Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“ROUGH ISLAND STORY” by Hugh McGraw (first published in 1954)

I’m going to write about a novel you have never heard of and which you will probably never read. It is no classic and after some research (i.e. fiddling around on the internet) I can find no evidence that it was ever reprinted after its first publication in 1954. Yet, having seen it advertised on various “rare books” websites, I sincerely hope that it has its little band of admirers. If so, then I am not alone.

Let me clarify the anonymity (or obscurity) which now cloaks Rough Island Story. Of its author Hugh McGraw (full name, Hugh Patrick McGraw) I can discover nothing, except that at one time he was a prolific, and possibly popular, novelist. Opposite the title page of Rough Island Story, eight other novels by him are listed, and a ninth is noted on the dust jacket. I also discovered (internet again) the extraordinary fact that one of his novels, The Man in Control, was prosecuted for obscenity because it had a scene which implied a lesbian relationship. Given that, even in 1953, it was acquitted of the charge, I can only assume that the scene must have been one that would now be regarded as totally inoffensive. Another discovery was that John Betjeman reviewed Rough Island Story for the Daily Telegraph, but I have not been able to find the review on line. And that is absolutely everything I know about Hugh McGraw.

How did I get to read this novel? When I was about 14, in the mid-1960s, my mother took Rough Island Story off my father’s bookshelves, and said it was just the thing a boy of my age might enjoy. She was right. I did. And I had a vague memory of what it was about as I kept the same copy on my own bookshelves.

Recently, to see if my positive memories of it stood up, I re-read it. Once again, I enjoyed it, but in a very different way.

The novel is told in the first-person by James Fitzsimmonds, generally known as Fitz. He is an engineer who has been commissioned to study the feasibility of situating a power-pylon on a small island in the middle of a small lake. But, as it happens, he knew both the lake and the island when he was a young teenager. So as he returns to his old haunts, the novel is the adult Fitz narrating the things that happened to him when he was 13, which was about 40 years previously. The recalled story takes place in the 1910s, a year or two before the First World War.

Young Fitz, as his adult self recalls, was basically a good kid, but allergic to some of his school teachers. He regularly played truant, and even when he was at school, he nearly always managed to absent himself from the classes of a particularly nasty mathematics teacher. For this he was, of course, often punished by his severe, disciplinarian father. Middle-class and English, Fitz’s main delight was simply messing about with a pair of boisterous Irish kids, the brothers Neil and Tim Mahoney, who were always good at exploring unvisited areas of the neighbourhood, playing rough games, putting thmeselves into mildly dangerous situations, and trespassing on closed properties if they looked interesting. The Mahoneys weren’t unlettered yokels – they learnt their school lessons more assiduously than Fitz did – but they had a greater sense of adventure. Fitz often followed where they led – even, in one case, where it came to some wanton vandalism.

Crux of the story has Fitz wandering on his own into an abandoned estate and “discovering” the small island in the middle of the small lake. He invites the Mahoneys to share in his discovery. The three of them are soon building rafts to get to the island, then running around on the island and speculating about what the little “fort” on the island is. It is covered in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Fitz fervently believes it is built over a hoard of buried treasure, and sets to work trying to find out what the hieroglyphics mean.

At which point you doubtless think this novel must be no more than jolly japes with boisterous young schoolboys, as in the old Richmal Crompton “Just William” books and their ilk. Not so. For, all the time, we are aware that it is an adult telling the story, and telling it in a sophisticated vocabulary well beyond a 13-year-old’s reach. Indeed, Rough Island Story is of that rare genre – a novel about childen written for adults. This creates a strain of irony. We understand, for example, that what the young Fitz takes to be an ancient monument, covering buried treasure, is really a cheap “folly” some wealthy person has recently constructed on the island. And the lake itself is little more than a large pond at the bottom of some rich family’s lawn. The adult perspective also means that young Fitz’s feelings and misconceptions are analysed with a sort of reasoned amusement.

Most of the novel cuts between Fitz’s misdemeanours at school, including the consequences he constantly dreads; and the various adventures of the three boys, who know they are trespassing, but can’t resist the lure of the island. Obviously they all know Huckleberry Finn, because they refer to it when it comes to making a raft. But a little English pond, on a private estate next to English suburbia, is not the mighty Mississippi and that gives us another thread of irony.

At about two-thirds through the novel, however, a more defined “plot” emerges. I will not go into it in detail, but it has to do with a little aristocratic girl called Miranda (as Fitz notes, an appropriate name for somebody connected with an island), a kidnapping, and Fitz and the Mahoney boys foiling the villains. Though well handled and written with an adult sensibility this is, frankly, Boys’ Own Paper wish-fulfilment stuff. And yet Hugh McGraw is very clever in giving it a slightly sour postscript, in which the adult Fitz reflects on what has become of his friends, and of Miranda, in later years, when notions of heroic adventure have long since evaporated.

Now how did my recent re-reading of this novel differ from my early-teenage reading of it? Basically, I did not then notice all the time-specific details of the novel, and how much it reflected a world that had disappeared long before the novel was published. This is not simply a matter of topical events being noted in passing (the Crippen case and the wonders of telegraphy). Not only is the boys’ school Fitz attends very disciplinarian (boys – including Fitz – are regularly caned); but boys are expected to be buttoned up in Norfolk jackets.  As “holiday tasks”, 13-year-olds must read and summarise the likes of Scott’s Kenilworth and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (assuming higher standards of literacy in the middle-classes back then). The middle-class families of both Fitz and the Mahoneys have at least one servant or resident cook. There is much mention of the fact that the Mahoney boys are Catholic, and therefore regular church-goers, which is clearly something alien and a little puzzling to the narrator. Motor-cars and aeroplanes (so called) are clearly the most fantastic of novelities. Most telling, however, is the fact that the world of young Fitz is an incredibly class-bound world, with strictly-observed shibboleths relating to how one receives guests and how one deports oneself properly at the dinner table. That the little girl Miranda is an aristocrat brings out much fawning, not from the unselfconscious boys, but from the middle-class adults. And late in the story it is mentioned, as if it were the most routine thing in the world, that a man is not prosecuted for an obvious crime because he has aristocratic connections.

When I read Rough Island Story as a 14-year-old, I rushed past all this, simply following the novel as an entertaining story. Now I see in it elements resonant of other books (the hidden lake and island are almost like the “lost domain” in Le Grand Meaulnes). I am also aware that, in the early 1950s, there was a spate of books which narrated childhood experiences in adult terms – L.P.Hartley’s The Go-Between, for example, or the New Zealand book that imitated it, James Courage’s The Young Have Secrets. But, unlike those other books, Rough Island Story is not exploring sexual tensions or the desire of pubescent boys to know what adults are up to.

I do not wish to talk this novel up as a “lost classic”. It is no such thing. There is no profundity and little subtlety of character. It is no more nor less than a good story, well-told in clear prose, with a slight touch of irony as an adult voice, with an adult vocabulary, narrates the experiences of a thirteen-year-old boy. After half-a-century, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it again as a piece of pure escapism. Even if James Fitzsimmonds’ life had little in common with mine, Rough Island Story took me back to being a kid once again.

I’m allowed to enjoy this feeling sometimes, you know. 

Typically pompous footnote, for which I am notorious: Being an incorrigible pedant, I caught Hugh McGraw out on one tiny detail. Rough Island Story is set before the First World War. Fitz refers to the deepest part of the “lake” as “the Maracot Deep”, a reference to Arthur Conan-Doyle’s underseas science-fiction story The Maracot Deep. Trouble is, Doyle’s story was first published in 1928, years after young Fitz’s adventures are supposed to have taken place.