While reviewing Malory Towers, I recalled Paul Newman’s wonderful piece on The Famous Five from 2007. Paul has allowed me to reproduce it here.
THE FAMOUS FIVE
by Paul F. Newman
2007
She never called them the FamousFiveand neither did the publisher until several years had passed. And that’s possibly because “the Famous Five” was the collective name of Billy Bunter and his cronies, used by Frank Richards in his stories before 1940.
But it’s such a catchy name. Like the terrible twins, the dynamic duo, the Fab Fourand so on, the alliteration sounds good and implies that these four kids and a dog – the Famous Five – are already celebrities before we start. It immediately puts them in a higher bracket than all her other near-identical gangs who stumble into amazing adventures on their hols. And someone was right to call them famous; the books took off like nothing she’d written before and are still selling comfortably around the world today, allowing us all to enjoy big teas at Aunt Fanny’s followed by a quick row over to Kirrin Island and then a night out on the moors.
None of the book titles feature the word Famous. It’s merely Five on a Treasure Island, Five Go Adventuring Again– Five go Here, Five go There, Five Go Out, Five Come Back Again… the titles mostly blandly interchangeable. And not once would the author concede to calling them The Famous Five in the text. Did she not like the idea because she didn’t invent it? At the end of the first adventure the children don’t trumpet, “I say chaps! Let’s call ourselves the Famous Five!”
A large factor in the Famous Five’s success is that there were only four of them. The other was a dog, so we had a fair chance of remembering their individual characters. This was always the problem with Enid Blyton’s other interminable junior gangs, like those aspiring chavvies The Secret Seven; there was no way on earth of keeping track of who was who. By the time you’d thrown in a few extra parents, villains, dogs and parrots you were lost. But it wasn’t difficult to keep in mind the four children of the Famous Five. Two boys and two girls. Two brothers, a sister and a cousin. Julian, Dick, Anne and ‘George’, a girl who dressed like a boy. We won’t indulge in cheap talk and brand anyone by modern categories. And anyway it’s Julian you’ve got to keep your eye on.
It was the inclusion of the dog Timmy in the line up that gave the stories a hint of plausibility from an adult perspective. It wasjust possible that four juveniles and a roaring beast could be a match for a couple of undesirable adults, and it gave the right message that children really shouldn’t get up to dangerous nocturnal antics without a savage hound in tow. Today Timmy would likely be a Rottweiler, and the Famous Five not only banned as public nuisances from all National Heritage sites, but endlessly grassed on by elderly Community Watch zealots and arrested by rural police for appearing to be teenagers. But back then they could roam freely in unspoilt landscapes peopled by occasional village bumpkins, drug smugglers, racketeers and international spies.
Five on a Treasure Island
Five on a Treasure Islandwas first published in 1942. We tend to associate the Famous Five with peacetime in the 1950s yet the first four books were published during the Second World War and the first eight before the Fifties had even started. There was approximately a book a year from 1942 through to the early 1960s when the series fizzled out at number 21.
No obvious reference is ever made to the War in the first books; no passing aircraft scrutinised for enemy markings by the boys as they lie in the heather stuffing sandwiches and chocolate. And as the Famous Five spent most of their time out in the open you would have thought it a major occupation. Neither did they ever run into any Dad’s Army patrols or soldiers on manoeuvres. Or even stranger, as they spent so much time on the southern coast, they were never clambering over barbed-wire fences on to restricted beach areas or ignoring warnings not to touch anything suspicious that was washed up or floating around.
We suspect that ‘Uncle Quentin’ may have had something to do with the war effort but typically he was not going to tell us about it, and neither – very weirdly – did food rationing ever seem to be a great problem in his household. His wife ‘Aunt Fanny’ could produce abundant feasts the like of which the children had rarely known in either war or peacetime, as if feeding an army was an everyday occurrence. This may of course be a subtle clue as to why the descriptions of food and drink play a large part in Enid Blyton’s stories. It’s not just that the word count devoted to food in children’s books equals the space given over to sex in adult ones, it’s also because in wartime, and for some while after, a massive five-course dinner with proper ingredients was a fantasy vision for the average British citizen.
Five on a Treasure Islandis an exciting title but it’s hardly original. I may be wrong but I seem to recall there being a book before called Treasure Islandin the genre somewhere. But at least it gave some clue as to its plot. Most of the subsequent titles were along the lines of ‘Five Have a Jolly Good Adventure’, telling you next to nothing about their contents. I don’t know how we used to know which ones we’d read and which ones we hadn’t.
To get my facts right I got hold of the first two books and logged on to a couple of Famous Five websites to learn that the ages of Julian, Dick, Anne and George were given as follows: Julian is twelve, Dick and George are eleven, and Anne is ten. I suppose it’s right that ten or eleven was about the age of an averageFamous Fivereader but it is a surprise to find how close to each other in age our heroes were. Everyone surely remembers Julian as the grown-up older boy. An old-fashioned pain in the arse certainly but we looked up to him and assumed he must have had a good three or four years on his brother Dick. Then there is Anne, the baby of the team, who turns out not to be not six or seven years old, but ten! Only two years younger than Julian. As girls develop faster than boys at that age Anne’s immature girlie image would appear to fly in the face of known facts. Their parents, who we only meet once, must have popped them out at a non-stop rate. Julian-Dick-Anne. Pop pop pop. One child a year in rapid succession and then – that’s it. No more for God’s sake, say mother and father. And the parents are still trying to get rid of them and have some peace when we come in. The children are duly packed off to Aunt Fanny’s in the country, or even remoter surroundings, at every conceivable opportunity.
Adults were always keen to get the Famous Five off their hands somewhere. Even Aunt Fanny, the archetypal loving nurturing matriarch who knocks up huge breakfasts and teas for all the chums, additionally provides picnic hampers to tide them over from dawn to dusk, presumably to get them out the house and out the way as long as possible. One wonders what Aunt Fanny and Uncle Quentin got up to all day with no kids and dogs about. Probably not much unless Uncle Quentin was in the mood. And Aunt Fanny would have had her work cut out making all those trips to the village laying in her black market food supplies.
Fanny, George and Quentin
George, Fanny & Quentin
Aunt Fanny is George’s mother and is nothing like her tomboy daughter. George, or Georgina, has often been assessed as the most complex character Enid Blyton ever created. That may not be saying much in an adult context but it’s interesting because the author once said she had based George on herself.
George is not a particularly likeable personality; it’s hard to relate to her. She has a big chip on her shoulder about being born a girl and she constantly sends out signals that she needs no one in her life except her dog. She has some kind of father complex and as previously mentioned she is nothing like her mother, taking instead after her moody father, that irascible oddball Uncle Quentin, a man constantly engaged in the pretence of inscrutable scientific business yet is always at home. What he actually does is never explicit so perhaps it’s best we don’t ask. Yet Uncle Quentin’s famed churlishness may have roots in unexpected spheres. Take this revealing paragraph from the first chapter of Five on a Treasure Islandwhen Julian, Dick and Anne’s father (Quentin’s brother) is suggesting that they go and stay with him:
“‘Well,’ said Daddy, “I had to see Quentin’s wife in town the other day, about a business matter – and I don’t think things are going too well for them. Fanny said that she would be quite glad if she could hear of one or two people to live with her for a while, to bring a little money in….’”
