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What they say
about Goodnight Mister Tom
A
selection of british reviews from 1981, the year of
publication
"…an assured first novel. Powerful enough to cause the odd gulp in readers of any generation."
Nicholas Tucker THE GUARDIAN
"This not-to-be-missed novel explores a wide range of problems amid an amazing welter of emotions. This is particularly important and striking because the emotions relate to a boy and a man."
Books For Keeps
"The brilliant story of an evacuee with the worst mother in the whole of children's literature."
Sunday Telegraph
"A brilliant story of how love defeats fear."
The Independent
"This
splendid first novel is unashamedly and gloriously
sentimental and it cannot fail to be loved by readers of all
ages.
The telling of this moving story is effortless in its
simplicity and lack of pretension. The characters are drawn
with sympathy and economy, and if the village and its
uninvited ugly duckling develop colours slightly brighter
than life, the reader can only be grateful that the author
had the courage to use so brilliant and beautiful a
palette."
Sarah Hayes THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
"… a warm-hearted and satisfying novel."
THE BOOKSELLER
"…a name to watch for."
OXFORD MAIL
"A book almost impossible to put down &endash; that is Goodnight Mister Tom, the first novel by Michelle Magorian. The story, strong and emotive without being sentimental, is superbly told. It is a first class read, highly recommended."
HERALD EXPRESS TORQUAY, DEVON
"…a first novel of exciting quality. Open it and you are with a born writer, of the storytelling kind. An optimistic, even a joyful book."
Naomi Lewis OBSERVER
"Goodnight Mister Tom is an outstanding first novel. Set in the Second World War, it deserves to stand alongside those classics portraying the period, Nina Bawden's Carrie's War and Jill Paton Walsh's Fireweed. Nine year old Willie, an evacuee, is billeted with elderly widower Tom Oakley. Both of them are gradually changed by the experience and a profound relationship develops. Will's initial deprivation is well portrayed, and the earlier chapters in which he gradually blossoms are particularly fine. Compulsive reading."
Ken Hobday JUNIOR EDUCATION
"…a powerful story of healing."
Gillian Cross BRITISH BOOK NEWS
"…a thoughtful story for the child of twelve or more who enjoys reading about people and relationships but rejects stories of everyday modern life for something a little more profound. My son has thought and rethought Goodnight Mister Tom. His own copy will be under the tree."
Cathy Lister BOOKS FOR KEEPS/CHRISTMAS ISSUE
Thursday March 25th 1982
GUARDIAN CHILDREN'S AWARD
"For the first time since Watership Down, a first novel has won the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction. Goodnight Mister Tom, by Michelle Magorian (Kestrel, £5.50), is everyone's idea of a smash-hit first novel: nostalgic but skirting sentimentality, full blown characters to love and hate, moments of grief and joy, horror and serenity compassionate (though not complex), sensitive (though not subtle), and a marvellous story that knows just how to grab the emotions. It's a book all kinds of children will actually read and tell their friends about &endash; no intellectual elitism about this year's award.
An eight-year-old boy, beaten and starved into stunned apathy by an insane mother is billeted as an evacuee on a crusty old villagerwhose own wife and baby died 40 years ago. The story tells how they bring each other back to life. It's a book about learning first how to feel, then how to cope with those feelings.
In spite of passages that, in adult eyes, seem appallingly miserable, the book has an unselfconscious innocence that gives it an unusually wide appeal &endash; from little boys to big girls. Great literature it isn't, but the warmth and vitality of its story-telling are as irresistible as its gold-September jacket, and the judges cheerfully surrendered.
(Authors note: The illustrator was Vanessa Julian Ottie)
ARTS GUARDIAN
It was just a line from a song but it was enough to set Michelle Magorian scribbling. First there were short stories and then a full-length novel, Goodnight Mister Tom, which has won her this year's Guardian Children's Award. Stephanie Netell reports:
AN ACTRESS WITH A DOUBLE FIRST
TWO SOULS live in the small terraced house in Walthamstow, East London, gradually being done up as the odd penny becomes available. One, an actress keeps her familiar name of Mikki Magorian but, between not always- small television parts allows the novelist Michelle Magorian to indulge herself. And lately Michelle's life has been full of happy twists as has her own fiction.
