What do you think?
Rate this book
Tom Barber Trilogy #3
Young Tom
In many ways, ten-year-old Tom is like other boys: his life centres on his parents, school, and his best friend Pascoe. But he also has another existence, equally real, in his dreams and imagination. In this novel, we follow him as he plays with his three canine companions, Barker, Pincher and Roger, befriends and communicates with a rat and a squirrel, and tries to find out what happened to Ralph Seaford, the dead boy whose ghost now haunts Tom's grandmother's attic. In exquisite prose, without sentimentality, exaggeration, or a single false note, Reid brings to life Tom, his greatest creation, and accomplishes the difficult feat of allowing readers to revisit and experience anew the wonders and mysteries of childhood. This [Valancourt] edition features a new introduction by Andrew Doyle.
Young Tom (1944) completes the trilogy of novels featuring Tom Barber, which began with Uncle Stephen (1931) and The Retreat (1936), and it is probably Forrest Reid's finest achievement. Acclaim from contemporary critics was unanimous, and the book won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize as the best novel of the year.
Young Tom (1944) completes the trilogy of novels featuring Tom Barber, which began with Uncle Stephen (1931) and The Retreat (1936), and it is probably Forrest Reid's finest achievement. Acclaim from contemporary critics was unanimous, and the book won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize as the best novel of the year.
184 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 1, 1944
2 people are currently reading
81 people want to read
About the author
Forrest Reid
65 books16 followersForrest Reid was an Irish novelist, literary critic and translator. He was, along with Hugh Walpole and J.M. Barrie, a leading pre-war British novelist of boyhood. He is still acclaimed as the greatest of Ulster novelists and was recognised with the award of the 1944 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Young Tom.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 17, 2022
This is an, intermittently, beautiful and poignant book; at times transcendent(especially the last page).
Tom talks to the animals(they talk back too!) and has a crush on an older boy; and tries to negotiate friendships, but mainly isolation.
The style is spare and simple; emotionally, may be seen as twee nowadays. But, somehow, Reid, (just) carries it off: the book (and its two sequels) are plainly manifestations of the author's own nostalgia for lost youth ("Young Tom" was written in his last years, in the midst of the carnage of the Second World War).
As an older man, I got what Reid is (mainly successfully) trying to convey: the loss, and the need for attempts at regaining lost days.
What he achieves is an achingly dreamlike, misty world;which can equally appeal to children, young adults and all readers.
Much admired in his time, he has fallen into desuetude; sad.
If you can get hold of a copy (I found a GMP original in a bookshop in Cyffordd Landudno!!!!), read it:)
Tom talks to the animals(they talk back too!) and has a crush on an older boy; and tries to negotiate friendships, but mainly isolation.
The style is spare and simple; emotionally, may be seen as twee nowadays. But, somehow, Reid, (just) carries it off: the book (and its two sequels) are plainly manifestations of the author's own nostalgia for lost youth ("Young Tom" was written in his last years, in the midst of the carnage of the Second World War).
As an older man, I got what Reid is (mainly successfully) trying to convey: the loss, and the need for attempts at regaining lost days.
What he achieves is an achingly dreamlike, misty world;which can equally appeal to children, young adults and all readers.
Much admired in his time, he has fallen into desuetude; sad.
If you can get hold of a copy (I found a GMP original in a bookshop in Cyffordd Landudno!!!!), read it:)
September 20, 2020
This tale of an eleven-year-old boy growing up in an idyllic Irish setting in the mid 1930's appeals as much to adult readers as younger ones due to Reid's unusual ability to highlight just the right moments with just the right touch.
March 23, 2026
“Careful, the plates are hot!” always has the unfortunate effect of making me put out my hand to see just how hot. I’m not sure whether this is me being curious, contrarian or just plain perverse. But I was intrigued to discover that Young Tom did just the same thing at mealtimes:
“Mind the plate, Master Tom, it’d burn you.”
Automatically he advanced an experimental finger, and then began to eat … (p20)
The novel is full of this kind of thing. Things you thought only you did or thought, things you’ve probably never mentioned to anyone else, things that you thought were just your own personal quirks. It’s unsettling, yet perhaps oddly reassuring, to discover that your individual idiosyncrasies might actually be just part of human nature more generally.
And so as well as the instinct to touch hot plates when told not to, we see in the novel all kinds of other personality traits and quirks that tell us not just about a rather solitary, questioning eleven-year old but about the human condition more generally.