Daddy had to see Quentin’s wife in town about a business matter? No disrespect to Fanny but what kind of ‘business’ does she conduct that requires going up to town, presumably London, to collaborate with her brother-in-law? Why didn’t they conduct their business at each other’s homes? Clearly Aunt Fanny is having an affair with ‘Daddy’ and after one of their furtive business meetings at some backstreet hotel in Soho she confides – not unexpectedly – that things aren’t going too well with her and Quentin.
So Quentin has this on his mind, or at the very least dark suspicions about Fanny’s mysterious trips away from home. It’s a fair journey to make on a regular basis; London to Kirrin – 150 odd miles if Kirrin is reckoned to be on the far coasts of Dorset – and rail travel doesn’t come cheap. But this begs another question. Why are they so hard up financially? Quentin, we are told in the first pages, is “a clever scientist who spent all his time studying”. Surely a boffin of his calibre in wartime is going to be high on the government payroll, or if he isn’t why isn’t he enlisted, fighting for his country somewhere? Who is he exactly, and what other outgoings has he got to constitute such poverty? One child, whom he hardly sees, an old house out in the sticks – hardly a mansion or expensive townhouse to upkeep – and an unfaithful wife.
Even more revealing in this first chapter is that Julian, Dick and Anne’s mother is present when Daddy talks about “meeting Aunt Fanny on business”. (Strangely the children always refer to their mother as ‘Mother’ but their father as ‘Daddy’. And in the book it’s always Mother and Daddy, not Mother and Father or Mummy and Daddy). It’s Mother who breaks the startling news to them that there will be no family holiday this year. (The first chapter is headed A Great Surprise). As Mother says:
“‘Daddy wants me to go to Scotland with him… All by ourselves…’”
Ah! So the affair has been rumbled. Mother and Daddy are trying to patch things up by going away alone together.
The more you reread this first chapter the more obvious is the subtext about an adult world in some kind of crisis. Whether the marriage of the children’s parents ever truly survives we won’t know. ‘Mother and Daddy’ hardly ever appear openly in the books again although we assume they have stayed together for the sake of the children. Maybe a deteriorating home atmosphere is what makes the increasingly regular holidays away from it more enjoyable for the siblings.
It seems impossible that Enid Blyton could have been oblivious of what she was inferring here, although it’s just grown-up stuff to her readers who want to get on with the adventure. Enid Blyton always said that her stories poured out and she didn’t stop to think about them too much, so was presumably unaware that she was writing out of her own childhood pain. Her father walked out on her mother when Enid was about the Famous Five’s age, never to return, and her writing was likely a form of therapy. Without realising what she was saying the truth behind this abandonment is subtly revealed. (Her father left her mother for another woman).
But back to Quentin and Fanny and our first glimpse of Kirrin Cottage; soon to be the setting for so many adventures. Julian, Dick and Anne are driven here in Mother and Daddy’s car. The family journey takes all day, interspersed with picnics, leaving home after breakfast and arriving at Kirrin Bay about 6pm. Warm-hearted Fanny rushes out to greet them all; hugs and kisses for the children all round. (The children no doubt blissfully unconscious of the strained smile on Mother’s face). Quentin doesn’t appear and sociable George has cleared off altogether.
When Fanny manages to get Quentin out of his room to meet the guests we get our first actual description of this creepy individual as seen through the children’s eyes:
“He was a most extraordinary looking man, very tall, very dark, and with a rather fierce frown on his wide forehead… ‘Quentin is working on a very difficult book,’ said Aunt Fanny. ‘But I’ve given him a room all to himself on the other side of the house. So I don’t expect he will be disturbed.’”
It sounds like they’re practically divorced already.
And how about this…
“There was no room at Kirrin Cottage for Mother and Daddy to stay the night, so after a hurried supper they left to stay at a hotel in the nearest town.”
It speaks volumes, doesn’t it. They can’t get away quick enough.
And that’s the last direct appearance of either Mother or Daddy, separately or together in the entire book. And I believe in most of the following books too. It seems a pity to leave them as I’m finding this adult back-story more interesting than the main one. So here’s a piece of additional dialogue (not in Blyton) when Mother and Daddy arrive at their room in the nearby hotel…
“Thank Christ we’ve got them off our hands for a couple of weeks,” said Daddy, trying to be hearty.
Mother responded frostily. “Yes, Thank Christ.”
But the estranged husband and wife had at least found common ground – the heavenly relief of being shot of Julian, Dick and Anne for five minutes.
“I shan’t miss the cooking,” said Mother. “And the endless sandwich making. I honestly think they’ve all got worms you know.”
Daddy laughed and relaxed a little. Perhaps this reconciliation business wasn’t going to be so difficult after all. He moved closer to Mother.
Mother stiffened and looked around the hotel room disapprovingly. “Is this the sort of place you and Fanny used to sleep in?”
Kirrin Cottage
Kirrin Cottage is a good example of things that don’t make sense in Enid Blyton’s writing. It’s what you might call a house of ever-changing dimensions.
Mother initially refers to it as a little house.
“I shouldn’t think (Quentin) would want the children messing about in his little house…”
But when they reach it, the seaside cottage becomes “quite a big house, built of old white stone”. So big in fact that Uncle Quentin can retire to a quiet room on the other side of it. Yet there is no room for Mother and Daddy to stay the night, although that was probably an excuse for the sake of the children. We must presume that the cottage has at least three upstairs bedrooms as Julian and Dick share one, Anne shares with George and, for the sake of appearances we guess Fanny and Quentin share another. In later stories this house, which is “about three hundred years old”, will house various live-in tutors, cooks and their families at the same time as all the children, making us wonder – where do they all sleep? It also reveals that it has secret passages. It’s hard to get Kirrin Cottage nailed down in your imagination as it seems to have a shape-shifting quality allowing it to be whatever the story requires at any given time. It would be a nightmare for an estate agent to evaluate.
Another famous anomaly that has kept devotees debating for years is the actual surname of Julian, Dick, Anne and George. By rights they should all share the same family name because George’s father Quentin is Daddy’s brother. Yet if George has any name at all it is Kirrin. Kirrin Cottage and Kirrin Island belong to her family on her mother’s side. George explains this inheritance to the other children in the early stages of the first story. It will be noted that cousin George often shares the family trait of referring to her parents as Mother and Daddy.
“All that’s left of what Mother’s family owned is our own house…a farm a little way off – and Kirrin Island.”