Mikki Magorian was in Newcastle appearing in Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat scribbling away in spare moments as she always had. The song It Was Red and Yellow and Green and Brown and…sparked off some short stories suggested by the pairs of colours, among them green and brown, about a small boy and an old man, Willie Beech and Tom Oakley, who gradually took on such a life of their own that she found herself adding story after story about them. And if she could write stories, why not a novel? Goodnight Mister Tom took shape.
But although she had already written plays and horror stories for her rep company, she kept her novel secret in a drawer. Only later in writing classes at London's City Literary Institute, did she reveal it to her tutor, the novelist Dulan Barber. He then fulfilled the fantasy of every apprentice writer by yelping with pleasure and persuading her to find an agent.
Today, Goodnight Mister Tom, by the fully fledged novelist, Michelle Magorian, wins the Guardian's Children's Award; it has also won another (still unannounced) award in America, was runner up in the Rank/Young Observer award and has been nominated by London Librarians (and I suspect others) for the Carnegie.
She's a tiny vivacious woman in her thirties - you can see at once why she was ideally cast as the young Cicely Courtneidge in Lily. Her family are Irish Catholic: although Magorian is an Armenian name, all the Magorians she's ever come across here or in the States spring from the same little village in the mountains of Mourne.
With a father in the Navy since he was 15 (a rather splendid sounding chap who, after retiring to teach in a secondary modern school, then became a barrister, but such an unlikely looking one it was often assumed he was the defendant), she spent her childhood years in Singapore and Australia. It was her mother's efforts to get rid of her Australian accent that led to elocution lessons and the discovery of the world of drama.
A dynamic teacher with a flamboyant talent and a very jolly convent school that cherished all its girls - the nuns slipping in a quick prayer for whoever had an interview or test for that day &endash; sent her on to drama school where she trained as a teacher as well as a performer, followed by mime study in Paris with Marcel Marceau. A career in rep developed &endash; her theatre pictures show a bouncy, versatile actress &endash; and it was during a prolonged spell in Exeter that she lived the kind of village life she portrays so easily in her novel: her little Weirwold is a nostalgic blend of Devon and Suffolk.
The novel however, is by no means all rosy. Set in the first year of the war, it tells of the strange billeting of a cowed eight-year-old evacuee on a taciturn old countryman, and of the effects of the unexpected love that comes into both their lives. The boy's mother is a guilt-ridden religious psychopath, who is driven by some inner torment to savage brutality in scenes that some adults consider pretty strong meat for kids.
Indeed they were harrowing to write but, she says, uncannily forced themselves into existence. She was interested in her adult's motives &endash; why for instance, would someone abuse a vulnerable child? &endash; and in expressing a child's feelings, his fear, discomfort with his own body, and later grief, something she believes was lacking in her own childhood reading, and which might have eased her sense of isolation. It's clear, though, that she is an instinctive writer, and it's this young reader's respond to sharing all that happens in her world.
Why choose a period she herself never knew with all those risky details? A part answer is that she loves research (she's revelling in the next book's demands) and while acknowledging the awkward presence of courgettes in 1939, she hesitates over whether ARP men wore boilersuits, and goes on to the attacks over questions of weather. Whatever people may remember, she says firmly, the records show that the day before war broke out was ferociously close and ended with dramatic thunderstorms over most of southern England.
It's only the second time the Guardian Children's Award has gone to a first novel: let's hope she is full of books, There's an amateur zest to Goodnight Mister Tom, a sense of a book inside someone that had to be written. She wants to write for young people: she hated teaching them but enjoys working with them, with that splendid feedback children offer, and on her shelves is a large idiosyncratic collection of children's books, pre-war and modern which she reads for pure pleasure. A few Magorians would fit in nicely.
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