The Smallest Room

by John Pudney

The Smallest Room

150 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1954

About the author

John Sleigh Pudney was born in Langley, Buckinghamshire. He attended Gresham's School, where he was a contemporary of W.H. Auden. He worked as a radio producer and scriptwriter for the BBC and as a war correspondent, before joining the RAF in 1940. Before the war he had written two published books of verse, Spring Encounter and Open the Sky, two collections of stories and Jacobson's Ladder, a novel. During the war he was recruited by the British Government to write about the work of air crews in a way that could be understood by the general public. A Squadron Leader, he served in Africa, the Mediterranean and France.

He became a reviewer for the Daily Express after the end of the war and Literary Editor of News Review from 1948-1950. He then joined the publishers Putnam as a director. He was an extraordinarily prolific writer, producing twenty collections of poetry, dozens of novels, children's books, short stories and two plays. His non-fiction included a history of lavatories, The Smallest Room, and an official history of the Battle of Malta.

Probably his most famous poem, 'For Johnny', was written on the back of an envelope during an air raid on London in 1941. This simple, twelve-lined poem seemed to encapsulate the mood of the war taking place in the air at this time. It first appeared in the News Chronicle and was read on radio by Lawrence Olivier and quoted by Michael Redgrave in a war time film, The Way to The Stars, and has appeared in numerous anthologies:

Reviews

[Dorothea · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the many reasons to explore a big library in person -- in this case I was amusing myself in the GT shelves (Library of Congress classification for "Manners and customs"). The smallest room, if you can't guess that euphemism, is the one with the toilet. And this is a small book about that room. It's a sort of history plus guide to literature (from John Harington to Chic Sale) plus collection of trivia and anecdotes, framed within the funny little story of how the author employed a plumber, stonemason, carpenter, and painter to add a "smallest room" to his house, replacing the "old Jericho" at the bottom of the garden. And it's a very nice little book -- managing to convey quite a lot of toilet-related humor with the minimal number of crass words needed to demonstrate the author's, er, ease with his subject.