Monday
I put my nine-year-old grandson Alban on a flight back to Washington, D.C. yesterday after 10 magical days with him. It didn’t start well because he had to watch his great grandmother being loaded onto an ambulance on his first evening. (She fell while we were washing the dishes and fractured her pelvis.) The rest of the time was positive, however, as we played board games, cards, and ping pong, went hiking and swimming, hit a tennis ball around, and (of course) read novels.
One of my favorites has now, gratifyingly, become one of his. Cecil Day-Lewis, a one-time Professor of Poetry at Oxford (he beat out C.S. Lewis for the position) and the English poet laureate following John Masfield, immediately after World War II wrote a children’s book. The Otterbury Incident is about two gangs of middle schoolers who reenact war battles before joining forces to help out one of their members. In the process, they uncover and take down a counterfeiting and black-market ring.
As exciting as it is, what sets it apart is the first-person narrator, who adds all the dramatic flourishes that can be expected from a literate 12-year-old. Alban and I, for instance, enjoyed George’s description of their war games, such as this line:
Bodies, locked in mortal combat, were rolling about everywhere: the air was rent with the screams of the dead and the dying.
And George’s dramatic summation of the day:
One advantage I have over the ordinary historian is that I don’t have to bother about a lot of dates, which are sickening things, to my mind, and quite unnecessary. It all happened over the weekend. First, a great victory; then the moment when disaster stared us in the face; then the recovery from this crippling blow and the turning of the tables on a dastardly enemy…
Here’s his description of a critical turning point:
Then the idea came to him which was destined to write a new chapter in the history of Otterbury.
And of his efforts to become a detective:
Anyway, as we walked back into the town, I was revolving in my mind all that I knew of the criminal mentality—which, I admit, comes chiefly from books, though Mr. Robertson did say once that for a Rogue’s Gallery and Chamber of Horrors rolled into one, nobody need go further than the Upper Fourth at our school.
It’s particularly enjoyable watching George wrestle with literary conventions. The Lewis Carroll-King of Hearts advice he gets (“Begin at the beginning, go to the end, and there stop”) conflicts with “Jump right into the deep end of the story, don’t hang about on the edge.” And then there’s the problem with descriptions, which he encounters when he needs to describe two of the villains:
I’d better try to describe this pair of blisters. Personally, speaking for myself, I always skip the bits in novels where they describe people: you know—“He had a strong, sensitive face and finely chiseled nostrils,” or, “Her eyes were like pools of dewy radiance, her lips were redder than pomegranates”—that sort of thing doesn’t get one anywhere, I mean, it doesn’t help you to see the person, does it?
He cites a line from a Robert Browning poem at one point, and I think “wild surmise” from “Upon First Reading Chapman’s Homer” shows up twice. Anyway, I understand why a reading crazy tweenager such as I was loved the book and why Alban is drawn to it now. We even read the exact copy that I checked out from Sewanee’s Thurmond Library in the early 1960s as my parents saw it in a library sale years later and bought it for me.
In a future post I’ll tell you about reading Alban the French children’s book The Knights of King Midas, by Paul Berna, which is another book about a gang of children who come together to work on a common project. A man overheard us reading it in the airport and was so entranced that he took a photo of the cover so that he could track it down.
Maybe kids are just an excuse that adults use for revisiting childhood favorites.
