The Devil on the Road by Robert Westall

Book of the Week: 26 April 2020

I hope you are all enjoying the 972 books you borrowed on the last two days before Lockdown.

Without access to our School Library and a steady stream of new books, Book of the Week has become dusty and a bit cobwebby. To get round this, I have searched my shelves at home to see if I can find some books that you might like to read if you ever encounter them. You may even decide to seek them out, despite their being a little bit harder to find in these days of lockdown.

My first pick is Devil on the Road, published in 1978 (the picture shows my paperback from 1981) which I first read when I started working with young people in public libraries .

The story opens at the start of a long, hot summer when John Webster has just finished his first year at University College London. To escape the city, he decides to take his treasured motorbike to Clacton and swim in the sea. Unlike his dad, his dad’s friend the bank manager and the rimless spectacle types at university, John is a believer in giving in to chance and doing things at the toss of a coin. The busy main roads force him to take a detour down Suffolk lanes and he soon finds himself escaping a threatening storm by sheltering in an isolated barn. It is here that he has a strange encounter in the semi-darkness with a thug who is flailing around with a huge blade. John sees that a kitten is trying to escape the attack, so he knocks the man out cold, only to be shot at by someone else who appears in the doorway. When he comes round the next morning, the landowner thinks he’s had a motorcycle accident and decides to take him under his wing. The rescued kitten reappears, and with nothing better to do and the friendly landowner keen to offer him a summer job, he decides to stay for a while.

What sounds like an idyllic summer quickly turns into an uneasy and puzzling experience. John finds there are hidden rooms in the old barn and the locals treat him like some kind of mystic. His watch keeps stopping, and one day whilst out for a walk he sees an oddly dressed child and a body hanging from a gibbet. What starts out as a few unexplained happenings turns more and more threatening as John gets involved with people from the past, including the infamous Witch Finder General, Matthew Hopkins.

John Webster is one of those tough-tender characters, as likely to punch someone as he is to protect defenceless animals. The past is never romanticised and there are wonderful descriptions of the Suffolk countryside. Although a re-read of this threw up some dated references, and a few phrases we would now put under the ‘politically incorrect’ heading, it is still an exciting and atmospheric story with an underlying uneasiness that make it well worth searching out.

Robert Westall wrote many other brilliant books which you can read about here.