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.
