Sadly, John Rowe Townsend has died; his funeral was on 3
April. He was married to Jill Paton Walsh. As their house is just a short
distance along the bank of the Cam from my own,
we regularly had tea together at 4pm and I’ll always remember John for his amusing anecdotes. He had a brilliant
memory and could quote from books and recite poem after poem.
John’s death
prompted me to re-read his first children’s book,
Gumble’s Yard (1961)
The children in this story are poor, living in a deprived urban setting in the north of England. John was breaking new ground here, for until then children’s book characters were invariably middle class and living in pleasant settings. The Puffin edition has powerful illustrations by Dick
Hart in a strong dark line.
Gumble’s Yard is narrated in the first
person by Kevin and starts with him walking, with his sister Sandra and their friend,
Dick through a neighbourhood called the Jungle because all the streets are
named after tropical flowers:
‘It was a fine spring
day, not warm but with a sort of hazy sunshine. Summer was coming, and blades
of grass were showing between the stone setts, and soon the weeds would blossom
on the empty sites. The days were getting longer. Next week perhaps we would be
playing cricket after school. There was a dog in Mimosa Row that I was getting very
friendly with. I was going to make a soap-box car for Harold. Life was full of
interesting things to do.
We walked three
abreast, with Sandra in the middle. And as we turned the corner into our own
street I felt happy and burst out singing.
‘Hark at him!’ said
Sandra. ‘Not a care in the world.’
‘Where does it hurt,
Kevin?’ asked Dick with mock sympathy.
‘I’ll hurt you in a
minute!’ I said.
And we started a
friendly scuffle, the kind that happens a dozen times a day.
When their feckless uncle and aunt vanish, Kevin, Sandra and
two younger children, with Dick’s help, are forced to do a moonlight flit to a
deserted warehouse named Gumble’s Yard.
Stories about children
fending for themselves and trying to avoid Social Services –
(‘the Cruelty,’ in John’s story) always fascinated me as a
child. Eleanor Graham’s
The Children whoLived in a Barn (1938) was a favourite book of mine but the children in that story were
from a middle class family and the setting was much more idyllic than that of
Gumble’s Yard. John’s book differs in
another way from Eleanor Graham’s; the children in
Gumble’s Yard find
themselves caught up in a fast- moving mystery when they encounter a
highly organised criminal gang operating at night in the deserted warehouse by
the canal.
In both stories, the adults eventually return but while the children in
Eleanor Graham’s story are returned happily to the comfortable existence they
had known before, the children in John’s story are not so pleased to see their
feckless aunt and uncle again and the prospect of returning to their old life
is not appealing.
Kevin and Sandra have to come to terms with the fact that,
“Even an
unsatisfactory family life is better than none.”
And accept their life as it is:
“So you see…we can’t
always have what we want.”
“We can always hope,”
said Sandra, in her matter-of-fact tone that often sounds so grown-up.
And the story ends as it began with the sunny optimistic refrain
of childhood:
‘It was a fine spring
day, not warm but with a sort of hazy sunshine. Summer was coming, and blades
of grass were showing between the stone sets, and soon the weeds would blossom
on the empty sites. The days were getting longer. Next week perhaps we would be
playing cricket after school. There was a dog in Mimosa Row that I was getting
very friendly with. I was going to make a soap-box car for Harold. Life was
full of interesting things to do.
We walked three
abreast, with Sandra in the middle. And as we turned the corner into our own
street I felt happy and burst out singing.
‘Hark at him!’ said
Sandra. ‘Not a care in the world.’
‘Where does it hurt,
Kevin?’ asked Dick with mock sympathy.
‘I’ll hurt you in a
minute!’ I said.
And we started a
friendly scuffle, the kind that happens a dozen times a day.
I can hear John reading this passage aloud, with his quiet smile and a twinkle in his eye.