Banal or deeply symbolic? Forrest Reid has a habit of describing aspects of everyday behaviour with such acute precision that it’s uncomfortable, sometimes even revelatory, to read. For example:
- The awkwardness of selecting a gift that someone else is paying for (Tom goes through internal agonies choosing the book he really wants on p12).
- Having to justify why you instinctively don’t like someone (“because I don’t,” is Tom’s only reason when Althea asks him why he dislikes her obnoxious older brother Max on p13).
- Responding to sad news affecting someone else by privately relating it to your own personal circumstances (I love the fact that Tom “speculates” how his own Granny might express her grief if he were to die young like the boy commemorated in the church window on p15).
- People’s questionable personal hygiene with their own pets! (“Roger [the collie] licked his face, so he licked Roger - but just once, because he had been told it was a disgusting thing to do. It couldn’t be disgusting, however, unless there was somebody there to be disgusted, and at present there was no one” p36).
- Self-censoring what we say (“If it had been Daddy to whom he had been giving his account, it would have passed through a half-subconscious process of selection and elimination, based upon what he felt Daddy would or would not wish to fear” p55).
- Having annoying best friends (who ask you difficult questions, like prim but practical Pascoe who “pointed out that because Tom told him a thing didn’t necessarily make it true” p113).
Remembering the novel’s subtitle - “Very Mixed Company” - it’s hard not to be enchanted by Young Tom’s motley circle of friends and acquaintances, animal and otherwise. There’s:
- The “Dogs’ Club” made up of Barker, the elderly independent-minded Old-English sheepdog, Roger the gentlemanly collie, and Pincher the feisty young fox-terrier - neighbours’ pooches who Tom relates to (and converses with) entirely as humans.
- Edward the squirrel, the river rat and Alfred the hedgehog, who Tom anthropomorphises but quite unsentimentally. His imagined conversation with the rat, for example, focuses on the rat’s dislike of Tom’s dogs (p30).
- Granny’s cat Dinah and her new-born kittens who Tom lies with on the hearth rug, “curling as well as he could round both cat and kittens till all felt warm and furry - and very soon purry, too” (p63).
- The ghost of Ralph Seaford, the boy who died aged ten, commemorated in the church window.
- Kind sensible Dr Macrory who seems to have more patience, interest and understanding for Tom than his own father who’s rather cold and remote.
- Miss Sabine, the masculine governess, who he non-judgementally observes as “big and strong” with “a tiny black moustache” (p11).
- James-Arthur Fallon, the sixteen-year old farm-hand who Young Tom hero-worships. Tom watches James-Arthur stripping for a naked swim, emerging “from his soiled and much-patched clothing like a butterfly from a chrysalis, and the contrast between his fair hair and the golden brown of his body and limbs appeared to the smaller boy as attractive as anything could be” (p33).
Sometimes the novel is a sharply psychologic insight into human nature, penetrating and unsentimental. Sometimes it feels like a moral tale, a parable full of biblical metaphor, with Max’s gun triggering (literally) evil in the Garden of Eden.
At other times it has the feel of an wistful meander down Memory Lane by an old gent conjuring up his own autobiographical memories - charming, ironic and gently amusing:
- Doctor Macrory suggesting penguins as pets to Tom, “much the same as dogs” only “they might be troublesome to keep unless you happened to be a fishmonger … “ (p7).
- Tom’s “artless rejoinder” - “I’d like it all right” - to his mother’s reproach about his not wanting to visit his Granny: “How would you like to be left all alone by yourself from morning till night!” (p23).
- Only-child Tom’s dream that he’ll make a special friend when he goes to school, like in school stories where “the hero always found a chum” (p41).
- Parlourmaid Phemie - kind souled, stout and perspiring - helping lug the old bath down from the loft so that Tom can transform it into an aquarium (p82).
- The boys’ joint horror when Tom’s mother asks the first name of his new chum Pascoe (“It turned out to be an extremely footling one - Clement - though that of course wasn’t Pascoe’s fault” p84).
Whether wistful autobiography, penetrating study of human nature or biblical metaphor (and perhaps it’s a mixture of all three, “a dreamy contemplation of a world shifting uncertainly between recollection and imagination” p168) what I’d like to end with is the striking imagery that Forrest Reid uses to transport us deep into Young Tom’s intense, private world.
