The Watch House

by Robert Westall

The dust flew in clouds, making her cough. Anne looked inside the last glass case. More writing. It was moving! Balls of fluff being pushed around like tiny mice. More letters appeared as she watched. AnHelpAnHelpAnHelp Anne Help Who is writing the messages in the dust? What is the story behind the huge skull in the old Watch House? Alone and unhappy in Garmouth, Anne knows the shadows are following her. Spirits of long-dead sailors who won`t rest. And from behind its empty windows, the Watch House is watching her...

Genres: Horror, Young Adult, Childrens, Fiction, Ghosts, Fantasy, Ghost Stories

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Robert Westall was born in North Shields, Northumberland, England in 1929.

His first published book The Machine Gunners (1975) which won him the Carnegie Medal is set in World War Two when a group of children living on Tyneside retrieve a machine-gun from a crashed German aircraft. He won the Carnegie Medal again in 1981 for The Scarecrows, the first writer to win it twice. He won the Smarties Prize in 1989 for Blitzcat and the Guardian Award in 1990 for The Kingdom by the Sea. Robert Westall's books have been published in 21 different countries and in 18 different languages, including Braille.

From: http://www.robertwestall.com/

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has been on my TBR pile for some time and got a bit lost in the list. I finally decided it was time to read this ghost story, and I'm so glad I did! So enjoyable!

The basics: Anne's parents are at odds again. This time, they are headed for divorce. Anne's mother forces her to leave London and travel to Garmouth, a seaside village. She's plonked down in the cottage of her former nanny, Prudie, and her husband, Arthur. A whole summer in a village where she knows nobody -- it's a bit of a nightmare for any teenager. Anne decides to take it in stride. She explores the village and begins asking Arthur questions about the nearby watch house. Inside is a treasure trove of history...pieces of boats that sank on the rocks, things that washed up on the shore after wrecks, bits of sail, ropes....even a skull and several jaw bones. It's a bit creepy.....and it only gets worse when strange writing starts showing up on all the glass display cases in the watch house. AnHelpAnHelpAnHelp. Anne is a bit terrified when she figures out what the writing means: Anne Help. Does the spirit that reportedly haunts the old watch house need her help?

The front cover art for this particular edition is just awesome!! The picture on the front is what made me want to read this book in the first place! The skull superimposed over the watch house is just awesome!

This is such an interesting and suspenseful story! It definitely kept my attention from start to finish. I did have to look up a few things so I could visualize the story. I'd never heard of a watch house before....lots of interesting facts and photographs on the internet about watch brigades who worked to save people after shipwrecks. I looked at a lot of photos of old watch houses to get a feel for what Anne saw. Only after looking at all those photos did I learn that back in the 80s, the BBC made a movie version of this story! Now that I've read the book, I'm going to watch the movie and get an even better feel for the watch house, the seaside cliffs and the suspense of this great ghost story! I hope the movie sticks close to the source material. For anyone else that would like to watch it, the movie is on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZuBK...

This story is a very enjoyable teenage adventure tale with some supernatural spookiness. It's totally age appropriate for ages 13 and up. There are a couple minor curse words, but nothing too graphic or scary. As an adult, I enjoyed this story immensely. It made for a great afternoon of enjoyable reading.

This is the first book by Robert Westall that I've read. I'm definitely going to read more by this author. This was a great story! And he has many more books that look like stories I would really enjoy! Check out his website here: http://www.robertwestall.com/

Now I get to watch the movie version! Yay!!

[Margo Laurie]

I usually love Westall books, but found it difficult to settle into this one - it had a clever plot and atmospheric setting, but somehow the magic wasn't there. I might come back to it another time, but for now, leaving it un-rated.

[Ria Bridges · Rating 4 out of 5]

I probably read this book for the first time when I was 12, and thought then that it was a good novel. I had a weak spot for Westall at the time. After all, he used to live not far from my nana, and the place of my grandfather’s garden allotment was mentioned in another of his novels. It seemed almost a family legacy that I read and enjoy his books.

The Watch House takes place in Garmouth, a place which is like Tynemouth in just about every way but the name. It centres around Anne, a girl of unspecified age but probably in her mid early to mid teens. Caught in a bad family situation, she is sent to Garmouth for the summer, where she stays with Prudie and Arthur, caretakers of the Watch House. But admit the legitimate teenage angst and coming of age is a well-done ghost story, one that doesn’t pull any punches and gives credit to the age group the book is intended for by bringing up some truly deep thought and contemplation.

This is the kind of book I look at and think to myself, “This wouldn’t make it today.” Not because it’s bad, but let’s be honest. There are too many novels with the intended age range of “11+” that mention sex, adultery, swearing, violent death, and heated snarky religious bickering between two priests, all all done with a sense of maturity and realism. If you can find books like this, they’re few and far between. But that’s one thing I’ve always found about Westall. He can write with a tone for younger audiences will still treating them as though they’re capable of understanding some of the darker aspects of reality.

