Ever since I wrote The Machine-gunners (and in spite of the fact that my last three books have been fantasies) people keep consulting me about realism in children's books. Rather as if I'd been appointed high priest and was being asked to read the entrails. There is not much career-structure for high priests who fail to read entrails, so I'd better come clean with what I think. (p. 34)

Perhaps all the best books start by being written for only one child, and that child very close to you. They start when the child-within-the-author turns to the real child and says, "Come away with me and I will show you a place you otherwise will never see, because it is buried under thirty, or three hundred or three thousand years of time." There are many examples of this process. (p. 36)

That is why I wrote The Machine-gunners. No thought of publication: it lay over a year in manuscript before I even bothered to have it typed up. I wrote it only for my son, then twelve. To tell him how it felt to be me, when I was twelve. As I read it out to him, chapter by chapter, we were, for the first and last time, twelve-year-olds standing side by side. He had "come away" with me. Twelve spoke to twelve, without interruption.

By the time I wrote my second book, my first was being published. It was not just Chris looking over my shoulder, but my two beloved editors: helpful, sympathetic, tolerant, but with definite views of their own, and definitely not twelve years old. Then publication day, and The Machine-gunners was favourably reviewed as an adult novel by the literary gent from The Times (a sort of pat on the back that most children's authors absolutely and hypocritically adore). The crowd looking over my shoulder as I wrote got bigger and bigger. And then Machine-gunners won the Carnegie, and it felt like the whole world was watching; for a month I couldn't write at all. The burden of all their expectations was totally flattening. My target figure had grown from one to thousands; how could I please them all?

To my shame, I tried. Crawlingly and contemptibly, though unconsciously, I tried. The amount of swearing in my books dropped; the intellectual content, the scholarship and research grew. I began writing books for the children of publishers, librarians and the literary gent of The Times … Now that I am at last conscious of what I was doing, I look round and see so many "good" children's books written for the same bloody audience. Books that gain splendid reviews, win prizes, make reputations and are unreadable by the majority of children. (pp. 37-8)

Now I feel the only way back to freedom is for me to write a really dreadful book—not one that's perverted or full of sex and violence, but simply one that will get me dragged to the head critic's study and given six of the best. So I'll know again whose side I'm on: the eighty per cent of kids who, like my own son, might enjoy Machine-gunners but wouldn't get past the first three pages of The Wind Eye or The Watch House.

It's not going to be hard to get caned. Once you get back to real childhood-realism, there are so many unsuitable topics. Because real children have got such grotty interests. (p. 38)

[To] a child, death has no immediacy. Children think they will live forever; dying is for grandpa and grandma—one of their duties…. Duties which render them as comfortably alien a species as the giraffe. So a child can afford to be detached and fascinated by death.

But if I put such thoughts in a children's book, I would be accused of being a morbid and heartless corrupter of the young. Because we adults are upset by children's real thoughts, we regard them as being unsuitable material for children's books. Only one book, to my knowledge, has been allowed to speak to children on this topic in depth, with official approval … and that is William Golding's Lord of the Flies…. It is the one book that seems to speak to every child's condition.

How many more of the best children's books have come drifting down from the adult world? Billy Liar, The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner? Why can't we children's writers write stuff that good?

Because it wouldn't be suitable for children. You don't even have to go as far as death to find taboos in the children's book world. We need go no further than the loo. (pp. 38-9)

And I haven't even mentioned the worst words yet. Neither has four letters. They are "class" and "politics".

Surely, surely, I hear the voices braying, we can keep class and politics out of children's books? It'll come to the little dears soon enough.

Too late, missus. It's in the books already. Only trouble, it's all your sort of politics, which you've managed to kid yourself is no politics at all. Tory politics, establishment politics. (p. 40)

There is politics in The Machine-gunners. But … they are largely the acceptable politics of war against Hitler. Chas doesn't like coppers and headmasters, but what twelve-year-old does?