Most pages contain descriptive prose that made me stop and re-read the words to savour them more fully. Vivid and rather startling descriptions like these, for example:
- “The very air seemed alive, and from the earth a living strength was pushing upwards and outwards - visible in each separate blade of grass and delicate meadow flower no less than in the great chestnut-tree standing at the corner” (p9).
- Gazing up at the church bell hanging above him in the tower, the bell begins to “take life” in Tom’s mind, “the life of a great sleeping, dreaming bat. Yet it was iron - an iron bell” (p17).
- “In fact James-Arthur, merely by divesting himself of his clothes, had instantly become part of the natural scene, like the grass and the trees and the river and the sky, and the dragon-fly asleep upon his water-lily” (p33).
One final thing. I’ve noticed that Young Tom sometimes finds himself categorised in the “growing up different” genre with the emphasis firmly on his sensitive bookish ways. But there are many things that remind us there’s nothing stereotypical about him, including his distinctly practical and unsentimental attitude to dogs eating their own vomit. As he sturdily explains to his disgusted chum, Pascoe:
“It’s quite clean: it comes out exactly the way it was when he swallowed it - perfectly smoothly - just the way meat comes out of a mincing-machine. And it’s only his dinner: you wouldn’t notice the slightest difference really, except that it’s perhaps a bit more mixed up and in the shape of a sausage” (p87).
“Mind the plate, Master Tom, it’d burn you.”
Automatically he advanced an experimental finger, and then began to eat … (p20)
The novel is full of this kind of thing. Things you thought only you did or thought, things you’ve probably never mentioned to anyone else, things that you thought were just your own personal quirks. It’s unsettling, yet perhaps oddly reassuring, to discover that your individual idiosyncrasies might actually be just part of human nature more generally.
And so as well as the instinct to touch hot plates when told not to, we see in the novel all kinds of other personality traits and quirks that tell us not just about a rather solitary, questioning eleven-year old but about the human condition more generally.
Banal or deeply symbolic? Forrest Reid has a habit of describing aspects of everyday behaviour with such acute precision that it’s uncomfortable, sometimes even revelatory, to read. For example:
- The awkwardness of selecting a gift that someone else is paying for (Tom goes through internal agonies choosing the book he really wants on p12).
- Having to justify why you instinctively don’t like someone (“because I don’t,” is Tom’s only reason when Althea asks him why he dislikes her obnoxious older brother Max on p13).
- Responding to sad news affecting someone else by privately relating it to your own personal circumstances (I love the fact that Tom “speculates” how his own Granny might express her grief if he were to die young like the boy commemorated in the church window on p15).
- People’s questionable personal hygiene with their own pets! (“Roger [the collie] licked his face, so he licked Roger - but just once, because he had been told it was a disgusting thing to do. It couldn’t be disgusting, however, unless there was somebody there to be disgusted, and at present there was no one” p36).
- Self-censoring what we say (“If it had been Daddy to whom he had been giving his account, it would have passed through a half-subconscious process of selection and elimination, based upon what he felt Daddy would or would not wish to fear” p55).
- Having annoying best friends (who ask you difficult questions, like prim but practical Pascoe who “pointed out that because Tom told him a thing didn’t necessarily make it true” p113).
Remembering the novel’s subtitle - “Very Mixed Company” - it’s hard not to be enchanted by Young Tom’s motley circle of friends and acquaintances, animal and otherwise. There’s:
- The “Dogs’ Club” made up of Barker, the elderly independent-minded Old-English sheepdog, Roger the gentlemanly collie, and Pincher the feisty young fox-terrier - neighbours’ pooches who Tom relates to (and converses with) entirely as humans.
- Edward the squirrel, the river rat and Alfred the hedgehog, who Tom anthropomorphises but quite unsentimentally. His imagined conversation with the rat, for example, focuses on the rat’s dislike of Tom’s dogs (p30).
- Granny’s cat Dinah and her new-born kittens who Tom lies with on the hearth rug, “curling as well as he could round both cat and kittens till all felt warm and furry - and very soon purry, too” (p63).
- The ghost of Ralph Seaford, the boy who died aged ten, commemorated in the church window.
- Kind sensible Dr Macrory who seems to have more patience, interest and understanding for Tom than his own father who’s rather cold and remote.
- Miss Sabine, the masculine governess, who he non-judgementally observes as “big and strong” with “a tiny black moustache” (p11).
- James-Arthur Fallon, the sixteen-year old farm-hand who Young Tom hero-worships. Tom watches James-Arthur stripping for a naked swim, emerging “from his soiled and much-patched clothing like a butterfly from a chrysalis, and the contrast between his fair hair and the golden brown of his body and limbs appeared to the smaller boy as attractive as anything could be” (p33).