It’s hard to square this with the fact that Quentin and Fanny are supposed to be poor. It’s true as landowners they could still be strapped for ready cash but why not sell the farm for instance. Anyway the point remains that ‘Kirrin’ is the mother’s name and could not therefore be George’s surname, nor by any stretch of the imagination that of Julian, Dick and Anne. (Unless Daddy is Fanny’s brother, but that would be incest wouldn’t it.)
Kirrin Cottage is Fanny’s house. She’s lived there all her life. It’s another reason perhaps why Quentin feels vaguely impotent. He married into a wealthy ancestral line and has contributed little to keeping it going financially. Careful reading suggests that he is not so much a practical scientist as a writer on scientific themes; a writer whose books no one wants to publish. Again this is disclosed by George to the others early in the story:
“Daddy doesn’t make much money with the learned books he writes…So that makes him bad-tempered…”
He’s a struggling writer then. Someone with whom Enid Blyton could have once identified.
The Artwork
Endpapers from the 1956 edition, by Eileen Soper
Coming back to the websites, what surprised me most was not how thriving they are – loads of daily hits and up-to-date feedback (from adults naturally) – but how the experts writing in had all read the books in later decades, not in the 40s or 50s. I guess the entire series has rarely if ever been out of print. If it seems incredible that modern children could still relate to these stories and characters it has to be said that the texts must have been edited a little. All the direct quotes I have given from Five on a Treasure Islandcome from a 2001 reprint without illustrations. It’s a pity from our point of view as the greatest pleasure we could get other than a pure nostalgia trip is to gasp at the scruffy drawings of the originals and savour some of the cracking dialogue, especially from Julian in chauvinistic mode.
And what about this original artwork. To be fair most of the cover pictures were not too bad. Not great but acceptable. They were in colour for a start and therefore bore some resemblance to reality. Five on a Treasure Islandhad the children on a boat rowing over to Kirrin Island, the Corfe Castle lookalike. It could have been more dramatic, more imaginative, but it will do. But as soon as we get inside those early books the standard drops down a black hole. Scribbly black and white drawings with sometimes a block colour like red sloshed across haphazardly. They look like an artist’s rough sketches before sitting down and starting properly. Do you think someone at the publisher’s cocked it up and put in the wrong set, and once the precedent had been established the artist happily pocketed the full fee for a continued series of half-finished quickies?
To be fair we must say a little something here in defence of the Famous Fiveartist, Eileen Soper. Her early etchings in simple lines of children at home and play are extremely good and it’s little wonder she moved professionally into children’s book illustrating. Eileen was born in 1905 and was something of a child prodigy, having her work shown in the Royal Academy while still in her teens. She would have been in her thirties when the first Famous Five book was published (1942) and she lived to a good old age, passing on in 1990. It doesn’t appear that after Blyton died Eileen Soper did much more in the book illustrating line. Either she breathed a massive sigh of relief and went off and did what she might always have wanted to do if she hadn’t got stuck on this treadmill in the first place or she settled for a quiet life. She probably came to loathe Julian, Dick, Anne and George – and their clones in the other books – and we can understand better now why the illustrations always look so slapdash; with Mrs Blyton on her back day and night she could hardly keep up with the manic work rate of the author. It’s far easier to write stories than to illustrate someone else’s.
The Treasure
The climax of Five on a Treasure Island is the gaining of a treasure long hidden on Kirrin Island and now the legal property of George’s family. It means that Uncle Quentin is rich at last and accordingly a total transformation takes place in his character.
“Oh, Father – shall we be rich now?”
… asks George. Something of an understatement this, as she has just admitted to finding hundreds of gold ingots dating back to the 16th century. And note how her ‘Daddy’ is suddenly addressed as ‘Father’ now that his financial and social status has risen.
“Yes,” (says Quentin) “We shall. Rich enough to give you and your mother all the things I’ve longed to give you for so many years and couldn’t. I’ve worked hard enough for you – but it’s not the kind of work that brings in a lot of money, and so I’ve become irritable and bad-tempered….”
Deserved self-reproach for the way he’s taken Fanny for granted has come far too late in the day for Quentin I feel. I doubt he will ever be able to ‘buy’ her back now. But his new-found generosity does extend to allowing George to keep Timmy, the pet that he had banned from the house forever. Funny what a bit of money can do.
Uncle Quentin is a totally different man at the end of the book as he realises he can continue to write obscure tracts that nobody wants to read and not feel guilty about it. But a leopard doesn’t change its spots and though we leave the story on this high note we suspect that temperamental Uncle Quentin is only in a temporary state of euphoria. He now has everything a creative artist might want, except a stable marriage; he has a quiet atmospheric seaside cottage, all the time in the world (Aunt Fanny does all the cooking and gardening), and financial security for life. He’s got it made. But he’s such a moody bastard that we shouldn’t be at all surprised if he reverts to type in future adventures.
In contrast Aunt Fanny seems less elated when she hears of the children’s great adventure. Life we suspect for her will be little different; she’s stuck with Quentin and her welcome romantic breaks in London with his brother have ended. She also loses the company of her daughter because George doesn’t ever want to be parted from her chums and Anne has persuaded her to join them at boarding school when the holidays end; a very accommodating establishment that allows pets on the premises so Timmy can go as well.
Very odd too is that there’s no mention of anyone phoning or trying to contact Julian, Dick and Anne’s parents about the treasure haul. Even the children themselves don’t say “We must tell Daddy and Mother!” Their immediate concern being more in the line of eating a barrage of plums and gingerbread biscuits. Quentin is still on cloud nine dreaming of all the ways he’ll be spending his wife’s money and Fanny, understandably, doesn’t particularly want to be the one who has to contact Mother and Daddy. The disintegrating marriage of Julian Dick and Anne’s parents is blocked out of everyone’s life by forgetting about them entirely. Their children have found a new identity away from home as part of the Famous Five, and their talk is only of future holidays on Kirrin Island and the japes they’re going to have at boarding school.
Meanwhile we imagine both sets of parents will soldier on, as they must, living their emotionally incomplete lives while their children enjoy a never-ending pre-adolescence replete with adventures and foodstuffs. Maybe the parents are treading water, hanging on until the kids are just that little bit older, and then when the war is over they’ll separate from their partners and start life anew. Maybe Fanny and Daddy secretly plan to get together for real this time and to hell with the ancestral complications. But as the Famous Fiveseries will last for another twenty years they’re never going to have much chance. Not until they’re in their late fifties anyhow.
This is ultimately a sad saga of dispassionate sacrifice for the sake of one’s offspring and for the sake of appearances. It’s much more than an exciting yarn, and it isan exciting yarn, of storms and wrecks and well shafts, dungeons, armed men and hidden gold. The understated and probably unconscious back-story of disintegrating adult relationships gives it a depth that Enid Blyton’s other children’s stories don’t possess and helps to explain its perpetual popularity.
I never realised it was so complex before.
Five Go Adventuring Again
The second adventure is, unusually, a winter one. It follows on four or five months after Five on a Treasure Islandso the Famous Five are once more at the shape-shifting Kirrin Cottage for the next end of term break.
The story opens with Anne at her boarding school receiving a letter from Daddy stating suspiciously that Mother is too ill to have the children back home for Christmas and that he’s arranging for them all to stay at Aunt Fanny’s again. It all sounds very fishy to me and the poor girl is understandably upset. George soon bucks her up by offering a cheery image of Christmas at Kirrin: “It’s cold down there…” and “It’s awfully boring…” and “For goodness’ sake eat up your sausages…” The other children don’t mind too much. We get the feeling that Julian, Dick and even Anne desire to be at their real home now as little as possible.
As childhood readers we take all this business of not being allowed to go home, in our stride, we just want to get on with the second Famous Five adventure. But as adults we deduce more. It transpires that Daddy is arranging for a private tutor to give the children some extra lessons while they stay at Aunt Fanny’s because – and this is highly significant – Julian and Dick have not been doing so well at their schoolwork.
Dick, we imagine, is a fairly regular sort of kid. A popular boy, a bit up and down in his studies; probably game for a laugh, neither a troublemaker nor a swot. But Julian is another matter. Mister Know-it-All is surely future head-boy material. That he should be getting a poor school report must have shaken everyone. So the obvious question is why? Ostensibly they have been ill (it says in the book) and therefore missed lessons, but that’s a puny excuse. The undeniable between-the-lines answer is – because their parents’ marriage is folding up. They are under emotional stress. True, that might have made them ill as well, so we come full circle anyway.
Anne however has a report that is not too bad suggesting that she has deliberately remained in denial of the whole family situation. It is possibly why Anne, who we already ascertained should be acting older than she does, is determined to play the little girl part. She escapes into a past security of dolls and childhood when her world was sheltered and safe. She believes the stories her parents are spinning, she believes everything at home will right itself; but Julian and Dick who have more chance to confide, are not so sure.
Anne doesn’t want to grow up, that’s the bottom line; and again this eerily echoes Enid Blyton’s own experience. It said in some book I read on Enid Blyton that so great was the shock after her own father left home that her womb stopped developing, causing her difficulties in having children later.
We feel sorry for Anne too. She’s a decent kid trying to hold her known world together while suffering cheap jibes for being a sissy from two older brothers and a butch cousin. She could also do without their daredevil stunts and dangerous antics at every holiday. Suffice it to say we’ll hear nothing more from either Daddy or Mother throughout this second adventure, including – and this is truly bizarre – no mention of Christmas presents sent from the parents for their children to open on Christmas Day.
We eavesdrop on delighted cries on Christmas morning at Kirrin Cottage as the piles of gifts are opened:
“A whopping great book…from Aunt Fanny!”
“Timothy! Look what Julian has given you – a collar with big brass studs all round…”
“A pocket-knife with three blades… from Mr Roland!”…
and so on, but no specific acknowledgement of anything from Mother or Daddy. Once again it is as if these two people have been exorcised out of everyone’s thoughts and feelings altogether.
The main unfolding plot this time is that the choice of tutor for the children at Kirrin Cottage has been left up to Quentin. Uncle Q is such a wally that he engages a dodgy piece of work called Mr Roland, simply because this suspicious latecomer makes some flattering comments about his books. It doesn’t occur to arch dimwit Quentin that hardly any member of the public would either know or care about his rambling dissertations.
Oddly Mr Roland insists on living in, much to the children’s initial dismay, and later they hear him creeping about the cottage at night. It seems obvious to me that Mr Roland is Aunt Fanny’s new fancy man and we can guess in which direction he’s been creeping in the dead of night. It was a clever ploy by Fanny to get her lover full-time on the premises by passing him off as a children’s tutor. She only had to prime him on buttering up Uncle Thicko about his stupid book and he was in, all set for a bit of extra curricular activity and getting paid for it into the bargain.
The Famous Five are not fooled though. They eventually get the police called, but for all the wrong reasons. Quentin believes the intruder has wangled his way into the house with the sole intention of plagiarising his work and stealing his scientific theories. What a bozo! (Quentin, that is). As if anyone would give a fig about his pretentious waffle. Fanny keeps quiet. She can hardly admit what was really going on, especially in front of the children, and must resign herself to the sacrifice of yet another paramour as Roland is carted off to the police station for questioning. As it’s wartime he might even be assumed a spy or traitor – and shot. Oh well. As Daddy might have said, you fool around with Fanny at your peril.
To support my theory that Mr Roland is Aunt Fanny’s latest beau, consider these other subtle clues: When the Famous Five and Roland go out on a pre-Christmas forage for evergreen branches to decorate the house, the children gather huge sprays of holly while Roland makes Herculean efforts to secure a piece of mistletoe.
“‘Mr Roland had to climb the tree to get this,’ said Anne…”,
… uncertain whether to report the incident with admiration or apprehension. Aunt Fanny, welcoming them back at the door, makes no audible comment.
And later at bedtime when Fanny peeps into the children’s rooms to say Goodnight she surprises George by suggesting that Timmy the dog, who usually sleeps near her bed, ought perhaps to sleep downstairs…
“‘Don’t you think Tim ought to sleep downstairs tonight?’ said George’s mother. ‘Joanna [the new cook] says he ate such an enormous meal in the kitchen that she is sure he will be sick.’”
We note how the improved financial situation at Kirrin Cottage has allowed for the employment of a cook, but the main point here is the lame excuse by Fanny to get Timmy the dog downstairs for the night. She’s never been bothered about this before and it’s plainly a half-hearted attempt to clear the way for some middle-of-the-night bedroom-hopping without a dog pricking up his ears and waking the children. The cottage has now grown so vast that Mr Roland presumably occupies a guest bedroom on the same upper floor, and we won’t even enquire where Joanna the cook is sleeping. Mr Roland has been wary of Timmy since the day he arrived and later, with Quentin’s gullible agreement, he gets the animal permanently shut outside in the snow, literally banned to the doghouse.
There’s another amusing exchange earlier on when Fanny can’t resist asking the children what they think about Mr Roland. She herself asserts that he’s “very nice, youngish and jolly”. The antithesis to Quentin clearly.
“‘Youngish!’ exclaimed Julian. ‘Why, he’s awfully old! Must be forty at the very least!’
Aunt Fanny laughed. ‘Does he seem so old to you?’ she said…”
Manifestly not past it to her.
Popular talent
With or without the adulterous sub-plot Five Go Adventuring Againis a great children’s adventure with strange maps, snowdrifts, secret tunnels and fraught relationship dilemmas. As a sequel to the first book it’s a triumph.
Like all great popular artists Enid Blyton’s talent and success would be envied and dismissed by the self-appointed arbiters of taste for many years. (Steven Spielberg is another name that comes to mind in this category along with Jack Vittriano the Singing Butlerartist). Eventually the establishment reluctantly admits what the general public has known all along and the artist receives due recognition, in their lifetime if they’re lucky.
The irony is that Enid Blyton created in her character of Julian a person that displays moments of that same pompous condescending mindset that would in the coming decades ban Blyton books from libraries and scoff at her authorship. We can just see Julian in his twenties or thirties taking his place on some die-hard committee, still trying to impress everyone by being as traditional, conventional and grown-up as he can. Agreeing with the old guard when they pour scorn on Blyton’s books, succeeding in getting them routed from every public library and then wondering, in the company of other old farts ten years later, why the level of children’s literacy had actually gone down instead of up. If only they would read anything, moaned the new educationalists. If only those high-minded imbeciles hadn’t ridiculed Enid Blyton for so many years.
Because that, strange as it may sound, was the truth. Enid Blyton was rock and roll. Children that read her books when they were first published in the 1940s, 50s and 60s were indulging in reading matter not officially sanctioned by schools or any other authorities. I don’t mean poring over Five Go To Mystery Moorwas a dangerous underground manoeuvre running the risk of arrest and forced shipment to labour camps, but unlike Harry Potterat the end of the twentieth century, reading Enid Blyton was in no shape or form regarded as being good for you. In that respect you read The Famous Fiveas an act of rebellion. They might not have realised it but a whole generation was in subtle training for a teenage revolution.
There are affinities between Blyton and Rowling. Both women were/are Leos, both added a feminine touch to what were essentially boys’ stories and both thought and wrote within the parameters of children’s school terms. We always meet The Famous Five at the end of a school term and the start of a holiday, whereas Harry Potter’s adventures start at the beginning of each new school term and finish at the holidays. For Julian, Dick and Anne, parents are practically non-existent. For Harry Potter they’re not only absent but dead. It’s the Leo ‘missing father’ syndrome.
Five on Kirrin Island Again
I hadn’t originally intended to keep this essay going from book to endless book, but as deciphering the running adult back story has become a minor obsession, any more of the early stories I could get my hands on have been equally plied for relevant clues.
Five on Kirrin Island Again is the 6th in the series dated 1947. I haven’t picked it out especially over numbers 3 to 5; it’s just that I haven’t found them yet.
This adventure opens with George and Anne at school receiving a letter from George’s mother (Fanny) saying that while she’s looking forward to them all coming down to stay for the Easter hols, they won’t be able to go over to Kirrin Island this time because Uncle Quentin has moved his experiments there and doesn’t want to be disturbed.
What can we deduce from this strange turn of events? It appears to me that Quentin and Fanny must have had an almighty row and Quentin has stormed off to live on his own on Kirrin Island. Either that or Fanny has finally thrown him out.
It seems that Uncle Weirdo has built himself a tower on the island. A symbol of his isolation perhaps. The children first see this monstrosity from the land when they arrive at Kirrin village, sticking up like a brazen phallic symbol of everything that Quentin isn’t. Did he build this simply to taunt Fanny from across the bay?
Fanny’s official explanation of all this to the children is that it is a scientific experiment:
“‘He never tells me a word,’ said Aunt Fanny, ‘…But I do know it’s very important – and I know, of course, that the last part of the experiment has to be made in a place where there is deep water all round….’”
This book was first published in 1947, we’re historically in the Cold War period now and Quentin has presumably become an atomic scientist. Some vague notion of ‘heavy water’ has informed Enid Blyton that Kirrin Island is just the place for an amateur scientist to test out some atomic theories. Does this idiot Quentin have planning permission to construct such an eyesore? Clearly he’s only happy when he’s being a pain in the arse but if he was trying to make a public statement he certainly succeeded. The locals don’t let it go unnoticed. “‘The people here were most curious about it…”’ admits Fanny to the children.
Yes I bet they were. The married couple at Kirrin Cottage must provide enough juicy gossip to keep the locals going at the best of times. I bet they had a field day over this latest incident. The old pub regulars had been exchanging ribald homilies over the dubious Uncle Quentin since the day he unwisely married that local hussy Fanny, now Quentin’s Folly has a whole new meaning.
Naturally the Famous Five will get over to the island and explore the tower and naturally they will save Quentin’s bacon by foiling yet another a dastardly plot to steal his scientific plans. In the process they discover even more secret tunnels, rather implausibly running from a deserted quarry behind Kirrin Cottage all the way under the sea to the dungeons on Kirrin Island. This whole area is a veritable rabbit warren. It’s a wonder Kirrin Cottage didn’t cave in years ago. But before we leave this particular volume we must have a word about its cover.
early editions had a colour frontispiece to compound the issue …
Five on Kirrin Island Againhas gained a degree of notoriety for its incomprehensible cover picture of the four children looking over towards Kirrin Island with a telescope. In fact it is George who is looking through the telescope but – incredibly – she’s looking through the wrong end. Her eye is pressed to the big lens while the little end points to the floating Corfe Castle called Kirrin Island, here containing her father’s phallic pillar. Is this all deliberately Freudian do you think? She doesn’t want to see her father’s erection? Or was this a deliberate ruse by Aunt Fanny to set up a scientific instrument back to front to diminish its view and therefore belittle her spouse’s upstanding eccentricity?
Five Go Off to Camp
Book number 7, also first published in 1947, breaks the usual pattern of spending the holidays at Aunt Fanny’s. This time the children are going off to camp in tents at some unspecified lonely moorland in the company of a silly old fool called Mr Luffy:
“an elderly, dreamy fellow with a passion for studying all kinds of insect-life”.
Luffy (unconsciously derived from ‘luvvie’?), one of their school teachers, is camping separately and only there to keep a vague eye on things, establishing the Famous Five’s ability to roam the country freely and upset some previously well-laid criminal activities.
Illustration from the serialisation in Enid Blyton’s Sunny Stories magazine
The book opens with the four children, and Timmy, planning their camping holiday together, studying maps and practising sleeping in their sleeping bags on their bedroom floors. Cleverly the text avoids spelling out whose bedroom floors these are, or which house they are in, because it appears they have broken up from school already and are counting off the days till their camping adventure begins. Logic, to the casual reader, would dictate that this must be the house of Julian, Dick and Anne, with George and Timmy staying, and this would seem to be so although scant descriptions are to be found of either ‘Mother’ or ‘Daddy’ or the surroundings or location of the house itself.
Up to now, and in most of the forthcoming books, every end-of-term holiday is spent at George’s house in Kirrin, and as Julian Dick and Anne are at boarding school the rest of the time it must be years since they set foot in what was once their proper family home. From the hints at the start of this current story we deduce that ‘Mother’ and ‘Daddy’ have stayed together in name at least and kept some kind of home in order. There is virtually no direct speech from these increasingly shadowy parents and our only clue that they might be physically beneath the same roof is in a reference to Mr Luffy:
“the children knew him quite well, because he lived not far away and often came to play bridge with their father and mother”.
This makes little sense as the children never live at home at all and we’ve just been told that harmless old Luffy is one of their teachers, hence they know him from school and not from home. And as he is one of Julian and Dick’s teachers there’s no way that George could possibly know him. But never mind, it all helps the plot along by allowing Mr Luffy to collect and drive the children off to the moors in his banger of a car thereby avoiding any need to implicate that suave lothario ‘Daddy’. The sop of social information about the bridge-playing parents is given almost reluctantly by Blyton as if she never wants to dwell on this awkward couple a moment longer than is necessary.
endpapers from the 1st edition
The story this time involves ghost trains running in abandoned tunnels (yes there’s more tunnels involved) and a host of strange individuals popping up in odd places on what we thought was a vast stretch of deserted moor. It seems suspiciously similar in places to Will Hay’s classic comedy O Mister Porter, a film that would have been playing regularly in British cinemas through the war years. In Five Go Off to Campat one point the children bump into a shepherd who confirms he has heard the nocturnal “spook-trains”. But it is Julian’s condescending way of addressing him that makes us gasp. Even though the children offer the old chap some of their picnic lunch, he is called simply ‘shepherd’. “‘Will you join us, shepherd?”’ says lordly Julian, as if he’s addressing a social inferior.
Maybe this sounds strange today because we’re not in the habit of accosting shepherds in the normal run of things but I suppose we might still address a doctor as ‘Doctor’ or a nurse as ‘Nurse’ without sounding patronising. However I can’t imagine many people offering refreshment to the man who is refurbishing their house with a cheery ‘Would you like a cup of tea, bricklayer?’ or ‘Another biscuit, landscape gardener?’ But then we know Julian is a natural snob and doesn’t have to work at it.
Before we leave Five Go Off to Camplet’s continue with this subject of changing expressions of speech. Early on in the book we learn that ‘Smashing!’ is Dick’s new favourite word.
‘Smashing!’
Okay. That’s fair enough. In fact that’s wizard, Dick.
He doesn’t seem to use it very often though and soon after we get this:
“‘Gee!’ said Dick. ‘Are they really true then?’” (He’s talking about the spook trains).
Just a minute. When have English children ever said ‘Gee’?
‘Golly!’ or ‘Crikey!’ or even ‘Bugger Me!’ – but ‘Gee’?
Did Enid Blyton write this or is it a later substitution for an equally inane outburst like “Goodie Gumdrops” or something? It’s not acceptable form Dick I’m afraid. Gutter language we can tolerate in The Famous Fivebut not fake American drawl.
Five Go to Smuggler’s Top
It’s Easter holidays again; or rather it’s Easter holidays before, as this is one of the earliest books in the series. Number 4, first published 1945.
Julian Dick and Anne’s parents have copped out of it again. We are told that Mother and Daddy “were both away and the house was shut up for a month” so the children are heading for their first Easter at Kirrin.
How utterly convenient (and totally heartless) of Mother and Daddy to choose their children’s next end-of-term break to shut up the family home and clear off for that precise duration. If that indeed is what has happened. Based on past experience we mistrust any information emanating from ‘Daddy’ as a matter of principle. But thank god for Fanny, who through a mixture of guilt and genuine kind-heartedness is always ready to welcome in these innocent orphans from the storm.
And storm is the operative word because no one’s going to stay at Kirrin Cottage for long this time either due to a massive gale that blows up on the first night sending a tree (that Quentin was supposed to have pruned) crashing through the house, narrowly missing the children. It effectively puts pay to the rest of the holidays under that roof simply because there isn’t a roof up there any more. It’s going to take several weeks to fix and maybe there’ll be possibilities here for a bit of further shapeshifting in the property. An opportunity to rebuild a new wing of bedrooms perhaps; or why not go the whole hog and add a gymnasium, a fully-fitted atomic science lab, an Olympic-size swimming pool… The choices are endless.
In a chapter titled ‘Uncle Quentin has an Idea’ – a concept so startling it makes us practically fall through the floor in amazement – Uncle Q saves the day by packing off the Famous Five to a mysterious manor further up the coast called Smuggler’s Top. He’s had a flattering letter from a man he doesn’t know, supposedly also a scientist, who lives there, inviting them all to stay any time. By an incredible coincidence this man’s son also boards at Julian and Dick’s school so the kids are quite looking forward to meeting up again with old Sooty Lenoir.
(This nickname Sooty is derived from lenoir meaning black, not from the colour of this chap’s skin, although his hair and eyes are “awfully dark”. I’m surprised that Julian hasn’t made a remark along the lines of him having a touch of the tar brush, but perhaps it was edited out later. In truth young readers from the 1950s onwards would associate ‘Sooty’ with a glove puppet, but that’s beside the point).
Smuggler’s Top seems to be a composite of St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and the great Grimpen Mire in The Hound of the Baskervilles. In other words it’s a misty hilltop fortress surrounded by treacherous bogs on all sides. Aunt Fanny is exceedingly reluctant to ship the children off to the home of a complete stranger but born-yesterday Quentin persuades her otherwise. Inside the castle it’s even more sinister than outside with hidden pits, people signalling from towers, secret passages (of course), a deaf butler called Block and a cast that could easily find future employment in the Addams family.
It has to be said that this is the muddliest Famous Five story I’ve yet read. Enid Blyton has so overstepped herself with the sheer number of secret passages at Smuggler’s Top, with openings in trap doors under carpets, behind sliding panels, in the back of cupboards, under window seats… that she forgets which ones lead where and what rooms they surface in. There’s more holes in the plot than in Quentin and Fanny’s roof. Which, come to think of it, isn’t a bad metaphor for the state of their marriage.
And that leads us to another shaky strand in the storyline: If Kirrin Cottage was rendered uninhabitable after the storm, where did Quentin and Fanny live in the meantime and why didn’t they take up the offer to stay at Smuggler’s Top with the children? As a late afterthought Enid Blyton decides she does want the grown-ups to stay at Smuggler’s Top after all – at least she wants Quentin there so he can be kidnapped. So about a week after the children have arrived we get this:
(Sooty’s mother at Smuggler’s Top is referring to a phone call she has just received from Uncle Q and is addressing George):
“‘That was your father,’ she said. ‘He is coming tomorrow, but not your mother. They went to your aunt’s, and your mother says she thinks she must stay and help her, because your aunt is not very well. But your father would like to come, because he would like to discuss his latest experiments with Mr Lenoir, who is very interested in them. It will be very nice to have him.’”
The usual old plot surfaces again with Quentin walking straight into a trap. How many times has he fallen for this one? But we should clear up what Fanny is supposed to be doing. It says “they went to your aunt’s”, meaning Fanny and Quentin both went together somewhere to stay. By the sound of it they hadn’t been full-time in each other’s company for more than a few days before another gigantic row erupted and Quentin was chucked out again, or he blustered off in a trademark tantrum. This aunt is obviously not ‘Mother’, Julian Dick and Anne’s mum. We know ‘Mother’ has a propensity for falling sick when any children are due to come home but we have been told already that she has gone away and the house shut up for a month, so it can’t be her.
