A Life Well Lived

Historians of children’s literature sometimes speak of a First and a Second Golden Age. The First was the Victorian/Edwardian period, when many of the most enduring classics were written – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Black Beauty, Treasure Island, Little Women, Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows – and the main genres of children’s literature (fantasy, adventure, animal stories, school stories, family sagas) were established. This period is generally thought to have come to an end around the outbreak of the First World War. For whatever reasons, the interwar period produced rather less memorable children’s literature.

The Second Golden Age dates from (roughly) the end of the Second World War to (roughly) the end of the 1970s, and is marked by novels of greater seriousness and complexity, tackling such themes as bullying, violence, death, war, family break-ups, sex – a world of literary realism quite different from the whimsy that had come before. In these stories children are acquainted with poverty, injustice and squalor, defy grown-ups, swear, fight, get injured and risk their lives. A child of the 1960s, I was born slap-bang in the middle of the Second Golden Age, and I grew up reading serious, sophisticated novels by such writers as Nina Bawden, Philippa Pearce – and Robert Westall. Robert Westall was one of the giants of this postwar Golden Age. Indeed, his writing continued well beyond that age’s somewhat arbitrary cut-off date – he produced over fifty books and was still writing up until his death in 1993. He won the prestigious Carnegie Medal twice (one of only a handful of children’s authors to do so), as well as the American Library Association Prize for Best Young Adult Fiction, the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award and the Smarties Book Prize, among many other honours. His books have been adapted for radio and television, and translated into eighteen languages. The ultimate test of literary quality is, of course, survival, and Westall’s books are still being read over thirty years after his death, when many other authors of the Second Golden Age have faded into obscurity. I hope that a new Slightly Foxed edition of his posthumously published 2006 memoir, The Making of Me, will acquaint or reacquaint many more readers with his wonderful, vivid, energetic storytelling. The Making of Me is an unusual memoir, a kind of collage, put together after his death by his friend Lindy McKinnel, who had encouraged him to try to get his first novel, The Machine-Gunners, published, and with whom he lived for the last six years of his life. It is based on a range of autobiographical writings, not all of them published, that Westall produced at various times throughout his life. But thanks to McKinnel’s sensitive editing, it doesn’t read like a patchwork. It’s the story of Westall’s life from birth (in fact, pre-birth, since it includes the lives of his grandparents, and describes a dream he believes is based on his memory of being in his mother’s womb) to his becoming a published author; and it reads as beautifully as anything Westall ever wrote. Because the first and foremost thing to say about Westall is that he was a fantastic writer, a natural. One experiences the same kind of pleasure reading him as watching a top tennis player or an expert dancer. He just knows how to do it. Almost every sentence carries a memorable image while some lines sound as if they belong in a poem – for example, this description of the sadistic headmaster at his primary school: ‘His eyes were hot and black and tiny and, behind horn-rimmed spectacles, they roved like homicidal black beetles.’ Or: ‘I was terrified of cows. They were as big as houses and they had great sharp horns and they looked at you.’ What makes his writing so good? It is vigorous and muscular, full of concrete nouns and active verbs. There are no wasted words. It’s prose that is anchored in the real, physical, sensory world. Here is his description of the Tyneside gasworks where his dad worked as a fore man fitter:

It was a magic kingdom where the blacksmith’s hammer rings out, where pools of beautiful slick oil, yellow, green and blue, lie on the cobbles, where carthorses stamp in gloom, where men stripped to the waist shovel coal into banks of glowing furnaces.

Westall’s first and probably still most famous novel was The Machine- Gunners, published in 1975 but set during the Second World War, when young Bob was growing up. The setting is the fictional city of Garmouth, but it’s really the Newcastle of Westall’s own boyhood, as this memoir makes clear. He belongs to that generation of Northern postwar writers, such as Alan Sillitoe and Bill Naughton, who rep resented the rough, tough, violent, vigorous life of the working-class as it really was. The Machine-Gunners centres on Chas MacGill, an amalgam of Westall himself and his son Christopher, who became part of a gang or ‘tribe’ of mates at the age of 12, thereby stimulating Westall into writing the novel. Chas finds a German bomber crashed in the woods. The pilot is dead, but the shiny, deadly black machine gun is still intact. Chas and his mates commandeer it for their collection of war souvenirs. So far, it sounds like fun. But as Chekhov said, if a gun is produced in Act 1, it must be fired in Act 5 . . . Although Westall wrote for and about children, his novels are far from childish. The air raids in The Machine-Gunners are real air raids. Bombs destroy houses, start fires and kill people. Fights between the boys are bloody. Defending himself against the terrifying bully Boddser Brown, Chas hits him with his gas-mask case, so that ‘a two inch flap of forehead hung loose’. The toughness of Westall’s writing makes most other children’s novels of the time seem anaemic. His novel Blitz Cat includes war, wounding, death and adultery, and contains no child characters at all (unless one counts the cat). Westall’s work is irrefutable testimony to the fact that children’s books can be ‘proper’ literature, by any standards you care to apply. I hope I haven’t given the impression, however, that Westall’s writing is all gritty realism. For him, the everyday world was full of magic and romance. This is apparent both in his novels and in his memoir. He compares his father – the ‘oily wizard’ – to Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings. Here is a description of the grammar school he attended:

The interior was dim with green and brown paint with honours boards so old and dark and withered that Robin Hood’s name might have appeared on them.

Reading The Making of Me gives an insight into Westall’s work – many characters and scenes from his life found their way into his novels. His favourite English teacher, Stan Liddell, appears, name unchanged, in The Machine-Gunners. His childhood visits to his father’s gasworks reappear in The Christmas Ghost. And his Nana’s habit of rifling Granda Westall’s pockets when he was drunk, to make sure there was money for food for the rest of the week, reappears in The Night Mare, Westall’s last, posthumously published novel. Yet The Making of Me is much more than a blueprint for the novels that would emerge from Westall’s early life. It’s a noteworthy piece of life-writing judged purely on its own merits, full of sharp observations, memorable character portraits, thoughts on religion, sport and politics, a vivid sense of place and time, and enjoyable flashes of humour (I liked the detail that the three Italian prisoners-of-war who were employed on the local farms were known as Alfonso, Luigi and That Useless Bugger). Writing was a part of Bob Westall’s life, certainly not the whole, and the later sections of this memoir touch on his career as a sculptor (he was mentored by no less a figure than Henry Moore), as an art teacher, and as an art critic and journalist. In fact, he was only a novelist for the last third or so of his life. He died at the age of 63 – he’d always been a heavy smoker, like his dad – but his was a life well lived. Westall wrote that to recharge himself he liked to sit ‘alone, with a cat on my knee, and Bach’s Double Violin Concerto and a single glass of whisky’. Which sounds like an excellent plan, especially if you supplement the cat, the Bach and the whisky with this memoir.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 89 © Brandon Robshaw