The Wheatstone Pond

by Robert Westall

When an archaeological dig begins at the Wheatstone Pond, nasty events occur. Violence and aggression build up in the people who work there, the corpse of a baby is found, and a motorbike salvaged from the water carries its new owner to a fatal accident. Some sort of evil is clearly at work.

Genres: Horror, Mystery

182 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

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

[Margo Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The narrator of 'The Wheatstone Pond' is an antiques dealer, as the author Robert Westall himself was for a while. While I'm sure Westall didn't cheat his customers, he takes real delight here (in a way that is reminiscent of Roald Dahl) in all the tricks/scams of the trade in souping up the merchandise. The dilapidated settings are also brilliantly evoked - such as a park where the railings were taken for scrap metal during the war, but the gates are still there, perpetually open. I loved the set-up of the plot: the draining of a pond in the park, with long-abandoned objects, skeletons and secrets slowly being revealed.

A scene where a student volunteer, with a rope around him, crawls into a muddy crater in the half-drained pond, trying to retrieve an object, is visceral and intense - Westall had such a talent for making such scenes feel real, with all the little details of human nature and foolhardiness. Towards the end, though, the plot starts to feel a bit rushed, even a bit silly - perhaps as Westall's books were usually marketed as YA/children's reads there was pressure to have a happy-ish ending, even if that meant a character escaping an exploding building by leaping to a convenient monkey-puzzle tree.

Having said that, it feels strange that this story was ever marketed to children: the main character is a middle-aged man, and in the most unnerving scenes, he becomes possessed by an evil desire to commit rape and murder. As another reviewer noted, the cheerfully casual sexism of this character earlier on in the story makes this development horribly plausible. Those scenes truly are chilling.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00768rk

Description: When an archaeological dig begins at the Wheatstone Pond, nasty events occur. Violence and aggression build up in the people who work there, the corpse of a baby is found, and a motorbike salvaged from the water carries its new owner to a fatal accident. Some sort of evil is clearly at work.

[Alex Sarll]

He's not talked about now in the same way as Susan Cooper or Nigel Kneale, but for me Robert Westall was at least as much of a fixture of a Haunted Generation childhood. Maybe a little too haunting; the scenes I remember really got their hooks in, but I never read all that many of his books, for saying how many he wrote. Certainly not this one, which came out in 1993, when I would have thought myself far too grown up for kids' books. Which this was, back then, despite the narrator being a middle-aged and moderately dodgy antiques dealer, not exactly the stuff of YA protagonists nowadays. And also despite quite how nasty it gets in places. But the main reason I'm glad only to be coming to it now is that it's a book which works much better if you have a little familiarity with the deep lore of London. Inventing a new district is a bold move, and the first rule is not to get greedy; the centre is too full of too many big beasts, but get a little further out and there are plenty of areas only their residents and neighbours know, and then often hazily. Westall's Wheatstone is one of those, and it's also one of the ones where you can tell, even on a brief acquaintance, that something isn't right, a certain shabbiness and nastiness and bad luck that seems to go beyond the usual. And after yet another fatality is linked to the pond on the common, it's finally decided to drain it, except it turns out there's more than model ships lurking in the depths... The niche focus could have ended up faintly silly, but instead gets under your skin, and much like the smell of the seeping sludge from the pond, it seems horribly as if it might linger.

[Hal · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nostalgia read for me, I read this as a kid and was curious what it would be like revisiting it. It does a good job of building a kind of decaying atmosphere, where everything feels like one of the main character Morgan's dilapidated antiques. The opening of the book is particularly strong for this, with some references to Thatcherite faux-gentrification that I don't know I noticed as a teen, and doubt even more would get picked up today - but that's partly the charm, it's not talking down to a percieved younger audience. Morgan is the only character we really get much insight into, he's a kind of gross dodgy antique dealer, complete with some unsavoury views on women, later inflamed to more violent fantasies or nightmares of sexual assault which feel more uncomfortably plausible given his more casual but of-a-kind prior attitudes. It's a short book and with enough event to cover that not much space is left for filling in the supporting cast of Hermione, James etc. The arrival of the backstory feels a little too sudden and like a leap, and the religious character of the conclusion little simple, but a good weird story overall.

[Canavan · Rating 4 out of 5]

✭✭✭½

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Wheatstone Pond" is a richly layered masterpiece of supernatural horror.

Jeff Morgan, local antiques dealer in the the London suburb of Wheatstone, is witness to, and then participant in, attempts to salvage lost toy boats from a pond when the local council decides to fill it in. The pond has a long history as a site of suicide, violence and other misfortunes.

Morgan is an excellent point of view character: knowing, glib, and cynical as Lovejoy. But "The Wheatstone Pond" is more than just his story; Westall gives us a host of different characters involved in mysteries and tragedies past and present. Only by their action and investigations do the incredible supernatural origins of the trouble come to light.

"The Wheatstone Pond" is a fully-fledged supernatural thriller, wonderfully shaped and executed.

[Macky · Rating 3 out of 5]

⭐️3.5⭐️

[Lisa Richards · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think we'll be weeding this book from the school library as it's so dated and our students won't understand the references, but I really enjoyed reading it myself. The language was easy and I really got a feel for the characters. The twist was slightly disappointing but it didn't spoil my overall enjoyment of the book.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting but not as good as his best books.