Sometimes the novel is a sharply psychologic insight into human nature, penetrating and unsentimental. Sometimes it feels like a moral tale, a parable full of biblical metaphor, with Max’s gun triggering (literally) evil in the Garden of Eden.
At other times it has the feel of an wistful meander down Memory Lane by an old gent conjuring up his own autobiographical memories - charming, ironic and gently amusing:
- Doctor Macrory suggesting penguins as pets to Tom, “much the same as dogs” only “they might be troublesome to keep unless you happened to be a fishmonger … “ (p7).
- Tom’s “artless rejoinder” - “I’d like it all right” - to his mother’s reproach about his not wanting to visit his Granny: “How would you like to be left all alone by yourself from morning till night!” (p23).
- Only-child Tom’s dream that he’ll make a special friend when he goes to school, like in school stories where “the hero always found a chum” (p41).
- Parlourmaid Phemie - kind souled, stout and perspiring - helping lug the old bath down from the loft so that Tom can transform it into an aquarium (p82).
- The boys’ joint horror when Tom’s mother asks the first name of his new chum Pascoe (“It turned out to be an extremely footling one - Clement - though that of course wasn’t Pascoe’s fault” p84).
Whether wistful autobiography, penetrating study of human nature or biblical metaphor (and perhaps it’s a mixture of all three, “a dreamy contemplation of a world shifting uncertainly between recollection and imagination” p168) what I’d like to end with is the striking imagery that Forrest Reid uses to transport us deep into Young Tom’s intense, private world.
Most pages contain descriptive prose that made me stop and re-read the words to savour them more fully. Vivid and rather startling descriptions like these, for example:
- “The very air seemed alive, and from the earth a living strength was pushing upwards and outwards - visible in each separate blade of grass and delicate meadow flower no less than in the great chestnut-tree standing at the corner” (p9).
- Gazing up at the church bell hanging above him in the tower, the bell begins to “take life” in Tom’s mind, “the life of a great sleeping, dreaming bat. Yet it was iron - an iron bell” (p17).
- “In fact James-Arthur, merely by divesting himself of his clothes, had instantly become part of the natural scene, like the grass and the trees and the river and the sky, and the dragon-fly asleep upon his water-lily” (p33).
One final thing. I’ve noticed that Young Tom sometimes finds himself categorised in the “growing up different” genre with the emphasis firmly on his sensitive bookish ways. But there are many things that remind us there’s nothing stereotypical about him, including his distinctly practical and unsentimental attitude to dogs eating their own vomit. As he sturdily explains to his disgusted chum, Pascoe:
“It’s quite clean: it comes out exactly the way it was when he swallowed it - perfectly smoothly - just the way meat comes out of a mincing-machine. And it’s only his dinner: you wouldn’t notice the slightest difference really, except that it’s perhaps a bit more mixed up and in the shape of a sausage” (p87).
October 9, 2020
Totally captivating. “Young Tom” is best of an already wonderful trilogy. These are stories to savor and return to.
June 28, 2025
September 2023 (4 stars)
This is my second Forrest Reid book. My first was Private Road, an autobiographical volume largely consisting of a collection of reminiscences surrounding the publications of each of his works to date (1940). I liked his style and manner and was keen to try one of his novels. There was something about him that made me think he would perhaps be similar to Kenneth Grahame. And perhaps he is.
Anyhow, I looked for the cheapest hardback novel I could find online and Young Tom happened to be the book I obtained, satisfyingly turning out to be a first edition too. And once again I enjoyed Reid's manner and style. Apart from the names and some of the elements of the plot you wouldn't really know it was set in Ireland. It's all written in plain and simple English. For a while I was tempted to give it five stars. But though it was meant to work as a stand-alone novel, for me it just left me on a bit of a downer, and I didn't like that. Some of the other reviews I had read gave me the impression that I was to expect a nostalgic look back at an idyllic childhood. And I didn't find that at all. I thought it a fairly realistic expression of childhood, complete with all the pain and anxiety.
I think the big problem for me was that Max reminded me too much of my older brother and the kind of relationship we had. On the rare occasions when I would have the opportunity to invite a friend round to my house, my brother, just like Max, would entice him away from me, just for the malicious pleasure of hurting me. My friend would be invited into my brother's room, his domain from which I was banned, and I would be left to play all on my lonesome until my brother got bored and sent my friend back to me. My brother was the cool one who my friends idolised. I was the boring one who they would settle for in the absence of anything better. So reading about Max stirred up all those past feelings of hurt and bitterness, and I found the novel quite dark for that reason, not at all uplifting.
