The Making of Me: A Writer's Childhood
by Robert Westall, edited by Lindy McKinnel
Catnip, £7.99; 206pp
ROBERT WESTALL, who was born in 1929, wrote wonderful evocations of what it
was like to be a child in the Second World War. His war wasn’t fought with
planes and tanks and guns but by “old men and women and kids — a life of
smell, fear, tribe-like gangs with their initiations rites, codes and
secrets”.
He is a glorious author to read aloud to any child of 11+, creating characters
you really care about, whether it’s the Blitzcat finding her way out of
bombed Coventry and back to her owner, or, in The Machine Gunners,
Chas McGill, boy collector of Nazi memorabilia.
The Making of Me: A Writer’s Childhood, a collection of his
autobiographical writing (he died in 1993), is a rare portrait of a gifted
child.
Westall’s father worked at a gasworks on Tyneside, adored as “the oily
wizard”. Industrial darkness, the Blitz and his own myopia made Westall
focus on small details.
He eventually drew on his memories to write 48 books, winning the Whitbread,
the Smarties, the Guardian and the Carnegie prizes, among others, and is
commemorated in the Seven Stories Centre for Children’s Books in
Newcastle-upon-Tyne. To read him is to hear the northern storytelling
tradition at its finest.
Westall’s Kingdom: A Writer’s Life is at Seven Stories (sevenstories.org.uk;
0845 2710777) A new edition of Westall’s The Wind Eye — a ghost story — is
published by Catnip (£5.99, offer £5.69)
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Extract
from The Making of Me: A Writer's Childhood
Westall describes his own journey back in memory that became the genesis
for The Machine Gunners . . .
In 1960 my son was born, and I moved to Cheshire as head of art in a grammar
school. Writing couldn’t have been further from my mind. I spent the summer
holiday of 1961 laying crazy-paving paths all over the garden. Such a waste
of creative time seems appalling to me now . . . my writing had simply
ceased to exist.
It came back to life in 1963. I went into the public library and there was an
exhibition of abstract paintings by a young engineer who had given up all
for art. This touched me and on an impulse I walked into the local newspaper
office and asked the editor to give the young man a break with publicity. He
said: “OK, but you’re an art teacher, you write about it.”
He paid me two guineas for it and the young engineer sold half his pictures.
Afterwards the editor, Geoff Moore, asked me to write a regular art review.
He taught me brevity, to explain abstract art to the man in the street in
500 words and not one more and I honed my writing to a razor edge. As the
years went by, I spread my wings gently — architectural profiles; articles
on antiques. I think that as a journalist I became a real pro.
As a novelist, I remained a complete idiot, totally self-indulgent and writing
in third-hand clichés about things I neither knew nor understood. I still
have, in school exercise books, the tale of an Anglo-Saxon princess
travelling through 7th-century England to get married. I was later to while
away long railway journeys with my son by reading him extracts; it was so
comically dreadful that tears of laughter used to stream down his face.
I might have gone on writing trash for ever, but for something that happened
as his twelfth birthday approached in 1972. We had been very close until,
one morning a strange group of three boys appeared at our back door. The boy
at the front was amiable enough, but he had that air of authority and
dignity that one sometimes sees in African tribal chiefs. The two other boys
stood back at a respectful distance, not from me, but from him. They were
obviously followers.
The chieftain enquired politely whether my son was in. I called Chris and the
moment he saw this boy, he went berserk. He just grabbed his anorak and left
with him. Christopher was about to be initiated into a gang.
Now, do not get me wrong; this was not some dangerous and hooligan gang. I
suppose “tribe” would be a better word. In England such tribes find a vacant
lot where they build a camp of hardboard or corrugated iron. Here, in the
summer, the tribe lives, usually eight to ten strong. It marks out the
boundaries of its territories and is usually at war with the neighbouring
tribes.
My son’s camp had trouble with a persistently leaking roof. The gang leader
had read my architectural articles in the local paper and, after a great
discussion, my son was sent to invite me to report to the gang headquarters.
Fortunately, I managed to spot the cause of the leak swiftly: they had
overlapped their sheets of corrugated iron wrongly. I was awarded honorary
tribal membership, and my son was allowed to tell me all the secrets of the
gang, otherwise he would have been sworn to a secrecy nothing would have
broken.
It was after all this that I began my own journey in memory back to the time
when I was twelve, in the Second World War. I wanted to share childhoods
with Christopher. Memories began to surface. A friend said: “Why does the
smell of burning kerosene make me feel safe?” and that carried me straight
back to the air-raid shelters of my youth. Another time, after a
particularly violent television war film, I went to sleep and dreamt, and
wakening said to my wife: “My war wasn’t fought with tanks and planes and
guns. My war was fought by old men and women and kids.” But I couldn’t
remember the content of the dream.
And then, suddenly, the whole time that I was twelve came back to me in one
great surge. The smells, the fears, what we ate: total recall. Only it
wasn’t a literary activity, it was a social activity. I wrote it in
longhand, in school exercise books, and only intended to read it to my son.
It was my gift to him, at the age he had reached; the age when boys in
primitive tribes are initiated; the time when Jewish boys have their bar
mitzvah. I read him the chapters as soon as I had written them, at Sunday
teatime. He was the most savage of critics: if a part bored him he’d pick up
a magazine and start reading that instead. The parts that left him cold, I
crossed out, which is perhaps what gives the book its pace. But I had no
thought of trying for publication. After we had finished reading the book
out loud, I threw it into a drawer where it gathered dust until I lent it to
a friend.
It is, I suppose, ironical that a book written solely for one boy has sold
over a million copies.
© Lindy McKinnel and the Estate of Robert Westall 2006