Westall should also be praised for managing to cram complex issues into a small number of words. In only a few short paragraphs, you can get a real sense for Anne’s relationship with her mother and father, her own sense of self, and her feelings about spending the summer in Garmouth. You get a real sense of who the characters are without spending pages on introductions, on narrating the backstory, without Anne staring in the mirror and contemplating the colour of her hair. Westall has always been good at saying volumes without saying much at all, and this book is no exception.

As a nostalgic reread, I’d say the Watch House holds up incredibly well. It isn’t a timeless novel, since there are some very dated references in it, but that was also true of it when I first read it, so I can’t fault the book on that. It may throw some new readers off a little bit, but if they can bypass a few odd cultural quirks and focus on the meat of the story and the characters, then there’s no problem at all.

I do have to admit that much of my high opinion, at least when it comes to nostalgia value, may be riding on the fact that I can close my eyes and picture everything in this book so clearly because I’ve been there. Repeatedly. On family vacations. So I’m more than a little biased here, and for someone who didn’t grow in around Tynemouth might not get the same enjoyment and sense of familiarity when reading this book. That being said, though, it is still a good book for its own sake, and there’s no denying that, even if I rip away the gloss of nostalgia. This just happens to raise my own personal opinion of it.

This isn’t the book I would first recommend to anyone looking to experience the full force of Westall’s talent. I’m pretty sure that the majority of people who have read this author will recommend The Machine Gunners, and I’m no exception. But if you are looking for a quick and mature ghost story, then by all means, give this one a look.

[Lynn · Rating 1 out of 5]

When an upset teen has to spend the summer with her elderly relatives in a coastal English village she encounters disturbing spirits in the lighthouse. She and her new friends work to unearth the mystery behind the ghostly activities, and have to figure out how to make the spirits rest.

I usually like these types of books, but had a difficult time reading this. It takes a long time to develop the characters and tension, and the language seems dated and stilted. I would not recommend this to teens unless they are reading at a very high level and appreciate this style.

[Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently had the pleasure of watching the Children's BBC adaptation of this Robert Westall novel. It was made back in the 1980s and sticks closely to the source material, while excising certain sub-plots in order to bring it into a three-episode running time (gone are the priests, for example). Both book and TV series have exactly the same creepy atmosphere, vivid setting, and effective historical ghost story in which the youthful protagonist, Anne, must solve a strange double haunting that carries down to the present day. As with most young adult fiction of the late 20th century (this was written in 1978), Westall's story is brief and to the point, surprisingly deep when it comes to character and setting, and very engaging.

[Tepintzin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this book from someone who had a big pile of them to give away. I figured, 70s horror is cheesy and fun, this is probably a very dated win.

What I did not realize was that this is a young adult occult novel, and it delivers. The theme is loneliness: the loneliness of being the new kid in town, of being the weird kid, of being in an isoltated place, of being a priest, and of being a ghost.

The main character, Anne, is a teen of unstated age. Her mother has dropped her off "like a package" to stay with Prudie, her mother's old nanny, and her brother Arthur, at the Brigade Cottage of the Life Brigade, a volunteer force that is dedicated to saving people whose ships wreck along the seashore. The Watch House of the title is full of memorabilia of the Life Brigade, including a human skull which becomes the focus of the haunting.

Anne herself is snarky without being too self-pitying or self-centered. I found her a highly sympathetic teenaged character. The novel isn't too dated, and I enjoyed it immensely.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some clever twists in a straightforward tale of late 70s teen angst set in a small seaside town. Plus a ghost being haunted by another ghost, which is pretty fun. Classic Westall.

[Orrin Grey · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Watch House is the first of Robert Westall's ghostly novels for young adults (in the back of the book he says "I always wanted to write a ghost story"). As such, its take on the supernatural isn't quite as nuanced as some of his later stuff. It really reads a lot like a Nancy Drew-esque YA mystery story (albeit with all the usual Westall touches), only with an added ghostly presence. That said, toward the end, there are some really good supernatural bits.

He's got an interesting take on the idea of a ghost here, with his claim that "Human beings are spooks plus. Why shouldn't they sometimes win?" I, of course, prefer my supernatural a little more on the inexplicable side, but then, in the last few pages, we're given something that makes the haunting a little less explicable than it at first appeared, so that's nice.

All in all a good book, though not up to the mark of Westall's best stuff. For a really fine supernatural yarn from him, I suggest The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral.

[Elizabeth]

Not Westall's best in terms of plot or organization, but he's still a wonderful writer. The prose just flows so easily and the sense of place makes up for a bunch of cliched twists including the fact that the grownups have to come to the rescue at the end.

[Teresa Traver · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book only once before, when I was a teen or tween, but it left an impression on me. When I reread it, though, I found that I had forgotten many of the details and misremembered some others. (Among other things, I apparently conflated this book with another ghost story that involved a ship's figurehead!)

In addition to some conflations, I had forgotten all of Anne's backstory— the reason why she was staying at the Watch House in the first place. I remembered the friendship between the two priests, but had completely forgotten about Anne's friends Pat and Timmo, who play a major role in the second half of the novel.

I enjoyed rereading the book as an adult, but different things stick out to me now. For example, I really enjoyed watching Anne's relationship with Arthur unfold in the first few chapters, and was a little disappointed that Arthur faded into the background as the haunting ramped up. As for Prudie, I liked her best in a pivotal scene where she confronts Anne's mother. It was good to see that Anne had adults who loved her and cared for her well-being. I like to imagine Anne staying in touch with Prudie and Arthur for the rest of their lives, because she is probably the closest thing they have to a niece.

Like many of Robert Westall's novels, this book explores the relationship between the past and the present, specifically questioning how we can deal with past evils that continue to haunt the present. The problem of past evil remains a timely issue, so I hope new readers continue to discover The Watch House.

There are some dated elements in the book, but the haunting at the core of the story still has power to grip readers. As a ghost story, The Watch House is a bit of a slow burn, but worth it. I would recommend it for ages 12+, with the caveat that young readers should be prepared to look up details about life in 20th century Britain. A lot has changed since the 70s!

[Emkoshka · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book #4 of 24 in '24

The premise of this book was intriguing — a teenager on holiday in an English seaside town is haunted by the secrets of the Watch House — but it hasn't aged well. Published in 1977, there's stuff in here that wouldn't make it past an editor's pen these days. For example, on the first page the protagonist jokingly wonders if the elderly man she's going to spend the summer with is a rapist. And, in classic 70s style, the story ends with an exorcism. But I did enjoy the bantering priests and Anne's friends Pat and Timmo, who she meets at the youth club disco, of course! There's some beautifully evocative writing that brings the fictional town of Garmouth (based on Tyneside) to life and interesting historical details chronicling the town in both the 1850s and 1970s, but I can see why it's now out of print. Robert Westall was a wonderfully prolific writer in the eight brief years before his death in 1993, but sadly many of his works are now time capsules and unlikely to find favour again.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Torn on what to give this: it ultimately feels more like a 3, but maybe a strong 3 or 3.5. This is a classical style ghost story that has some charming small English village atmosphere and a few all too sparse creepy moments given life by strong descriptive writing but maybe ambles a bit too much; during the last 70 pages the protagonist seems increasingly shoved to the side by side characters to the point where she can't even decide what they do, others get to do it for her and during the final showdown she does precisely nothing at all and seems to stop existing until the final one page scene.

[Huw Collingbourne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite disappointing. This is a rather run-of-the-mill ghost story with few chills and no characters of any great interest. It has none of the brilliance of Robert Westall's beautiful war-time novels, 'The Machine Gunners' and 'Blitzcat'. Those two novels are first rate. This one, sadly, is not.

[Dan Coxon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little uneven in places, and quite difficult to recommend for children under the age of 15 (there's a reference to rapists in the first page, and a few other moment that gave me pause). On the whole it's an excellent ghost story, though, with some truly deft touches.

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this. Well written ghost story set in my neck of the woods (which as most definitely caused me to be bias). I do love reading literature set in a locale I'm from and tis one had such a nostalgic feel to it.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was rather different for a middle grade. I liked the North East location as it's rare to read anything set here. I listened to the audiobook and the accents used really put you there. My only issue was that I felt rather removed from the characters.

[Sharon Bidwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I call this a pleasant read it may give the wrong impression for a ghost story, but it’s still atmospheric and I liked the cast of interesting characters, the unusual setting, different ghosts, and background stories. An excellent read for younger readers but absorbing enough for some adults.

[Ines Harrison · Rating 3 out of 5]

An endearing coming of age book with a creepy setting

[Mark Schiffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

English seaside ghost story with a fun cast, rainy atmosphere, and some great spooky moments (especially in the last act). Solid fun.

[Georgie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been on my TBR list for ages. So glad I finally got around to reading it - it’s delightfully creepy and sinister.

[Pollymoore3 · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most truly frightening ghost stories I've ever read, and like all the best ghost stories, believable on both levels: psychological and psychic.

[Stephen Tallevi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not Westall's best. First 2/3 of book is very slow moving - may have worked as a short story or as a novella at best.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you like mysteries with a twist, this is a good read. I enjoy novels about the past & ghosts. This has both.

[Faramir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dieser Jugendroman wirkt echt und gar nicht altbacken, obwohl er 1970 geschrieben wurde

[Tracey Browne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved, loved, loved this book! Original ghost plot!

[Michael Vawser]

1 SP paperback
Reprint 1984

[Shandi Leonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those stories that throws you right into the action. I loved how you could easily relate to anne and her emotions. When she discovers something strange about the watch house, you will be captivated by her journey and will always be wanting more! Great read!

[Rachel Brand · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book creeped me out so much, which is rather amazing considering that I lived off a diet of Point Horror when I read this!

[TeNnIsHoTtiE · Rating 1 out of 5]

HATED IT!

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delightfully creepy without being overly gross - not bedtime reading!