when the posh children in Enid Blyton have an "ice", I always thought it meant "ice lolly"...

[sadpapercourtesan]

...but I was reading "Five Go To Billycock Hill" last night, and they talked about having an "ice" in a tub with a little wooden spoon...surely that's an ice cream?!

Yes, I have too much time on my hands. I should be doing stuff

My children loved Mr Pinkwhistle so much.

Have really enjoyed this thread, we were discussing the ‘Adventure’ series only a few days ago, as my FIL and I adored this series even though we are a generation apart. Her appeal endures, although my kids never really liked the FF. DD was very keen on the Mistletoe Farm and the boarding school series.

One thing that always annoys me, EB forgot that Mirabel was an amazing musician! She just turns into an obnoxious head of games and never picked up her violin again. Also Gladys forgets her skills as an accomplished interpreter of Shakespeare. I am similarly annoyed by the way Jill doesn’t take up the offer of a job from Captain Cholly-Sawcut and faffs around with silly jobs in Pony Jobs for Jill.

I know that the Jill books weren’t EB btw

Oxen, it's hard to know what to say when faced with the abhorrence of EB's character. It's also hard to understand daughters publicising the evidence....it must have been truly horrible behaviour for them to distance themselves from natural feelings of loyalty. All I can think is that power corrupts and makes people indulge their fancies and behave like dictators.
Well, if values are preserved in the social fabric, I suppose you can recognize and do justice to them in writerly imitation, even if the values doesn't come from your own conscience.

I suppose in terms of Jo sleeping in Joanna's room, well Joanna is ok, a good human being, and 'loved' by the children. It's not the pits sharing with her and she maybe has her inherent worth for EB. ( Maybe not though). I'm fully glad we don't call people 'bad' today. I don't fully understand the class system as it operated then to know is it just a case of everyone having a place and role, each with dignity, different distinctions, but not one role essentially better. ( I doubt it, but it didn't feel so abhorrent reading the books as a child). Would the parents also be saying, " On no, we can't have the children when they're children at home sharing our lives , our conversations are too good for them - they must go off to boarding school, ". But, sadly, I think you're right Oxen, there is no real humanistic feeling for Jo - she is simply local colour. The parallels with George's bravery are just for humour.

I wonder if EB felt socially inferior to the families she wrote about - because of her more humble upbringing.

Gillian and Imogen were the owners of Bimbo and Topsy. Another classic! They were a Siamese kitten and a puppy who were mostly left to their own devices in the nursery and kitchen.

As some previous posters have mentioned, small pieces of vocabulary were changed in some modern prints of the Famous Five.
Shorts or skirt became "jeans".
A shilling became "five pence".
A kit bag became "rucksack".
A spanking became a "telling off".
"I bet I'll get an awful telling off from Uncle Quentin if I'm caught."

I loved the 'The Children of Cherry Tree Farm' I think it was and then They Children of Willow Farm'. I think they had visited Cherry Tree Farm and then they were so inspired they bought one of their own..... or something.
Also not EB but does anyone remember the Family at One End Street or something like that about a large family who lived in the city and were quite poor?

With regard to tomatoes being a treat. At the time she was writing there wasn't salad available all year round, so it was something to look forward to when the summer months arrived. I can remember my mother and aunts being thrilled when English tomatoes came into the shops.

I grew out of reading Enid Blyton around the age of six or seven and the Faraway Tree. After that, there were much more interesting books to read. I belonged to three libraries. Just William books were vastly funnier than anything by EB.

@Wambsgans well-documented - and IIRC so badly received that most were changed back.

As for the latest Malory Towers BBC adaptation - ugh, mixed feelings. Review here: biancasbookblog.blogspot.com/2020/05/malory-towers-bbc-series-review.html?m=1

@Diverseopinions wouldn’t go that far to say the selection of literary devices is a load of guff: rather that some writers just do it more consciously than others. You can still make a lot of highly effective linguistic and literary choices subconsciously.

FWIW I am an unashamed EB fan and lots of my favourites have been mentioned here already. Shout-out to Hollow Tree House too though.

I really enjoyed the recent MT adaptation.

@MrsNoah2020 trigger warnings on MN? Really? I didn’t realise people here were so sensitive.

I had a large book of short stories by EB as a child, which DH used to read to our DC. One of the stories was The Silly Story-Teller, and I don't know if it was the same story or a different one where a boy had ripped and muddied his brand new coat and rather than own up he hid it in some brambles and said someone stole it.

Meanwhile the local working man found the coat and took it home to his wife who washed it and mended it good as new for their boy, who wore it to school where the original boy went and got accused of stealing it. Exciting stuff. (The nasty boy got his comeuppance and had to wear his old coat all year).

There was also a story about poisonous berries which we used to drum into our DC. All the tales were very moral. Oh and a boy who was awarded a brand new bike after a policeman spotted him being really courteous on his old tatty one.

...and I missed the point of that ramble which is that DH and I use all sorts of phrases from those stories, which have passed into family lore.

@ScarletZebra I remember that one! Also one about a little boy called Willie who was cruel to animals - he chased a swan one day and it turned around and broke his fucking leg and then took a lump out of him with its beak for good measure. Which of course richly served him right...

@hagsrus0 ahhh see you got there first with Hollow Tree House! Lovely story.

[quote Angelil]@MrsNoah2020 trigger warnings on MN? Really? I didn’t realise people here were so sensitive.[/quote]
You're not very observant, then - there are threads with trigger warnings all the time.

Can anyone remember this EB book? It was about a family who moved from the city to the country side (a familiar theme). Except they didn't move to a farm. Their neighbour was an elderly lady who wasn't too keen on kids but I think they won her over. She served them animal shaped biscuits when they called in for tea. The youngest brother got into trouble for stealing his sister's toy monkey. He claimed he found it in the bin in her bedroom and assumed she didn't want it anymore. She denied putting it in the bin. The boy was vindicated when someone discovered that a breeze coming in the open window was blowing the monkey off a chest of drawers/dresser into the bin underneath. The sister felt guilty for wrongly accusing her brother of theft and told him he could keep the toy monkey.

I also loved her Tales of Brave Adventure, a retelling of King Arthur and Robin Hood. I re-read that many times and pondered the nobility of the characters in the face of their untimely ends.

Yy to Hollow Tree House.

As people read Fanous Five as adults... you should watch Malory Towers on iplayer

I read books as a child and loved them.. at 45 I watched and loved it on iplayer.

Oh the Jill books, now you're talking! Ruby Ferguson was my go to, together with the Pullein-Thompsons and Pat Smythe.
I only really came on here to say that I was astonished to hear that "N brown" was still being used by someone only 15 years ago! 😲
I clearly remember my mother using it in the 60s to refer to shoes/handbags, even in shops and the sales assustants not turning a hair. To be honest, at that stage I didn't find it odd. I didn't know any better I suppose.
We had no BAME people where I grew up until one little girl joined my class at school when I was nine. She'd been adopted by a white couple. Unthinkable now. Sadly, most of my school mates were forbidden to play with her and she certainly wasn't invited to tea. My mother, on hearing this, hit the roof and insisted I invite her regularly, the upshot of which was that I stopped being invited places too! Yet she would still shop for "a new pair of N brown shoes"

Ice is an individual ice cream. The kind with a paper lid and a wooden spoon attached to it.

I enjoyed the Jill books but I HATED the character of Jill herself, she was so obnoxious!

Jill was not obnoxious, she was poor but decent.