When my wife and I first met and struck out on that long process of get­ting to know one anoth­er, one of the ques­tions that came up at some point was: what was your favourite children’s book? Amaz­ing­ly, we chose the same one — The Otter­bury Inci­dent by C Day Lewis — and this coin­ci­dence was com­pound­ed by the fact that nei­ther of us knew any­one else who had even heard of this book, nev­er mind read it or cher­ished it as their favourite.

In my case, the book, I believe, was on a book­shelf at pri­ma­ry school and I guess I must have bor­rowed it, or per­haps it was read by the whole class (the great span of time that has elapsed since then has, alas, greyed out the specifics…though look­ing it up, I see that it was in fact on the UK Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion read­ing list for 1972!). In any event, I came to own it, as did  my wife, and to this day both copies sit along­side each oth­er on one of our daugh­ters’ own book­shelf. So what was it that cap­tured our imag­i­na­tions?

Writ­ten in 1948, it is a sto­ry set in the fic­tion­al small provin­cial town of Otter­bury, short­ly after the Sec­ond World War. Although the town had been large­ly untouched by the war, it had sus­tained an acci­den­tal hit from a Ger­man bomb leav­ing a bomb-site (known as the “Inci­dent”) which is used for war-games by two rival gangs of boys (Ted’s Com­pa­ny and Toppy’s Com­pa­ny) from the local school. A plot involv­ing some stolen mon­ey draws the boys into con­flict with local spiv John­ny Sharp and his sleazy accom­plice “the Wart”, and a series of events lead the boys on a mis­sion to uncov­er ille­gal goings-on in the town. An excit­ing denoue­ment involves a raid on dodgy local busi­ness­man Skinner’s yard (with the rival gangs now col­lab­o­rat­ing against the com­mon ene­my) and his ille­gal activ­i­ties are bust­ed wide open, with every­thing pret­ty much wrapped up just as the police arrive.

Cecil Day-Lewis (father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis) was pri­mar­i­ly a poet (and indeed was Poet Lau­re­ate from 1968 until his death in 1972) but he also wrote mys­tery sto­ries under the pseu­do­nym Nicholas Blake. He only ever wrote two books for chil­dren (the oth­er is 1933’s Dick Willough­by), but The Otter­bury Inci­dent is pitched per­fect­ly for young minds, and its char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion is engag­ing.

Then there are the illus­tra­tions by Edward Ardiz­zone: sim­ple, charm­ing, evoca­tive. My wife says her first con­cep­tion of what a “spiv” looked like (even before Pri­vate Walk­er from Dad’s Army, pre­sum­ably!) came from the illus­tra­tion of John­ny Sharp. We recent­ly vis­it­ed the Hep­worth in Wake­field and saw an exhi­bi­tion of lith­o­graphs from the School Prints scheme in the for­ties (an inter­est­ing sto­ry in its own right). One of the prints fea­tured some sketched fig­ures whose style jumped out as strange­ly familiar…looking up Ardizzone’s name we saw that indeed it was one and the same artist respon­si­ble for those images from our youth. So, to both writer and illus­tra­tor, we salute you!

The intro­duc­tion is a mas­ter­class in sum­mari­sa­tion: in two para­graphs the whole sto­ry and its char­ac­ters are set up per­fect­ly.

Begin at the begin­ning, go to the end, and there stop — that’s what Rick­ie, our Eng­lish mas­ter, told me when it was set­tled I should write the sto­ry. It sounds sim­ple enough. But what was the begin­ning? Haven’t you won­dered about where things start? I mean, take my sto­ry. Sup­pose I say it all began when Nick broke the class­room win­dow with his foot­ball. Well, OK, but he would­n’t have kicked the ball through the win­dow if we had­n’t just got super-heat­ed by win­ning the bat­tle against Top­py’s com­pa­ny. And that would­n’t have hap­pened if Top­py and Ted had­n’t invent­ed their war game, a month before. And I sup­pose they’d not have invent­ed their war game, with tanks and tom­my guns and ambush­es, if there had­n’t been a real war and a stray bomb had­n’t fall­en in the mid­dle of Otter­bury and made just the right sort of place — a mass of rub­ble, pipes, rafters, old junk etc — for play­ing this par­tic­u­lar game. The place is called ‘The Inci­dent’ by the way. But then you could go back fur­ther still and say there would­n’t have been a real war if Hitler had­n’t come to pow­er. And so on and so on, back into the mists of time. So where does any sto­ry begin?

I asked Rick­ie about this, and he said, ‘Jump right into the deep end of the sto­ry, don’t hang about on the edge’ — which inci­den­tal­ly was con­tra­dict­ing what he’d said first. ‘Start with the morn­ing you kids had the bat­tle and Nick broke the win­dow’ he said. When Mr Richards calls us ‘kids’, nobody objects: he’s a decent chap, as school­mas­ters go; and it’s quite true we’re young — even Ted and Top­py aren’t four­teen yet. But when John­ny Sharp and the Wart strolled past our ambush on the Inci­dent that morn­ing, and John­ny Sharp said in his sneer­ing way, ‘You kids up to your games again? Flip­ping heroes, ain’t we all?’ our blood fair­ly boiled, as you can imag­ine. We may be kids. But it was us kids who raised more than £5 for the bro­ken win­dow, and us kids who tracked down a gang of crooks and inci­den­tal­ly were thanked in pub­lic by Inspec­tor Brook. So there’s the start of my nov­el. You’ve got to have a title before you can start, I mean, and per­son­al­ly I think The Otter­bury Inci­dent is a smash­ing title.