Gideon Ahoy! by William Mayne was published in 1987. Gideon is a teenager and he’s profoundly deaf, so he doesn’t have much in the way of speech. He seems to be mentally handicapped but he would probably be described as being severely autistic nowadays. The whole household revolves around Gideon who makes a lot of noise which of course he can’t hear. His younger sister Eva gets somewhat neglected because of the situation, not that she minds. There are also two younger children, called Tansy and Mercury. Their mother has a hard life because she’s more or less a one parent family, the father is in the Merchant Navy and spends most of his time away at sea.
Gideon gets a job working on a canal barge, he’s good at the work and is popular with the people who pay to go on the boat trips, but it’s a mystery what happenes to his pay. He never brings any home although his employer pays him. Gideon’s confidence rises and the atmosphere in the family begins to improve, although Tansy and Mercury are still a handful, brimful of energy. But it turns out that Gideon’s job is just for the summer and he can’t understand that the barge isn’t used in the cold months.
This is a lovely story with a happy ending, just what I needed really.
Apparently William Mayne was convicted of child abuse and his books have been removed from libraries and possibly even most bookshops but I bought my copy of this book in a secondhand bookshop in Callander, Stirlingshire, and when I bought it the woman said, ah that’s a lovely book. I don’t know if she knew of the history of William Mayne. However it set me thinking. Are some authors ‘too big’ to be cancelled the way some banks or companies are deemed to be too big to be allowed to fail?
I’ve always wondered why Gary Glitter’s records have been cancelled but Michael Jackson’s are still played regularly on the radio and TV.
Likewise William Mayne’s books have been removed from shelves but Alice Munro is still feted despite her husband admitting that he sexually abused her daughter from the age of nine for years, and she blamed her daughter instead of getting rid of her husband, the girl’s step-father. You can read about it in a Guardian article here. I find that more shocking.