Thankfully my brother and I get on far better these days, but it has become an ingrained part of my character that I always see myself as a second-class human being who no one's really bothered about. I find it hard to believe anyone can find me interesting or love me, certainly not peers. Old people, yes, they like me, because they are short of friends and lonely and I have time for them and sit and listen. But people of my own age? No. I'm too boring for them and have nothing to offer. They are caught up with partners and children and work. I am way down the list of priorities, unmissed, easily forgotten. I think this means I come across as too intense or too demanding on the rare occasions when potential friendships do come my way. I see friendship as something precious to be treasured and nourished and requiring life-long commitment, and that is something most people don't want. They just want to enjoy a casual friendship for a season of fun and are then happy to move on with a new phase of life, leaving most of the old friendships and associations behind. I am usually on the list of those who can be left behind. Cheerful review, this, isn't it? Anyway, that's why it loses a star, because of the painful thoughts it stirs up. And I've been going through a tough time in my personal life lately too which hasn't helped. All in all, it's a book which is in danger of leaving the reader feeling suicidal. But as far as the writing goes I still appreciate Reid's style and would like to read more of him!
This is my second Forrest Reid book. My first was Private Road, an autobiographical volume largely consisting of a collection of reminiscences surrounding the publications of each of his works to date (1940). I liked his style and manner and was keen to try one of his novels. There was something about him that made me think he would perhaps be similar to Kenneth Grahame. And perhaps he is.
Anyhow, I looked for the cheapest hardback novel I could find online and Young Tom happened to be the book I obtained, satisfyingly turning out to be a first edition too. And once again I enjoyed Reid's manner and style. Apart from the names and some of the elements of the plot you wouldn't really know it was set in Ireland. It's all written in plain and simple English. For a while I was tempted to give it five stars. But though it was meant to work as a stand-alone novel, for me it just left me on a bit of a downer, and I didn't like that. Some of the other reviews I had read gave me the impression that I was to expect a nostalgic look back at an idyllic childhood. And I didn't find that at all. I thought it a fairly realistic expression of childhood, complete with all the pain and anxiety.
I think the big problem for me was that Max reminded me too much of my older brother and the kind of relationship we had. On the rare occasions when I would have the opportunity to invite a friend round to my house, my brother, just like Max, would entice him away from me, just for the malicious pleasure of hurting me. My friend would be invited into my brother's room, his domain from which I was banned, and I would be left to play all on my lonesome until my brother got bored and sent my friend back to me. My brother was the cool one who my friends idolised. I was the boring one who they would settle for in the absence of anything better. So reading about Max stirred up all those past feelings of hurt and bitterness, and I found the novel quite dark for that reason, not at all uplifting.
Thankfully my brother and I get on far better these days, but it has become an ingrained part of my character that I always see myself as a second-class human being who no one's really bothered about. I find it hard to believe anyone can find me interesting or love me, certainly not peers. Old people, yes, they like me, because they are short of friends and lonely and I have time for them and sit and listen. But people of my own age? No. I'm too boring for them and have nothing to offer. They are caught up with partners and children and work. I am way down the list of priorities, unmissed, easily forgotten. I think this means I come across as too intense or too demanding on the rare occasions when potential friendships do come my way. I see friendship as something precious to be treasured and nourished and requiring life-long commitment, and that is something most people don't want. They just want to enjoy a casual friendship for a season of fun and are then happy to move on with a new phase of life, leaving most of the old friendships and associations behind. I am usually on the list of those who can be left behind. Cheerful review, this, isn't it? Anyway, that's why it loses a star, because of the painful thoughts it stirs up. And I've been going through a tough time in my personal life lately too which hasn't helped. All in all, it's a book which is in danger of leaving the reader feeling suicidal. But as far as the writing goes I still appreciate Reid's style and would like to read more of him!
October 29, 2012
Interesting portrait of a fairly privileged young boy growing up in Northern Ireland. He prefers animals to humans. His character and values seem to be formed at a very young age and it will be interesting to see how Reid "develops" him further in Uncle Stephen etc. Tom seems to be both old and young for his years and clearly an only child. Quite delightful in its setting in a world which has almost vanished.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews