And then there was William. I had read avidly, in less than a year I think though I tried to pace them out, the many William books I had found at Roshanara, and then I was sad that there was no more of him to take me away to a wonderful world. For that world had not only William’s rumbustious exploits and his zany reasoning, but also illustrated a period when courtship was earnest and romantic and when social relationships were static and ordered (which is why William’s disruptotiveness was so sensational). n

I had forgotten my own childhood collection. I don’t think I actually owned many William books, and the little paperbacks I had got later, when stories were recycled, had been given away. But of the two that remained, I was delighted to find one that had not been amongst the spoils of Roshanara, which I had not read in years.

This was Still William, an early work, published in 1925, when dance cards were still marked, and schoolboys wore collars that came loose. It had fourteen stories, all of them fun, with a couple quite preposterous so that I was once again laughing out loud.

The looniest situation was when William and his friends decided to play at being the residents of a little enclave of houses, and they are overheard by a French youth over to learn his English. He reports then that a man and a woman have got married, and that the Secretary of the Temperance Society was drunk, and that the fourth denizen, a Mr Burwash, was mad and had resisted the efforts of a policeman to capture him.

Kindly neighbours going to advise the woman that the man was already married was to be anticipated, but it took Richmal Crompton’s genius to make the woman think that he had one already referred not to a wife but to a maid, since she was trying to find one for him. The President of the Temperance Society confronting his errant Secretary was predictable, if splendidly presented, but the piece de resistance we General Moult trying to capture the lunatic by crawling towards him whereupon Mr Burwash decided a madman had to be humoured.

“Bow=wow!” he said.

If the General thought he was a dog, the General must be humoured.

“Bow-wow!” promptly replied the General.

The General also knew that madmen must be humoured.

They continued this conversation for several minutes.

It gets dottier, when the General, not knowing the reason, turned into a cat.

If not quite so preposterous, there are lots of other splendid moments in the book, as when William and Ginger, believing they are amongst savages on a desert island, attack the New School of Greek Dancing, whereupon A crowd of thin, lightly-clad females ran screaming indoors. One young man nimbly climbed a tree and another lay prone in a rose bush.

One need say no more to establish just what fun Richmal Crompton could be.