FORGOTTEN AUTHORS
William Cook on Leon Garfield
Never meet your heroes. As a wannabe writer, I learnt that lesson early on. I was ten years old, and my favourite writer was Leon Garfield. Imagine how thrilled I was when my mother arranged for me to have tea with him! My mum was friends with Philippa Pearce (author of the children’s classic, Tom’s
Midnight Garden) and Philippa was friends with Garfield, so a date was set for high tea, at Philippa’s lovely country cottage, near Cambridge.
I arrived giddy with excitement, hoping some of his literary magic would rub off on me. e. Fat chance. Garfield was perfectly polite, but the occasion was excruciating. I was hopelessly tongue-tied, and so was he. Looking back, the fact that this successful author was so shy in the presence of a pre-pubescent fan makes me like him even more, but I didn’t feel that way at the time. Back then, I would have been far more impressed if he’d rattled off a few jolly yarns about the inspiration for his stories. I didn’t know then, as I know now, that such glib urbanity is usually the mark of a second-rate writer, and that his reticence was a good indication that his writing was first rate.
Leon Garfield was born a hundred years ago, in Brighton. He went to Brighton Grammar School, and then on to Regent Street Polytechnic to study art, but his studies were curtailed by the Second World War. He served in the Royal Medical Corps and, while on active service in Belgium, he met the love of his life, the children’s author Vivien Alcock, who was serving as an ambulance driver. They married in 1948 and adopted a girl whom they named Jane, after Jane Austen. After the war he worked as a lab technician at London’s Whittington Hospital, writing in his spare time. Only in the 1960s, in his forties, was he able to pack in the day job and write fulltime.
Garfield never set out to be a children’s author. His first novel,
Jack Holborn, was intended for adults, but when an editor suggested he adapt it for younger readers he did what he was told. Jack Holborn was a hit and, for better or worse (better in the short term, worse in the long term), his subsequent novels were marketed as children’s fiction. In fact, they occupy an odd no-man’s-land, midway between the two genres. This was one of the reasons I loved them (I never felt he was talking down to me) but it may explain why, since his death, in 1996, aged 74, his subtle books have largely disappeared.
Garfield’s stories were well reviewed and won lots of prizes. Several were adapted for the screen ( one of his finest novels, was brilliantly filmed by Ken Loach). They must have sold pretty well, I suppose, but none of my schoolfriends had ever heard of him, and so reading him felt rather secretive, even slightly illicit. Maybe his other readers felt the same.
His best books are set in Georgian (or sometimes Victorian) England, and often follow the fortunes of a wide-eyed lad who stumbles into a grown-up gro world of criminality crim and intrigue. His young you protagonists begin by div dividing this world into go goodies and baddies, only to discover that the goodies aren’t ar that good after all, and an the baddies aren’t entirely en bad. His novels are ar primarily adventure stories st but they’re also painful p rites of passage, in which w a child is thrust into i adulthood, and learns learnsl to t see adults as they the really are. The debt to Dickens D is quite clear c (it’s no surprise su that Garfield G wrote an ending en to Dickens’s unfinished un final novel, no The Mystery of Edwin E Drood) but his stories are far more mor than mere pastiche. past Garfield has a wry wr voice that’s entirely entir his own, ironic yet compassionate, and his descriptive powers are superb. How about this description of snowfall in 18th-century London? ‘The worn old streets were gone; the blackened roof tiles were gone; the mournful chimneys and the dirty posts wore high white hats – and the houses themselves seemed to float, muffled, in a sea of white. Never, in all its life, had the town looked so clean; it shamed the very sky, which was of a dirty, yellowish grey.’
When I dug out my beloved Garfield books, to reread them for this article, I realised, with a mortal shiver, that I’m now the same age that he was when I met him, 55. When we met that sunny afternoon, his best work was already behind him. I wonder if he knew that at the time. When we parted, after an awkward half hour, he gave me a copy of his latest book, The Ghost
Downstairs. I think it might amuse him to know that of all his books which I’ve cherished for nearly half a century, that beautiful first edition, with its handwritten inscription on the inside cover, is the only one I can’t find.
None of my schoolfriends had ever heard of Garfield, and so reading him felt rather secretive, even slightly illicit