Michael de Larrabeiti's website

The Borribles online

Interviewed in 1976 and talking about some famous children’s books — Swallows and Amazons, The Hobbit and Watership Down — Mick de Larrabeiti remarked that they “were a bloody long way from Battersea”. The occasion was the publication of what was to be his most celebrated story: The Borribles, a highly original saga of gang warfare between feral child-men running wild on the streets on the South Bank of the Thames. Borribles, with their pointy ears concealed beneath woolly caps, matured very slowly through a process that leads from “a bad start” to the attainment of independence through total “unmanageability”. Only by having their ears clipped can they be returned to normal childhood.

Larrabeiti may have been himself a proto-Borrible. He was born in Battersea in 1934, his father a shadowy figure of Basque descent who seems to have had an alternative ménage in Streatham, and his mother a child of one of those extended working-class dynasties who used to inhabit the old villages of London. Portraits of them are given in the semi-fictional memoir of his childhood A Rose beyond the Thames (1978) where he sketches his rackety and unstable early career which included his evacuation to a startled Arundel in West Sussex in 1939 and his life on the streets during his truncated education at Clapham Central School. (The Arundel experience would help to inspire the plot of his novel Foxes’ Oven, published after several vicissitudes in 2003.)

Although he left school at 16 with six O levels he had no guidance as to how he might build on that start and his awareness of his intellectual capacities was constantly sabotaged by his dislike of the formal constraints of a “regular life” — no hanging his hat on a pension for him. With great, if intermittent, application he got over numerous academic hurdles: A levels in English and French and an O level in Latin which enabled him to study for four years at Trinity College Dublin in the early 1960s where he gained a first in French. A Leverhulme scholarship for a year at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, along with an abortive year of teacher-training at Bangor, North Wales, was followed by his acceptance to read for a DPhil at Keble College, Oxford. But throughout those 12 or so years he was also involved in a scatter of short-term jobs, many stemming from his self-taught skills as a film cameraman. In 1961, just before going up to Trinity, he took part in a four-month motorcycle trek from London to India as photographer to a group exploring Marco Polo’s route to China.

Initially through a friendly contact he also got work as a travel courier and over the years came to spend much time in France, mostly in the South to which he was devoted, as he records in another memoir, French Leave (2003). Impressed by the character and independence of the shepherds of Provence he joined — very much as un étranger — their great transhumance, driving several thousand sheep 150 miles or so to summer pastures in the Alpes de Provence. In doing so he got to know some of the stories which the shepherds told among themselves on their journeys and these he later translated as The Provençal Tales (1988), which attractively combined their traditional stories with his own account of his journeyings. (His DPhil, which, predictably, came to nought since it carried no grant, was aimed at establishing a relationship between the shepherds of the Languedoc and the troubadours of medieval times.)

For several years in the 1970s Larrabeiti had been struggling with the memoir that was to become The Rose beyond the Thames, but before completing it to his satisfaction he had turned to fiction and produced the first of what he hoped would be a series of westerns: The Redwater Raid (1972), written under the pseudonym Nathan Lestrange. The deal for subsequent volumes fell through and, prompted by a suggestion that he might write a children’s book, he investigated the market and came across the popular stories of the Wombles of Wimbledon Common by Elisabeth Beresford. Appalled by what he saw as the cosiness and the self-satisfaction evident in the books, he was impelled to his invention of the Borribles who would not only have reverse characteristics (and reworked names: Bungo/Bingo; Tobermory/Torreycanyon etc) but would wage direct war on “The Rumbles of Rumbledon”.

The satiric edge to the story made it something more than a novel about Bash Street Kids, as did the unrestrained violence of the war between the Borribles and the Rumbles. Critical opinion was divided, but The Borribles was aligned with a new movement towards social realism in children’s books and became something of a touchstone — even figuring as a musical at the Young Vic in 1981. Larrabeiti pursued its success through two sequels which carried his urchins into new territory, most significantly in battles against the police, who in The Borribles Go for Broke (1981) set up a Special Borrible Group under the significantly named Inspector Sussworth. This introduced a more directly political element to the stories, which led to trouble over the publication of the third volume, Across the Dark Metropolis (1986) which had been completed round about the time of the riots in Tottenham and Brixton. The book was to be co-published by Collins and Pan Books, but, in a letter that came to be circulated to reviewers, Collins’s publishing director of children’s books withdrew from the project. It was felt that the bounds of “urban fantasy” had been pressed too hard and that the glamorisation of “the battle between law and lawlessness” could not here be condoned.

Although, Larrabeiti published several more novels (and The Borrible Trilogy was issued in a single volume in 2002) much of his writing after 1988 was undertaken as a travel journalist for The Sunday Times. From the time of his Oxford venture, however, he had also, with his wife, Celia, whom he had met at Trinity, been preoccupied with restoring a house that they had bought in the Cotswold village of Great Milton (also “a bloody long way from Battersea”). It was in a dilapidated condition and, to his many other accomplishments, Larrabeiti now added that of builder and roofer. Much of his continuing casual work as travel guide and cameraman was undertaken to help to finance the restoration work and Tallis House came to stand as an emblem of his always stimulating creative energy. It even figured as a publisher’s imprint for his final novel, Princess Diana’s Revenge (2006), which had been rejected by his agent and more than 30 publishers.

Larrabeiti’s wife died in 2002. He is survived by their three daughters.

Michael de Larrabeiti, author and jack of all trades, was born on August 18, 1934. He died of cancer on April 18, 2008, aged 73