Had this been the first Enid Blyton book I came across as an adult I fear it would have confirmed some of the worst criticisms against her. The writing in places is as wobbly as the marshes that surround the improbable house. She realises near the end that she hasn’t made full use of these treacherous fens so Timmy has to unnecessarily fall in and be rescued with planks, which just happen to be conveniently on the back of a lorry passing at the time. But the whole thing was in the mire long before this.
Five Get Into Trouble
Unusually the first edition has a different drawing to the 50s editions,
Five Get Into Trouble, number 8 in the series, first published 1946**, begins with the following paragraph:
“‘Really, Quentin, you are mostdifficult to cope with!’ said Aunt Fanny to her husband.”
The unusually mild riposte from Fanny is because the children are also present at the dining table at Kirrin when Uncle Q flourishes a letter confirming that he and his spouse have been invited to an important conference. It means that Uncle Sieve-head has booked two conference places at the same time as the children have arrived for the Easter holidays.
“‘You know Easter came late this year,’” blasts Fanny.
But the movable calculation of Eastertide has proved too much for brain-challenged Quentin so he goes off on another offensive.
“‘How can I possibly be expected to remember… if (the children) are going to be here with us or with your sister?”’ he blusters.
This statement requires a double take. What did he say?
The children will be staying ‘with us or with your sister’?
Apart from the fact that the children never stay anywhere but at Aunt Fanny’s, who is this sister then? It must be that one who was ill and threw Quentin out in our last review – the Smuggler’s Top fiasco. We’ve never heard the children even mention her let alone stay with her, whoever she is.
Surely Quentin means ‘staying with my brother’ or ‘my sister-in-law’. I know the children never do stay there, but it is Julian Dick and Anne’s parents he’s talking about surely.
It’s another of Enid Blyton’s famous confusions. A blithe disregard for anything that refers to Mother and Daddy. Her childhood readers don’t care, so why should she?
If Fanny and ‘Mother’ really were sisters, and Quentin and ‘Daddy’ were brothers – as we are told they were in the first book – it is possible that two brothers married two sisters and their respective children would be especially close cousins. Strange therefore that these cousins never met each other at all until they were almost 12. Why were the adults so keen on keeping the families apart? Could it be that Daddy and Fanny’s affair had a longer history than we deduced?
Never mind; a new adventure is at hand. Fanny is not keen on leaving four children and a dog unsupervised in her house for a week so somewhat reluctantly allows them to go on their bikes and camp in tents in the surrounding countryside.
Before we go further we must have a word here about Easter. It may be a coincidence but in the books we’ve been looking at Easter holidays come up more often than Summer ones. Easter as such is never mentioned though. No trips to church on Easter Sunday, no hot cross buns, no Easter eggs… These last items an unfortunate omission for our five gannets. Naturally the adventures could take place in the weeks before or after Easter; it’s a fairly long holiday and the movable date means that schools often break up in advance. What I’m coming to is that Easter is a lunar celebration. Easter is always the first Sunday after a Full Moon. It’s more than likely that temperamental Quentin is more crabby than ever at this time and does lunatic things like building towers, changing his mind with the wind and getting kidnapped more often. None of the Famous Five appear to have twigged that Quentin regularly becomes unhinged in the week before Easter. I expect Timmy understands it though.
The rest of the plot continues on familiar lines with the children meeting a boy about their age, who has a dangerous-sounding father, and them all getting imprisoned in an isolated house.
This story is most entertaining from our point of view for Julian’s perpetually priggish attitude towards this poor lad who, with thugs and abusive minders using him to get back at his father, has some right to feel scared. Julian continually denigrates him for being cowardly and for his lack of “spunk” and is down on him for almost everything. When the kid briefly rides his bike without holding the handlebars, self-appointed policeman Julian tells him off severely, reprimanding him further every time he pulls alongside to ride three abreast with the others. In Julian’s eyes he is “spoilt”, because he has no brothers and sisters, and needs “a jolly good hiding”. (He had a go at George in the first book for being an only child as if that were her fault and something to be ashamed of.) There are times when you could happily knock Julian’s block off.
**I can’t see how Book 8 could be published a year before Books 6 and 7 but maybe author and artist had gone into therapy and the publishers schedule went awry in sympathy. It must be said that many of the reprints are sloppy in this information on dates of original publication. One book late in the series was given as first published 1942, which is complete eyewash.
(Actually published in 1949. The publisher gets it wrong. The first editions get it right)
Five Are Together Again
You will be gratified to know that I’m going to wind up the survey here. But before we do I thought it would be fun to fast-forward to the very end of the series, the last Famous Five of all, Five Are Together Again.
It’s 1962, a very different world out there to their first adventure in 1942. Television sets are in every home, Beatlemania will shortly be sweeping the UK and the Famous Five are still ripe for adventure. Mother and Daddy are still keeping right out of it, Fanny is still searching for Mr Right and Quentin is still a raving nutcase.
Five Are Together Againbegins in the time-honoured way with the children arriving in Kirrin for the Easter break. They arrive by train but this time there is a crucial difference; Timmy is not travelling with them. It seems that somewhere in the last twelve to fifteen books the in-house pet policy at George’s boarding school has changed its code of practice and dogs are no longer welcome. Anne makes a comment that suggests that they never remember it being otherwise:
“‘Your mother always says how excited he [Timmy] is on the day you are arriving home from school…keeps going to the front gate and looking down the road.’”
Maybe Enid Blyton discovered over the years that hardly any schools allowed pupils to be permanently accompanied by dogs, and possibly one of the private establishments had a word in her ear about the growing number of children complaining that the Famous Five do it so why can’t we?
Anyway Timmy is at home, outside in his kennel, but no one has come to meet the train because when the children reach Kirrin Cottage they are not allowed to step inside. Through a window Aunt Fanny explains that she and Quentin are in quarantine because Joanna the cook has suddenly caught scarlet fever. And it certainly must have been sudden for the ambulance has only just been called.
Well we’ve heard some good excuses from parents trying to get rid of the Famous Five over the years, and we’ve had some ingenious reasons for making Kirrin Cottage uninhabitable for a couple of weeks, but this tops them all.
Standing in the garden the children wonder where on earth they are to go. As Julian says:
‘We can’t go to my home because Mummy and Daddy are still in Germany.’”
Yes, they would be, wouldn’t they.
Julian is not quite as odious in 1962 as he was 1946, and that applies throughout this book. We also note that ‘Mother and Daddy’ have at last become the more normal Mummy and Daddy, although their habit of disappearing at every end-of-term holiday remains unchanged. In fact they don’t so much just go away now as emigrate to other countries.
