Goodnight Mister Tomby Michelle Magorian was first published in 1981. Despite the dark context of the story ultimately it is positive and hopeful. On the other hand, Will is clearly assisted by adults and friends (including the dog) using common good sense and decency, sympathetic care, encouragement, acceptance into a community and the unconditional love of a dog and an adult.
Some aspects of it are challenging as I have suggested: physical abuse of children, deaths and a child finding himself quite alone in an alien environment. Tom has been severely abused again and now the villagers bring him back to life. Not having heard from the boy Tom goes to London to find him and bring him home. Will has developed more confidence in what is right and wrong which is a provocation to his mother. I was genuinely shocked by the moment when Will finds the baby with her mouth taped to keep her quiet.
Will learns to read and write and his talent at drawing is uncovered.Īll goes well until Willie’s mother demands his return and in a disturbing turn of events it is discovered that she has had a baby. The two boys form an adventurous friendship with three local children which brings Will out of himself.īoth Tom and the boy gradually become absorbed into the transformed community. And when the boy goes to school another outsider makes him his friend. And he must work with his neighbours to clothe the boy and deal with the harm resulting from Will’s mother’s physical abuse. In order to care for the boy Tom has to learn discretion and gentleness. He is so anxious that at night he wets the bed. It emerges that Will has never slept in a bed. The old man has a loft room that he prepares for the boy.
Despite it being September he has been sewn into his clothes for winter. Frightened of everything, he has been threatened with dire consequences if he strays outside his mother’s strict code. Will is in a pitiful way: beaten and neglected by his mother and unable to read or write. This is Tom Oakley, who has been a bit of a recluse since his wife and baby son died 40 years before. William Beech (8) is an evacuee in 1939, sent from Deptford in London to a rural village, and lodged with an older man (in his 60s).
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