere with every aspect of our lives.  The old adage that “Nanny knows best” – or thinks she does – has never had more potency.  But if the weapons have changed, the enemy is still the same.

            Richmal Crompton is an ally in that ongoing battle; her gift of laughter a defence  and defiance against the solemn and the self-important, who would seek to paint our world in ever duller shades of grey.