After Bath by Vaughan Wilkins: Shades of Bertolt Brecht and Anthony Burgess

Back in the Eighties there was a big house in the village of Marston Trussell, some three miles from here, that used to open as a second-hand bookshop on Sunday afternoons.

I walked there once and came away with two books. One was a paperback copy of  de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, which I was never to read but kept on my shelves, as you do, in the hope of absorbing its contents by osmosis. And the second was After Bath, the only children's book by Vaughan Wilkins.

Wilkins usually wrote historical novels and was obviously popular between the 1930s and 1950s. At one time every second-hand bookshop in the country had a copy of the World Books edition of his Fanfare for a Witch, so I started seeing if I could find his other books.

I don't know what children made of After Bath when it was published in 1945, but the interesting thing about it to me today is how much it of its period.

The villains after the gremlins, who are armed with bombs and machine guns and given to torturing people. They are like a cross between Nazi stormtroopers and Chicago gangsters, which immediately put me in mind of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.

As drawn by Audrey Pilkington in the book, the gremlins have bowler hats and long noses, which look forward to Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange.

The plot of After Bath is a quest by four siblings to restore magic to a city. After several clashes with the gremlins, they find all they need do is apply to the Magic Control Board, where a benevolent bureaucrat gives them their wish once they have filled in the right forms.

Wilkins doesn't strike one as a Labour supporter - in 1943 he published a pamphlet called Looking Back to See Straight for the Individualist Bookshop in Fleet Street - but you couldn't get a more Clement Attlee hero than that.