Robert Westall, who died in 1993, was a writer for only the last third of his life, but during that time he produced some of the best children’s books to come out of the decades following the Second World War. His first novel, The Machine Gunners, won the 1975 Carnegie Medal (which he later won a second time, in addition to many other prizes). One reviewer wrote that his son had never forgotten the scene in which Grandma is blown off the lavatory by a wartime bomb.
Westall started his working life as an art teacher and that first novel was written in a series of exercise books for his own son Christopher, without thought of publication. He was a modest man whose writing was rooted in the working-class life of Tyneside where he grew up and where his father was a foreman fitter at the local gasworks. Though he never wrote a memoir he did leave behind some autobiographical sketches that take him from birth through school to the publication of his first book, and these were brilliantly woven together after his death into The Making of Me by his partner Lindy McKinnel.
Vivid, warmly human and written with a clarity and directness that make you feel its truth, it says everything about why Westall’s children’s books are still read and admired today. It takes us inside the head and heart of a boy growing up during the 1930s and ’40s in the shadow of the great gasworks, a world benignly ruled over by his father, an almost godlike figure to his son, apparently able to fix anything, returning at night from his magical kingdom with ‘boots of a fearsome chemical blackness and a strong smell of benzene on his cap’.
Westall catches the feel of a tight-knit community and the familiar characters who loom so large in the life of a child. Pale widowed Mrs Cook, their next-door neighbour, sits in her backyard with her small feathery dog, talking comfortably with her friends. This is Robert’s first outdoor memory. It’s as if she has aways been reassuringly there. ‘Like God she needs no justifying.’ When Robert’s family moves to a new house in a better part of town and he has to say goodbye to Mrs Cook and her dog, though his parents are delighted at this step up in the world he is inconsolable, suddenly overwhelmed by everything he is losing in his cosy shabby old neighbourhood. It’s a truly heartrending scene, one of many in this lovely and original book that describe not just the making of the man but also the making of a writer.
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