stdesjardins

The Leon Garfield novel that I read last week as The Stolen Watch (1988) was first published as Blewcoat Boy and I may have read it originally under its American title of Young Nick and Jubilee, which I am taking as an excuse for its absence from any kind of mental index even after various turns of its plot had gone into long-term storage. I loved it peculiarly in elementary school, right around the age of its pair of orphans introduced living like foxes in a den of hawthorn on the wild side of St James's Park. I may always have been more at home to found family when it is discovered through crime.

It was soon after nine o'clock, and the dazed air was staggering under the booming and banging of the bells of Westminster Abbey; for Devil's Acre was right next door to God's front yard. In fact, you could have heaved a brick out of the Abbey and hit the Devil right in the eye—if he'd happened to be on his property at the time instead of sitting in Parliament and making the laws.

As a novel, it's short, sweet, and satirically edged, a fairy tale of Victorian London in the right key of droll color to social rage. In need of a dad to sponsor them into the charitable advantages of the Blewcoat School and the genuine article no closer than a child's dream of Kilkenny, the raggedly resourceful Young Nick and his sister Jubilee locate an expedient substitute in the amiable, if not precisely upstanding person of Mr Christmas Owen and share his horror when it develops that he will have to stand as their father for more than the morning if all three of them want to keep out of trouble with the law. It is all but inevitable from this set-up that their inconvenient imposture should convert with time and responsibility into the real thing, but it happens by awkward, inadvertent degrees, without much in the way of schmaltz or saccharine, and without losing hold of the social thread. The win conditions of a reformation are not riches or even middle-class respectability. Gainfully employed and integrated into a community, Mr Owen and his chicks still belong to the rookeries of London, living half in the pockets of their downstairs neighbors and busking for their suppers the rest of the time and because it matters that children are cared for and adults act like it for once in their aimless lives, it feels like a triumph rather than a concession that the narrative concludes, modestly but meaningfully, in the none more Dickensian unity of carols at Christmastime. On the slant of a punch line or a prophecy, Young Nick's wishful, signature boast even comes true: "Our dad's a big feller, big as a church!"

When you go shopping for a dad, you got to be careful. You don't want any old rubbish . . . You got to try the bottom end of the market, where there's always a chance of picking up a bargain among the damaged goods.

As a re-read, it was one of those dual-layered experiences because the title meant nothing to me, I recognized the text from the second page, and not having read it in at least thirty-five years kept remembering the events of future chapters while simultaneously discovering all the details in the story that I had not originally been able to appreciate or even recognize. Please not to look surprised that at any age I was gone for quirky, rackety Mr Owen with his absentminded snapping-up of trifles and his rueful habit of sighing, "Sharp as pickles!" whenever the children catch him out in a cheat, as unprepossessing a father-figure as ever rocked up half-lit to an admissions interview. He looks half the size of his voice that can soothe a wakeful tenement and gets himself epically pasted in a barroom brawl. The text which slips conversationally between the wry omniscience of a nineteenth-century narrator and the near stream-of-consciousness of the children has him tagged with the antiheroic epithet of "old parrot-face." Watching his makeshift kindness deepen into real concern would have won me over as much as his fallibility, but then I did not have, like Young Nick, the dog-eared, partly fantasized memory of an ideal parent to interfere with accepting the imperfect reality of one, an embarrassing and surprising adult with their own charms and crotchets and fears who may need rescuing from the locked wilderness of a park one night and risk their freedom for the sake of one of their formerly burdensome charges the next. "Our dad!" Jubilee names him more readily, captivated by his ballads and thrilled that he started a fight he couldn't finish over her very first handkerchief. She herself could go toe-to-toe with any feral heroine out of Aiken or Hardinge when she beats up a bigger boy with a fish; it pairs her classically with the more anxiously adult Young Nick, who after all landed them with a new dad through fretting over a dowry for his sister at the age of ten. It may occur to the grown reader that the sooner he can let go of the expectation of heading the family, the healthier. Mutual rescue need not be confined to romances and I like its involvement in the bonding of the eventual Owens. It will still probably never be a good idea to lend anything to the dad if six months later you don't want to have to ask for it back.

Then he give Jubilee the violin and the bow and, after a scrape or two, she starts rendering The Ash Grove all over again; and it were very queer, what with her being only nine, and the fiddle being a hundred and fifty, how well they got on together!

It were different from them other fiddles. It were very sweet and strong; and, as Jubilee stood in the middle of the room, with her fingers fluttering and trembling like white butterflies, and her face nestled into the golden brown of the old fiddle, like a flower asleep, nobody moved nor said a word.

It were something wonderful, you had to admit it. If she'd gone fishing for a husband, she wouldn't have needed no more dowry than her earrings and the old violin. She'd have caught a king!

Language-level, it's a pleasure, careering from sentence to ironic, high-flown, argumentative sentence as if the story is tumbling out through a visit to a long-razed slum. Garfield has the historical knack of pinpointing his time without obvious references like battles or coronations: the smattering of cant in the richly demotic narration helps, but so does the slight distance in habits of mind as well as the plot winding through charity schools and one-man bands, marginalizations of class and nationality and a baby named Parliament Smudgeon. Jubilee's own appellation is the result of "the Pope having done something wonderful in the year she was born," while her brother's diminutive distinguishes him from the Devil. I take Mr Owen's uncommonly Christian name as a seasonal consequence à la Christmas Evans, but the fact that he's a pickpocket—a popular trade around Onion Court—is not an encouragement to the reader to follow the casual bigotry of the police who treat Taffy was a Welshman like forensic gospel. The law in this children's novel is a primer in ACAB, an unappetizing mass of "bluebottles" buzzing fawningly round their social betters with their truncheons at the ready for anyone below. "Real life ain't like a beanstalk, lad! Climb up out of your proper station, and you'll just get knocked down again!" Whereas Mr Owen may need a stiff belt of gin to face a schoolmaster, but as soon as he learns that Young Nick has a head for figures and Jubilee's as musical as his own child, he's determined to support them in their talents. I had a better ear for his own this time around: in the seven-to-ten range I knew a different set of English lyrics to "All Through the Night," but I wouldn't hear "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" until high school or "The Ash Grove" until college and I still couldn't render you "The Bluebells of Scotland" without listening to the Corries first. As I kept hearing the folk songs arranged by Stephen Oliver, however, I have ended up showing the 1982 RSC The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby to spatch. The double bill works. I hadn't read enough Dickens in elementary school to know.

But it turned out to be a dirty lie as it wasn't the little 'un in the story what got thumped and had to be helped out of the boozer with a nose like a bee-cluster that didn't go down for a week!