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| New Windmill/Heinemann Books UK, 1983 |
What did he want? Joby asked himself as he walked away from the house. What was it he was looking for? Did he really believe his mother was in danger, that she wasn't coming back to make life as before? He didn't know what he did believe. Somehow the events of the afternoon had contracted themselves into a sharp point of loneliness and uncertainty which ripped a small tear in the protective fabric of his world. So that he now looked through the tear at his world and though it seemed in almost every way the same it was in fact different… He wanted, he needed now, a grown-up whom he could trust and who would, if only for a few minutes, talk to him directly, really talk to him, person to person, without evasions or mention of rules or fobbing him off because he wouldn't understand. He could understand if only he had the chance. But it seemed there was only one person who would even make the attempt to talk to him like that, and she wasn't here and he couldn't get to her.
The Novel: The transition from childhood to adolescence to adulthood can be a challenging, confusing, emotionally painful experience and, for many people, a physically painful process as well. This probably explains why it has always served as such a popular theme for novels in the West, some of which — The Member of the Wedding (1946), The Catcher in the Rye (1951), The Go-Between (1953), Billy Liar (1959), That Was Then, This Is Now (1971) and even the ubiquitous Harry Potter series (1997–2007) to some extent — have gone on to achieve iconic status for their depictions of children struggling to come to terms with the unavoidable and sometimes unduly harsh realities of adult life.
While Stan Barstow's Joby may not be as well known or as widely read today as these novels, it nevertheless remains a notable addition to the canon of twentieth century children's literature, recreating a time and place — a small Yorkshire mining town in the final peacetime summer of 1939 — with unpatronising precision and a remarkable sense of warmth and compassion. What happens to eleven year old Joseph Barry Weston after he's sent off to stay with his nagging Auntie Daisy for what he's been told will only be a few days while his mother goes to hospital proves to be as life-changing for him as it does, in the end, for his parents.
Denied access to his 'Mam,' as he calls her, for the first time in his life and fearful that the truth about her health is being hidden from him — a fear that reduces him to tears when he learns, on the morning of her departure, that she'll be undergoing surgery while she's away — Joby finds himself plunged into a world that, while outwardly still recognisable as the familiar world of childhood, quickly begins to change in ways that are completely unforeseen and, for that reason, deeply unsettling to him. It's the way Barstow explores these changes and the responses they trigger — the known and safe being replaced by what is unknown and unsafe and, at its worst, threatening — that makes this short but flawlessly written novel so worthy of rediscovery. Joby gradually ceases to be a quiet well-mannered boy whose studiousness has earned him a place at his local grammar school and becomes the kind of boy who deliberately shuns the company of his best friend Snap, gets into fistfights, spies on adult lovers having sex outdoors, exposes himself to a girl (who in turn exposes herself to him), regularly steals from shops and sends a bottle of stolen perfume to a different girl named Elsa Laedeker whose family are recently escaped Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.
Joby also violates the strictly enforced rule that forbids children from visiting hospitals and surprises his cousin Mona — a dozy teenager who has been roped in to doing his dad's housework while his Mam's away — coming downstairs from his parents' bedroom where his dad, he's nervously informed by her, is laid up sick in bed. Joby is immediately struck by how breathless Mona appears to be and the uncharacteristic redness of her face. A few Sundays later, when his dad comes to his Auntie Daisy's house to have his tea and offers to help Mona with the washing up, Joby overhears them talking in the scullery in a very unusual way and creeps forward so he can better observe them through the room's half-open door. 'His father kissed Mona on the mouth,' we're told, 'before she pushed him away with, "Give it up now; don't be so daft".'
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| Michael Joseph Ltd first UK edition |
Eventually, Joby's Mam is released from hospital and returns to the family home. But while all is apparently well with her physically, the same can't be said of her emotionally. Following an informative visit from Mr Laedeker, father of Elsa, the Jewish girl to whom Joby made a gift of the stolen perfume, his Mam angrily sends him to bed, only to see him wake up hours later in need of his supper and a drink of water. Sneaking downstairs in search of them, Joby once again finds himself ideally placed to eavesdrop on an adult conversation — this time a more heated one in which his Mam argues with his Auntie Daisy and Mona who, it's eventually revealed, had been on the verge of running off to Manchester with Joby's dad who has, it appears, now vanished.
The next day Joby's dad still hasn't returned home, prompting another visit from sanctimonious Auntie Daisy who this time brings her husband, Mona's father, with her. Their blustering presence drives Joby out of the house, sending him down to the river where, to his shock, he finds his dad stretched out on the grass in his best suit, a new cloth cap set low on his head, gazing thoughtfully at the water. 'His best clothes somehow added to the strangeness of his sitting there alone like this, and as Joby looked at him he experienced for the first time a sense of his father as not his father… He saw for the first time his father as a person carrying about with him a world of his own… He was only a part of his father's world whereas his father belonged to his, Joby's, world in its entirety. And things were far from well in his father's world.' Joby tries to question his dad, who dismisses him, as every other adult he knows has always done, with the statement that he 'wouldn't understand' the situation he's in because he's far too young to know about such things. He tells Joby to go back home and Joby obeys, only to stop walking after a few steps, terrified at the prospect of what his dad might do to himself if left to his own devices.
