Live Fast, Die Young

Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Rosemary Sutcliff offer stiff competition; nevertheless I can’t help thinking that Smith (1967) by Leon Garfield might just be the single most accomplished novel for children in the English language. Garfield (1921–96) was a prolific author who also wrote splendid ghost stories, but Smith is his masterpiece. So deeply embedded in literary tradition that it amounts to a child’s gateway to Dickens, Fielding and Stevenson, this London novel par excellence has a brilliance of style, depth of characterization, vividness of description, thrillingly twisty plot and above all an indomitable child hero who wouldn’t disgrace any of those illustrious writers.

Smith is a wily denizen of the streets of Georgian London, a pick-pocket of dazzling skill, gifted with a homing pigeon’s knowledge of the topography and the ability to melt away unseen into the shadows with a handkerchief, watch or purse. ‘Smith,’ he introduces himself. ‘’Unted, ’ounded, ’omeless and part gin-sodden. Smith. Twelve years old. That’s me. Very small, but wiry, as they say. Dark ’aired and lately residing in the Red Lion tavern off Saffron ’ill.’ Within the first five pages he has witnessed a murder (only his third, public executions not included) when an old man he has just robbed is set upon by two men in brown. In a lightning change of perspective, the reader sees through the dying man’s eyes ‘a small, wild and despairing face whose flooded eyes shone out of the shadows’. In a grim world of privation and corruption, Smith’s humanity is never in doubt. He has been lodging in the inn’s basement with his two sisters, soft, romantic Fanny and brisk, no-nonsense Bridget, who make ends meet by dressmaking; or rather, altering the clothing of the recently hanged for resale. Being ‘nubbed’ is the accepted fate of such as Smith and the friend he venerates, the glamorous, green-eyed ‘high toby’ (highwayman) Lord Tom, whose ‘live fast, die young’ philosophy in no way discourages Smith from his hope of one day joining him in the highwayman’s life, the glorious ‘snaffling lay’. The two men in brown will haunt Smith for the rest of the novel as they hunt for the ‘McGuffin’ for which they committed murder: the pilfered document which illiterate Smith is unable to decipher. They are mere hirelings; more terrifying is the man with the soft voice who makes a strange ‘tapping, limping, scraping’ sound on the cobbles as he approaches unseen. Back at the Red Lion, excited Bridget and Fanny are convinced the document will net them a fortune, but Smith uneasily realizes that he’d be unwise to trust them entirely, and the gallant, alluring Lord Tom hardly at all. As usual in his life, Smith has only his own wits to rely on. Chance brings him to the blind justice Mr Mansfield, almost certainly based on the brother of the novelist Henry Fielding. We are thus firmly in the world of Tom Jones (a child’s version), with its inns, tobacco, coaches, tricorn hats and wigs. Having rescued this lumbering giant from the dangerous streets, Smith is taken into the Mansfields’ elegant Vine Street household, a world away from grimy Clerkenwell. There are clear echoes of Dickens, with Smith a much less innocent Oliver Twist, and Mansfield in the role of the kindly Mr Brownlow, wishing to believe in his charge’s innate goodness but apt to be influenced by the more cynical heads about him. An upright representative of the law, Mansfield has eyes so blank they terrify the lad almost as much as do the men in brown. The magistrate is all too aware of his forbidding demeanour, choosing to remain expressionless: ‘a bland face was the best security for one in his situation, and for a blind man to frown, scowl or laugh, even, was like a fool discharging his pistol wildly in the night’. ‘To me, angels and devils are all one,’ despairs Mansfield, but Smith too is forced to grope his way through a world of masks and hidden identities. Lord Tom’s romantic tales of waylaying ‘gay glitterers’, or coaches, on the heath belie the violence and greed of his trade. Meanwhile, Miss Mansfield, a bitter Miss-Havisham-in-waiting, has learnt to divorce her voice from her facial expression, with soothing tones intended for her blind father’s ears belied by looks of ‘phenomenal rage’. That this distorts her character is an insight almost too subtle for a children’s book. Younger readers can enjoy the guns, chases and peril while older ones will marvel at the psychological penetration. The novel moves memorably into comic mode with the peerless scene of Smith’s enforced bath (he’s wearing fragments of clothing that haven’t been removed for years). His ‘livestock’ is spooned off as it rushes to the surface of the water in a ‘speckled throng’. Neat and clean at last, he looks forward to the opportunity to learn to read, and thus decipher the precious document. Garfield never disdains to deploy coincidence of Dickensian proportions; it turns out Mr Mansfield knew the murdered gentleman, Mr Field, and another agent in the mystery lurks uncomfortably close to the Red Lion. Smith regularly hits on an emotional or even a political truth that those around him either aren’t aware of or seek to conceal. ‘You old blind justice, you,’ he mutters at Mansfield’s, and by extension the law’s, obtuseness when it comes to the reality of poverty. Characters retain an ability to surprise; Miss Mansfield’s rage conceals a kind heart after all, harsh Bridget has nerves of steel in a crisis, Lord Tom’s moral fluctuations dazzle and appal. Yet there’s also room, in the service of the plot, for a perfectly ‘flat’ character, in E. M. Forster’s celebrated formulation. Trying to enlist the Mansfields’ servant, Meg, to his cause, Smith is thwarted by her obstinate opposition to ‘cleverness’: ‘Brains? Wouldn’t have ’em if you paid me!’ Meg demonstrates Mrs Micawber levels of consistency (‘I never will desert Mr Micawber’) as well as Garfield’s mastery of technique. Another turn of fortune’s wheel sees Smith committed to Newgate as the snow descends (the action takes place over three months from autumn into a pitiless winter). Here Garfield shows he’s also as adept as Dickens when it comes to atmospherics:

The snow continued to fall . . . sometimes in great whirling quantities, and sometimes – for half a day at a stretch – in idle, drifting flakes that wafted wearily down as if the air was filled with invisible obstructions . . . The worn old streets were gone; the blackened roof-tiles were gone; the mournful chimneys and the dirty posts wore high white hats – and the houses them- selves seemed to float, muffled, in a sea of white.

At this point it would be remiss not to credit the original illustrator, Antony Maitland, for line drawings that form the perfect accompaniment to Garfield’s ornate prose. I bought a replacement paperback recently that featured a cartoon-like image of Smith as a Cock-er-nee sparrer on its cover, before finding a second-hand copy with the illustrations I remembered as a child. In Maitland’s design, the title and author appear graven beneath a pediment, while Smith is a tiny figure in coat, breeches and hat, dwarfed by tall buildings and the dome of St Paul’s, and overlooked by a lone pigeon; an unforgettable image of a child’s insignificance. Embellishing the story are more of Maitland’s marvels: Smith hiding under the bed in the Mansfields’ attic; smoking a pipe and drinking gin with his sisters in Newgate as he awaits his trial and possible execution; and, best of all, the scene, taking up a page and a half, wrapped around the text, of his daring escape attempt up through the ventilation passages to the roof of the gaol. The plot culminates in a wild pursuit on the deserted heath where Lord Tom plies his trade. A panicked Smith intercepts the imperilled Mansfield and blunders with him into the white-out, pursued as ever by the indefatigable men in brown. (Their path can be traced on the A-Z up Highgate Hill to Whetstone, nowadays unrecognizably built up.) With a sudden hardening of his heart Smith lets slip the magistrate’s hand and moves away to witness his solitary agony: ‘“Am I alone? Am I alone?” . . . And the wind blew as hard for the blind man as it did for the boy.’ It’s telling that Mansfield had lost his sight twelve years before, the length of Smith’s life. ‘You old blind justice, you,’ sighs Smith. ‘Give us your hand, then.’ Finally, there’s the image that scared me so much as a child that I hardly dared look at it; the man with the wooden leg who set the whole plot in motion, seated atop a snowy grave, and given by Maitland – and Garfield – an icy, implacable dignity. ‘Peg-top! Old Hop-an’-Scrape! Whispering Jack! . . . Who’d have thought the Devil was born among the green fields out Barnet way?’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 83 © Suzi Feay 2024