by Daisy Hildyard
Sometimes when you don’t have many memories of someone or something, you keep coming back to the same ones. One of the things I remember about my Grandma is her saying to me: boys will be boys – he’s like Just William, when my brother was teasing me when I was little.
More so than my brother, I was a fan of Richmal Crompton’s Just William books, published during the 1920s and on. I liked the adventures, the gangs, the jokes, the particular, evocative apparatus: catapults, dens, ginger beer, and so on. I think there’s a kind of inter-war literature – Swallows and Amazons, Just William, anything by P.G. Wodehouse – adventuring and even escapist, but not fantastical, that is particularly British, well-loved and easily recognised – the kind of stories that would be published by Boy’s Own magazine. The world is familiar to us as England, despite the fact that no-one alive has lived in any England like this. I think that this kind of inter-war literature seems to represent something very different to its close contemporaries in Modernist artworks, about which plenty’s been written. Just William was first published in 1922, although two more famous publications of that year might be Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land. Unlike these Modernist works, Swallows and Amazons, Just William, Wodehouse, and other country house/schoolroom dramas from this time seem to me to share a kind of escapism rooted in the everyday – a slightly coy, even camp, humorous, rollicking story which turns its face from the things going on in Europe at the time, whilst at the same time bringing the paraphernalia of its world vividly to life for the modern reader.
It’s strange how some people seem to return obsessively to a single point in history. The arrival of the post-war ‘Windrush’ generation of immigrants from all over the world has been branded as the beginning of a multiracial society in England (the HMS Windrush docked in Tilbury, Essex on 22 June 1948, carrying 492 soon-to-be Jamaican citizens of England).
Recently elected to represent Britain in the European Parliament, the British National Party’s speeches and policies build on a concept of a pre-Windrush Britain to which we can return through change in government. On the BNP website electoral candidates have uploaded their favourite books to a profile section which tells you a bit about the candidates and their lives and loves.
Alongside the predictable Dickens/Tolkein battering, the BNP’s reading of choice includes Wodehouse and Flashman (memoirs of the Rugby school bully), while a small army of them profess they return again and again to that childhood and adulthood favourite, Swallows and Amazons. Little surprise, given the attitudes they strike, that these people favour books written during the final years of pre-Windrush Britain, in which white people take tea whilst their little, white sons get into scrapes playing practical jokes on lugubrious butlers and cantankerous neighbours, or accidentally shattering the windows of the drawing-room with a cricket ball.