The Joby who turns around to fetch his dad away from the riverbank is no longer a little boy. While he doesn't fully comprehend what's happened to his family, he has learned enough to realise that the life he'll be living from now on will never be the same sort of life he lived with his Mam and dad before the former went to hospital.
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| STAN BARSTOW, c 1960 |
The Writer: 'There are no villains in Stan Barstow’s fiction,' wrote journalist Andrew Darlington in a 1973 article about the Yorkshire born novelist, playwright and radio dramatist whose literary debut A Kind of Loving, published to rave reviews in 1960, remains a key work of mid-century British social realism. 'Only victims. When you
think in terms of his working class background, and the outlook you
could expect to develop from such roots, that may seem strange… Politically, Barstow’s characters say only what
he feels they would say, never what he feels they should be saying… the most obvious reason for Barstow’s apolitical style is his interest — not in issues, but individuals.' It is this interest in investigating the psychology of individuals trapped in lives they can't seem to escape that makes Barstow's fiction — be it novel, story or play written for stage or radio — so engaging and enduringly relevant.
Stanley Barstow, the son of a coal miner, was born on 28 June 1928 in the West Riding town of Horbury and was first educated at his local council school before doing well enough in his Eleven Plus exam to earn a place at Ossett Grammar School in nearby Wakefield. From here he preceded to his own table in the draughting office of Charles Robert Engineering, a local Horbury firm where he would remain until the success of A Kind of Loving — greatly enhanced by its award winning 1962 cinematic adaptation directed by John Schlesinger — made it possible for him to become a full-time writer. He was, by then, married to his former schoolmate Connie Kershaw and the father of two young children, Neil and Gillian.
Barstow first began writing on his honeymoon when the combination of damp weather in the Lake District and the encouragement of his new bride prompted him to try his hand at a short story. He was twenty-three years old and, according to a 1969 interview, 'didn't think for a moment anybody would take me seriously as a writer or that there was anything
in me worth taking seriously. I began to regret the years of slacking at
school but I was looking for some kind of creative outlet.' As he would later recall in his 2001 autobiography, he sold a total of four stories over the next eight years, earning enough to buy a Remington portable typewriter and provide him with an incentive to keep on writing. He produced his first novel in 1955, a thriller about two teenage boys who travel to Blackpool for a holiday after one of them has assaulted and robbed a local shopkeeper, which was rejected by every publisher he sent it to, only to be revised and appear in 1987 as his tenth published novel B-Movie.
A Kind of Loving, which became the Book Society Choice of 1960 and has seldom been out of print since, was followed a year later by his first short fiction collection The Desperadoes and Other Stories and in 1962 by Ask Me Tomorrow, the autobiographical tale of a young Yorkshire writer named Wilf Cotton. Barstow's next novel was Joby which, like much of his work, would go on to be successfully adapted for television in 1975. This was also the case with what came to be known as the 'Vic Brown Trilogy,' consisting of A Kind of Loving and its sequels The Watchers on the Shore (1966) and The Right True End (1976) which became an eagerly anticipated ten part Granada Television serial that premiered in the UK on 4 April 1982.
Much of Barstow's other work was also adapted for radio and the stage, with his first original work for the latter medium — Stringer's Last Stand, written in collaboration with Albert Bradley — debuting in 1971 at York's Theatre Royal. By now a well-established writer whose work sold steadily and was generally admired by the critics, Barstow was commissioned to adapt Winifred Holtby's novel South Riding into a thirteen part series for Yorkshire Television in 1974. He also published four further collections of his own short fiction between 1969 and 1984, all of which were collected, along with his first collection, as The Likes of Us: Stories of Five Decades by the Welsh-based Parthian Press in 2013.
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| STAN BARSTOW, c 2005 |
Barstow and his wife separated in 1990 (though never divorced), after which he began a relationship with fellow radio playwright Diana Griffiths. The couple moved to South Wales in 2000, Barstow having published what would be his final novel Next of Kin — third part of the 'Ella Palmer Trilogy' set in a Yorkshire mining village during World War Two — in 1991. His well-received autobiography In My Own Good Time appeared a decade before his death, aged eighty-three, on 1 August 2011.
'I have lived by my writing since 1962,' his autobiography concludes. 'I have brought up my children and
provided for those it has been my duty to support. That this has been achieved
solely through my own efforts, without subsidy, grants, paid fellowships or
awards with monetary gifts attached, should, I feel, be a cause for some pride.
It has all been worked for, year on year. I have been a professional. I have
survived.' As will his work which awaits a new generation of readers who are sure to find themselves and their complex and sometimes unfairly compromised lives reflected in its pages.
You might also enjoy:
That Was Then, This Is Now (1971) by SE HINTON
The Chocolate War (1974) by ROBERT CORMIER