There is one difference; Chas's dad doesn't like coppers either, even though he is strictly an honest man. I am proud of creating him, because so often in children's books, the workers are either baddies (Jed Stowe the village no-good and poacher, with no job and seven filthy kids) or entirely establishment-loving goodies, often a bit comic (like Gowther Mossock and his wife). The idea of the intelligent workingman, who is honest, but honestly bitter and critical of our society, is a comparative rarity. I can think of few in English children's books (Alan Garner's Stone Book sequence is an honourable exception)….

Yet in reality they do exist; and in realism they should.

But there is yet worse to come.

The adult psychopath; and I'm not talking about Jed Stowe the poacher. I suppose I would define psychopathy as a lack of empathy with living things. (p. 41)

What do we writers do about this problem? Usually we invoke Jed Stowe the poacher, or an evil slant-eyed Chinese, or in films a Mexican bandit who punctuates his killings with insane laughter. But if you want realism in children's books, this really will not do. The devils are among us, among those most respected. (p. 42)

[Thanks] to a subtle chemistry that takes place, usually unconsciously between the reasonably successful writer and the establishment which is beginning to absorb him, a lot of realism and vitality is drained from children's books, and replaced with nostalgia and a body of opinion acceptable to the establishment. Naturally, the children reject them, and go to those adult writers who are allowed to handle the basic realities of blood, decay, hate, shit and death. (pp. 42-3)

We must look for the hot-line to the reader…. It lies, I think, in children's love of inevitable catastrophe. (p. 44)

But what about that even deeper source of reality, the hot-line to the subject?

For me, long after all my research is done, this is where my books start, where they draw their first infant breath. The moment I touched the German machine-gun in the Imperial War Museum; the moment I gently touched St Cuthbert's tomb in Durham cathedral; the moment I roamed the empty rooms of the real Watch House, fingered the skull in its glass case; the moment I first felt a motorbike kick forward under my bottom, the books came alive. (p. 45)

[I] am besieged by people who passionately explain to me what The Machine-gunners is about—and all their answers are different.

But perhaps that is the way realism is. As Eliot said, his poems meant something different to each person—they meant what each person thought they meant. And I must warn you that Eliot also said that mankind cannot bear too much reality. (p. 46)

Robert Westall, "How Real Do you Want Your Realism?" (copyright © 1979 Robert Westall; reprinted by permission of the author and The Thimble Press, Lockwood Station Road, South Woodchester, Glos. GL5 5EQ, England), in Signal, No. 28, January, 1979, pp. 34-46.

Where Robert Westall differs from other exponents of a 'Time' theme is that he allows a greater degree of participation in the past. Others may be content to let their time explorers be witnesses to past events; John Webster, in this remarkable story [The Devil on the Road], is right up to his neck in them.

Through the operations of Lady Chance, John finds himself set up as caretaker and odd-job man in a Suffolk barn. The barn had been a manor-house in the seventeenth century—the book is a marvellous exercise in local history and archaelogy—and, through the agency of a time-cat, John slips back into the time of the Civil War and becomes Master Jack, confidant and defender of a charming white witch. It is the period and the home ground of Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General, and there is a convincing portrait of this revolting cheat. Not content with his hazardous visits to Cromwell's England, John brings Johanna back with him to modern Suffolk to become the 'yarb-mother' of the country folk….

It is a good idea, but Mr. Westall's novels are about people, not ideas. There is less conflict here than in, for example, The Wind Eye, but there is particular interest in the central figure…. As always with this most brilliant of writers, characters are clearly drawn in all their idiosyncratic oddity. There is a convincing local squire with his sexy modern wife, and the locals, contemporary peasants and importations alike—there is a lovely thumbnail sketch of a second-hand bookseller—are equally vivid.

The book makes demanding reading, not merely the acceptance of the improbable but the ability to follow the author's closely reasoned argument. But perhaps it is not absolutely necessary to understand it all. Surrender to a fascinating idea and to a tale supremely well told will bring its rewards.

"'The Devil on the Road'," in The Junior Bookshelf, Vol. 43, No. 2, April, 1979, p. 124.