Who grew up reading Enid Blyton books?

[OldFred]

Just seen that The Magic Faraway Tree movie is to be released in the UK on 27 March 2026 🙂

I will hold judgement until I've seen it on it compares to the books but as a child, I devoured EB books.
I loved them all but TMFT holds a special place in my heart so fingers crossed!

I know EB books rightly so have had their fair share of criticism but (immigrant) childhood me just took them at face value, and as an adult and parent, my enduring love for them remains.
The Mini Old Freds have inherited all my copies and love them too.

What are your favourite EB books?
(Hoping to come across some I've not heard of!)

The family at Red roofs. I had a horrible childhood and for some reason reading this gave me hope and a glimmer of normality. Also a massive magic faraway tree fan.

@IjustbelieveinMe EB books definitely provided a "safe place" and escapism for many readers. I hope you're in a better place now x

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@EllieQ - yes, it was the Castle of Adventure! This was a war time espionage/spy story, and the spy has a German name. The context is all in there, as with 'Valley' (hidden treasures the Nazis plundered) and would have been obvious to contemporary readers.

I still have these! A bit mottled and tan-marked with age but special nonetheless.

It's nice to see how many of us hold EB books so dear to our hearts.
They might not be classed as literary masterpieces but they captured our imaginations (and even got some of us into better education ~ shout out to @MrsKateColumbo 👏 )
The most important thing is, in my opinion, they got us reading.
So many of us here have said we devoured her books, couldn't wait to read them, such a simple distraction - to give a child a book to read!
A childhood full of books is a rich childhood.

Very well said. Love this thread and the memories

I went on to do a PhD in literature, and I'm sure my childhood reading was in no small part responsible. Not everything has to be a literary masterpiece. My favourite books of all time are Ulysses and The Waves, but I read my fair share of pap fiction too (loved Jilly Cooper as a teenager).

On this point: Such as Five Go to Billycock Hill - 'pillicock' is an old term meaning 'penis', which I highly doubt that she wouldn't have known about! she's using it in the context of a billycock hat, which is an old-fashioned name for a bowler hat. But this double ententre is really funny!

That was the one I referred to upthread. I bought a copy about 10 years ago off abebooks or ebay or something similar. I really enjoyed it as a child so decided to get another copy of it. I think mine got very battered and thrown away.

I liked the Trebizon books too. I was a cheapskate and used to read them in WH Smiths or Martins each Saturday while my parents were shopping for boring stuff. One of the shop assistants in Martins got the measure of me and used to shoo me away if she spotted me.

Yes, I really don’t think EB was throwing in double entendres about penises to amuse adults who might be reading, anymore than her anthology ‘Enid Blyton’s Gay Story Book’ is a paean to same-sex love or ‘Two Naughty Pussies’ is about anything other than badly+behaved kittens.

I loved the Famous Five books. My granddad bought me every new one as it was released.

Read them all. My DC love the audiobooks of Secret Seven, Wishing Chair, Malory Towers and Faraway Tree so we will def see this.

I like the focus on being kind, loyal and truthful. Gwendoline isn’t any of those things. My 6yo’s ASD means he struggles a bit with social relationships and so having quite a black and white depiction of how to be a good friend is quite good for him to follow.

True but reading MT with adult eyes has made me realise that Darrell isn't the heroine I thought she was, she's extremely superior to anyone different from her and lacking empathy. And Alicia too can be a bitch to anyone she considers lacking. It's actually Sally, Bill and Mary Lou, who I found a bit boring as a child but I now realise are the best characters.

My two absolute favourites were The secret Island and Five go to Smugglers Top. Dreamy little Prince Paul and his hunky Baronian bodyguards - and his own plane!!!!

Also still have all the Malory Towers and St Clares series. They have their own bookshelf.
DD1 adored all of them - she's in her 30s now but dd2, 15 years younger showed no interest at all. I guess this shows the huge change in social attitudes and how children grow up.
I love the six bad boys, as i said earlier because poor Bob (?) had a single mum, which i did too, although mine wasn't quite as abusive!!

Yeah, but it's great for a good old childish giggle! I'm cackling at this. And Enid wasn't shy. I read something recently about her bisexuality, although I'm not sure how uncomfortably her 'unnatural passions' might have sat with her. The subtext is sometimes there in her books. Alison's overwhelming crush on Miss Quentin is the more obvious example - the 'silly girl' has an unfortunate habit of losing her heart far too easily to the 'wrong' people (there's also more than a hint of Sapphism in the relationship between Rose Red and Clover in What Katy did at School).

Strange how even in the Victorian era the school girls met and flirted with male college students, as did the girls of Trebizon. Only in Blyton do they seem to be completely sequestered, as though in a prison!

No, she isn't. But then again, neither is Alicia, the mean girl readers are supposed to admire. She's catty. She thinks too well of herself. She's disloyal (note how she turns on Darrell after befriending her, when the form thinks she's guilty of destroying Mary Lou's pen). She's judgemental. She's dishonest (refuses to own up to Miss Grayling about setting Belinda up to play a mean trick on the two Mamzelles). Kindness isn't a word in her vocabulary.

As for Darrell, she's honest alright but routinely duffs up girls who are smaller and weaker than herself: yet is then shocked rigid by a spate of anonymous notes - not exactly in the mode of Edith Swann, but more to the tune of 'you're horrid and everyone hates you, so rah!'

It always struck me how the other girls were let off the hook for sins that were amplified in Gwendoline.

Five go to Smugglars Top was one of the few Enid Blyton books that genuinely frightened me as a child.

@SerafinasGoosei don’t think we are meant to admire Alicia that much - we use her to DC as an example of unkind words that would be better kept inside your head.

Sally and Bill were my favourite characters

I haven't read the full thread but i loved Mr Galliano's Circus - has that been mentioned?
Also Malory Towers, Famous Five and Secret Seven.

Child me thought the Faraway Tree was very silly.

I agree.
Daryll recognises in the first form that although Alicia can be fun, she's not actually a good friend in the way Sally is.
Alicia is a bit of a queen bee in the form, but she doesn't actually have a big following. Interestingly her best friend is from another tower, maybe indicating that those in her tower find her a bit much all the time! The towers are very distant, and I don't think there's any other friendships we hear about across the towers.
I'd have liked to see a little more character arc for both Alicia and Gwendoline in MT over the series. Alicia should have been better after having measles over her exams and failing them, and Gwendoline goes up making the same mistake year after year - befriends the "most important" new girl and then falls out with them. But then EB knew what worked.

On the double entendres, apparently she once wrote a story entitled "Noddy spends a penny" not knowing that "spends a penny" was used to mean "go to the toilet", and her publishers had to point that out to her. Noddy had to spend tuppence.

Noddy had to spend tuppence.

I suppose that requires more paper, so understandable it would cost more.

I loved the imagery of all the secret passageways. I think they did a good job with those in the glorious TV adaptations in the 70s and the 90s. Much of the 70s series was filmed in and around the New Forest in seriously fab locations.

There was a thread on here ages ago about old houses, and a poster said that she lived in a house built in the 15th or 16th century in a hillside, which had all the secret tunnels in it. I do hope it was true and not 'imagination-driven'; but I was rapt and so desperate to know whereabouts it was!