Letters: Just William and the ghosts of war

JR Townsend was wrong, writing in 1969, to say that 11-year-old William Brown "started in 1922" (From the archive: The Peter Pan world of William, 13 January). It was February 1919 that the first story (Rice Mould) appeared in Home Magazine, the next two being published in the March and April issues of that year.The reprint of Townsend's article came to me as a pleasant surprise, as I had just reread those earliest stories, and was impressed above all by that dating. William appeared in print just a few months after the armistice. Doubtless he was conceived in the last days of the war. Within those few short weeks Robert and Ethel were hanging festive decorations for a family party, Mr Brown was returning of an evening from his office, and Mrs Brown was entertaining village ladies for afternoon tea served by cook and maid. Every hint of the so recent catastrophe, the near-universal grief, anxiety, destruction, confusion, and vain attempts at rationalising monstrous loss, was swept away from the family hearth, all to be gathered into the person of the little boy, so accurately dismissed by his father as dangerously insane.There, in this scapegrace-scapegoat, all the harms of the village-world found a refuge, were exercised there month after month, until the time came 20 years later for them to be released at large again in the next inferno to be wrought by adult society.Claude CliffordCrediton, Devon