Introduction

These are my favourite short stories, listed chronologically in terms of when I first read them. My unhinged literary take is that short stories for children are generally more satisfying than those for adults.

Father Christmas by Raymond Briggs

I’m classifying this picture book featuring a bare minimum of words as a graphic short story. It’s one of the first books I remember coming into my childhood home (I was 4 when it was published) and probably also the one I’ve read the most times as I reread it every Christmas. Beautiful artwork – I especially love the depiction of Father Christmas having a snack between snowy roofs – and with so much detail in the background that each panel merits as close an inspection as a Pont cartoon.

Hamish Hamilton, 1973

The Omruds by Oliver Postgate with illustrations by Peter Firmin

The fourth installment in the The Saga of Noggin the Nog series, it’s short and it’s a story so again I’m claiming that it counts for these purposes. I loved all of the adventures of the Norse King Noggin and his various Isle of Lewis chessmen-inspired friends (and main enemy Nogbad, boo, hiss), but this one which focuses on his encounter with a race of little people who live under a nearby hill is a particular favourite because I also loved stories about little people such as The Borrowers when I was a little person. The detailed endpapers of the original editions are worth a long browse.

Kaye & Ward, 1968

‘The Bishop’s Handkerchief’ by Richmal Crompton

One of the reasons I loved the William stories was that my parents would read an entire chapter to me at bedtime rather than a bit at a time of a longer story such as The Hobbit – I much preferred the closure of a short tale. This will make me sound like an insufferable infant but I remember thinking at the age of about five that this one – in which William goes to some extreme lengths to get hold of a silk handkerchief – was the epitome of adult sophistication.

First published in Still William, Newnes, 1925

‘The Magic Wristwatch’ by H. E. Todd

Bobby Brewster was a pleasant but unremarkable pre-teenager whose taste for sardine sandwiches and mildly magical goings-on were chronicled in various charming collections for children from 1949 until 1988, the year of Todd’s death. This was my favourite as a child, in which Bobby receives a watch for his birthday and discovers he can turn back time to relive the big day, naturally with unforeseen results. By chance (or perhaps not), it was also the story Todd read out during an author visit to the London primary school class which included my father.

First published in Bobby Brewster, Brockhampton Press, 1954

L’enfant et les sortilèges by Colette, with music by Maurice Ravel

This will only confirm how unspeakable I was as a nipper. This short French opera about a mischievous boy who smashes up his bedroom and hurts nearby animals, then learns his lesson when the objects come to life and the animals start talking (think Where the Wild Things Are meets Disney’s Beauty and The Beast) absolutely fascinated me at about the same time I was enjoying Bobby Brewster stories. My parents had an LP which featured Colette’s short libretto in French (with bits of English sprinkled around too) and even though I didn’t speak any of the language I used to follow the text while the record played because I found the sound mixture of words and music quite haunting. Sometimes I just looked at the words without playing the music. Strange little boy.

Monte Carlo, 1925

‘The Verger’ by W. Somerset Maugham

I came to this initially via a 1950 film compilation of three of Maugham’s short stories called Trio, starring James Hayter in the title role as the verger of St Peter’s, Neville Square, ousted because he is illiterate, but who finds (as many of us do) that redundancy is actually not always such a terrible thing.

First published in Cosmopolitans, Heinemann, 1936. Read it via the British Council here

‘The Purity of the Turf’ by P. G. Wodehouse

This would be my Desert Island short story if I could only take one of the dozen. I can’t see how this account of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster betting on the races, especially the girls’ egg and spoon, at a local village fete could be bettered. It’s just perfect.

First published in The Strand Magazine, July 1922. Collected in The Inimitable Jeeves, Herbert Jenkins, 1923

‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ by anon/Gawain poet

Another slightly rule-bending choice but while it’s a poem I’d also argue that it’s as much of a short story as Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest’s Tale et al, and written at exactly the same time in the 14^th Century. I half-heartedly collect versions/translations of Gawain’s encounter with the eponymous Christmas visitor to King Arthur’s court and his later tribulations with a seductive noblewoman. There’s something to be said for most ‘translations’ but Simon Armitage’s recent effort (Faber & Faber, 2009) is particularly good, though I would also urge readers to have at least a bit of a bash at the original too.

First printed edition Syr Gawayne: A Collection of Ancient Romance-Poems by Scottish and English Authors Relating to That Celebrated Knight of the Round Table, The Bannatyne Club, 1839

‘Crisp New Bills for Mr Teagle’ by Frank Sullivan

A heartwarming Christmas story about a chap who discovers how much people appreciate him when he tries to give them presents. Simple and affecting. Sullivan was one of the Algonquin Round Table circle.

First published in The New Yorker, December 14, 1935 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in A Christmas Treasury, edited by Jack Newcombe, Viking Press, 1982

‘Pontoon Boat’ by Garrison Keillor

For my money, Keillor is unsurpassed as a performer of short stories, as well as the writer of them. I’ve loved his gentle but superb Lake Wobegon tales since I first heard them as an impressionable sixth former on Radio 4’s A Book at Bedtime slot in 1986, and he is the only author whose entire oeuvre I have bought (even though some of it is a bit ropey, I have to admit). One of the highlights of my life was asking him a question at one of his London performances in the mid-1990s. In ‘Pontoon Boat’, the local bar proprietor and proud boat owner Wally takes a delegation of Lutheran ministers out onto the town’s lake in his new vessel. Things go a bit wrong – but, this being Lake Wobegon, only a bit.

First published in Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories, Viking Penguin, 1987

‘The Man Who Would Be King’ by Rudyard Kipling

Two 19^th Century British adventurers (and Freemasons) in India decide to head to Afghanistan and set themselves up as regional monarchs. Kingsley Amis described it as “grossly overrated”, but as always he was wrong – this is proper swashbuckling Boys’ Own stuff with a clear message about the morality and sustainability of British colonialism. There’s a cracking 1975 movie version of it starring Michael Caine and Sean Connery.

First published in The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Tales, AH Wheeler & Co, 1888. Available at The Kipling Society, here

‘Black Caesar’s’ by John Williams

Earlier this year I published a book called My Year of Reading Welshly for which I spent a year reading lots of books by Welsh authors and about Wales. One of the delights was coming across the engaging and witty Five Pubs…, a series of interlinked-ish short stories about Cardiff’s somewhat criminal Butetown underbelly. This first story, in which local gangster Kenny Ibadulla attempts to turn part of his nightclub into a Nation of Islam mosque, is a superb opener.

From Five Pubs, Two Bars, and a Nightclub, Bloomsbury, 1999