The boy's
own stories
Juliet Townsend
CAESAR, THE LIFE STORY OF A PANDA LEOPARD and HUSSEIN: AN ENTERTAINMENT by Patrick O'Brian British Library, £50 (limited edition, £125) Going through some old papers the other day, I came upon an exercise book in which my brother had written an early novel — he must have been about eight. The opening scene is set in a but in a clear- ing in the jungle, where a missionary and his wife are trying in vain to beat off a horde of frenzied savages. 'Do not attack the minister of the one true God,' this mus- cular Christian roars as he empties his revolver into the advancing masses, then calls on his wife, who seems to be acting as a sort of unofficial loader, to 'kindly hand me my Martini Henry riffle' [sic]. All in vain — they are hacked to pieces. Skulls are cracked like eggshells, blood spurts from severed jugulars, their baby son is swept off by the victors to be brought up as a cross between Superman and the Noble Savage, and one realises that the author had been reading Tarzan.
I was reminded of this story when con- fronted by two early works by Patrick O'Brian, now issued in handsome matching bindings by the British Library. The first, Caesar, The Life Story of a Panda Leopard, was written when the author was 12 and by his own account delicate and somewhat precocious — 'a sort of elderly child'. Even now, 70 years later, he can remember the gusto with which he embarked on this first work of fiction, and, as is the case with most children's writings, his sources of inspiration are fairly clear. He does not explain why he made Caesar an impossible mythical animal whose father was a giant panda and mother a snow leopard. Apart from this unusual ancestry, Caesar, who tells the story in the first person, behaves very much like the other panthers, leopards and tigers whose life stories for children were popular in the 1920s. We have those staples of wildlife stories, the forest fire, the death of the mother, the kindly white master who tames the wild beast. And there is plenty of blood and guts here too — more eggshell skulls, a tiger disembowelled by a wild boar, an ele- phant kneeling on a panther 'breaking every bone', while the jungle rings to 'the mocking bellow of the alligator'. It is wor- thy of the ancient Colosseum.
Where Caesar differs from many other similar children's stories is in the young O'Brian's persistence. He keeps the story galloping along for 90 pages, then brings it to a proper end, and among the echoes of The Jungle Book and Rider Haggard there are vivid descriptions and the beginnings of a sure touch for words. Having witnessed the recent total eclipse, I was struck by his description of an eclipse in the jungle: 'The sun seemed to go out like a dead firefly.' There are rather endearing touches of pedantry, too, with obscure information proudly displayed: 'A sounder of wild pigs — as a large family is called.' Although the second book, Hussein: An Entertainment, was written when O'Brian was an undergraduate, it is still very much a boy's story. As he explains in his intro- duction, he had no first-hand experience of India, and relied on his reading and the anecdotes of friends and relations who knew the country well. Again the influence of Kipling is very strong. O'Brian's Indian characters, like those of many other authors on India who are writing at one remove, speak Kiplingesque English. There is a good deal of 'By the Beard of the Prophet', and '0 Son of Eblis'. There are casual sentences to establish the author as an old India hand: 'He was singing that melancholy song they sing in Peshawar, of which the refrain goes "Drai jarra yow dee" ', and the love scenes are described with typical Kipling evasiveness: 'For a long while they said and did nothing that has not been said and done by half the world when it was young.' There are many echoes of Kim and The Jungle Books particularly `Toomai of the Elephants' and `Rikki tikki tavi'. Hussein, like Toomai, comes of a long line of mahouts; like Toomai he tethers his elephant with a fragile bracelet of grass; like Mowgli he is chased by a pack of ravenous dholes; like Kim he wanders round the country encountering many adventures; his mongoose, like RIM tikki, enjoys epic fights with deadly cobras. Yet, in spite of these borrowings, there is much in both Caesar and Hussein to inter- est those of us who have derived such great pleasure from the works of O'Brian's matu- rity, for we can see here a true storyteller in the making. There is a feeling of the sheer zest of setting down a gripping narra- tive, which holds the reader's attention and never flags, and there is endless fertility of invention. Never did heroes, human or ani- mal, lead more eventful lives. Hardly has one crisis been resolved than they are plunged into the next — and even in the 12-year-old's story you always want to turn the next page. The historical and technical expertise and the subtle depiction of characters which mark the Aubrey/Maturin books still lay in the future, but for those who find it interesting to see whether the child is father of the man, there is much in these two examples of juvenilia to enjoy.
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