Whatever is going on inside Kirrin Cottage that Fanny doesn’t want the children to see – and it must be something unpremeditated or she would have headed them off earlier – she is not one to leave them in the cold and makes hurried telephone arrangements for them to stay with a local scientist called Professor Hayling and his son and his monkey. Amazing how many scientists live in this rural area but apparently they have had an adventure with this odd crew before.
And before all this can happen an ambulance arrives and someone is carried out of Kirrin Cottage on a stretcher. It is described as “Joanna…wrapped round with blankets”, but I’m not at all convinced of this. I think it’s Quentin, bundled up so he won’t be recognised. Knowing that Uncle Q is badly affected by the Full Moon at this time of year I reckon he’s gone off the deep end completely.
Either that or Fanny has done him in.
In any case it will be the last curtain call for Quentin – and Fanny – in the book and in the series. Professor Hayling and his housekeeper Jenny substitute for them in all but name for the rest of this tale. The Professor, bad-tempered, forgetful, is Quentin all over again (he even builds a phallic tower) and Jenny is the kind food-provider playing the traditional Fanny role. It’s a re-run of an earlier Kirrin Cottage plot with scientific papers going missing and the police called in to round up the suspects, this time with a travelling circus and a smarmy magician called Mr Wooh thrown in for added colour. (I thought he worked in a Chinese laundry with George Formby). But, we wonder will Kirrin Cottage ever be open to the Famous Five again?
We know from hindsight that this is the last Famous Fivestory ever, but did Enid Blyton consciously know it? At first I thought not but on reflection I’m not so sure. The very last paragraph anticipates further adventures, yet is somehow laboured, overworked, and compared to the other books oddly nostalgic. It addresses George specifically, Blyton’s most personal character, but rather like a letter from Mother and Daddy it smacks of false sentiment. It is like someone promising to keep in touch when they know they never will.
“So did we, George. Hurry up and fall into another adventure. We are longing to hear what you and the others will be up to next. How we wish we could join you! Goodbye for now – and take care of yourselves, Five. Good luck!”
The author is waving them off into the sunset with a personal message on our behalf that I had not noticed to be the usual run of things before. She (the author) would die six years later while her Five remain immortal. I’m not sure about the adults though. Uncle Quentin is either now dead or in a straitjacket somewhere and Fanny’s either being held in custody or escaping at last with the man of her dreams, whomever that might currently be. Mother and Daddy probably separated years ago, found other partners and even raised new families, all the while funding their first children’s education while keeping them in ignorance of the truth.
Right to the end in Enid Blyton’s eyes parents are untrustworthy specimens. Fathers are all remote scientists or deceiving philanderers, mothers are distant or bounteous but always slightly suspect on the monogamy front.
It is in Five Are Together Again, and possibly others I haven’t read, that George’s surname is confirmed as Kirrin. This is so unquestionably her mother’s name, whose family owned Kirrin Island etc., that we are led to presume that Fanny and Quentin may never officially have tied the knot at all. That George is Quentin’s daughter we cannot doubt, they have the same temperament and personality, leaving us with only one other possibility – could Fanny not be George’s mother? Was Quentin already married to someone else when Fanny first met him? Was there a young wife who understandably couldn’t stand the sight of him any longer and abandoned him along with their small child? Did compassionate Fanny take in the child as her own while setting up a later-to-be-regretted partnership with Quentin?
At the perpetual age of eleven George has never questioned why her surname is her mother’s rather than her father’s, although it is at just about that age that children start to query such anomalies. Like Julian Dick and Anne’s situation there’s going to be a mighty lot of things dawning on these poor kids in the next few years.
With Quentin now dead or in the madhouse Fanny is again a free agent and should she settle down with a proper husband who is not kindly disposed towards George or who is a lawyer or something, George may find herself disinherited from the Kirrin fortunes. Her island no longer hers, her true parents nowhere to be found. The future for all four children doesn’t look too bright to me.
The End
We’ve examined only a fraction of the books and we’ve learnt a lot but we’ve had enough now. You only have to read four or five Famous Fivestories on the trot to find you are getting a little weary of the same old chestnuts cropping up with monotonous regularity. Like a recurring nightmare we know we’re going to find ourselves climbing up or down bricked-up air vents, dropping down shafts or crawling along dark passages. We know we’re going to meet a boy about our age who has a nice mother but an unpleasant stepfather. We know that Uncle Quentin is going to be bellyaching about something and will then get robbed, kidnapped or generally taken for a ride and we know that Timmy is going to chase a rabbit into a hole while we’re stuffing sandwiches and discover the entrance to yet another secret tunnel.
But the genius of the books is that you can start anywhere and read any half dozen in any particular order, which I guess is what most children ever did do, and have experienced the fundamental validity and enduring legacy of those ageless pre-teens, who we now realise must remain forever pre-teens because their real future is too hard to contemplate.
Enid Blyton survived it. She was their same age when the adult thunderbolt struck.
Or did she ever survive it – really?
END
SEE ALSO:
Paul F. Newman’s 2007 article: Agatha Christie: Deduction in a dell’arte maskreprinted on this site.
I loved this review. They were big when I was a child (seventies and eighties) and I read a few of them, though I think I preferred the American Hardy Boys. (I never read much children’s fiction, though Treasure Island was and is a perennial favourite- the stephenson one). The other thing that comes through (perhaps in retrospect) is Enid blyton’s unpleasantness. Julian’s priggish behaviour is never or rarely commented upon. Maybe a new George McDonald Fraser could follow up Julian’s adult life, a la Flashman. Julian supports Enoch Powell. Julian agrees with Margaret Thatcher. Julian votes for brexit to take back control and to give Johnny French and the krauts a good kicking and who cares about the consequences. (He’s rich after all).
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Julian would have become Head Boy at school before a career as a proctologist. I asked a doctor friend how people became proctologists and he said you have to be a head boy at a major public school first.
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John Logan’s play “Peter and Alice” reviewed here (https://peterviney.wordpress.com/stage/peter-and-alice/)
is about the inspiration for Peter Pan meeting the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland. At the end, I said:
“When I first read about the concept, my mind leapt to Richmal Crompton’s nephew, said to be dogged through life by being the inspiration for Just William, meeting Enid Blyton’s George from The Famous Five. Actually, that has more mileage in it. At least there’d be some funny sections.”
Any ideas on how the rest of the Famous Five ended up?
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Really enjoyed this, but wondered how you ever had enough time on your hands to put it all together. That said, at school (in my last years) we did put Noddy on trial, using much of Blyton’s own language. I remember little, but Noddy jumping into bed with Big Ears and allowing the`Milkman to ‘nod’ him rather than pay for the milk spring to mind. And Noddy driving in his his shiny new car past the doll’s house and stopping at the sight of a brightly painted doll and inviting her to go for a drive into the woods in the car. And of course in the woods Noddy trying to scrub the golliwogs clean. Memories …
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