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!)

I wasn’t allowed to!

Well, but Rose Red knew whichever of the boys it was since childhood, so that’s ok, she’s still, in Katy’s eyes, a ‘little lady’, but Katy and Clover are genuinely shocked by the flirting and start a society to suppress ‘unladylike conduct’!

Yes, Blyton had an affair with her daughters’ nanny, among other extramarital complications. None of which make their way into her utterly unsexual books. I mean, the children essentially propose to Aunt Ally on behalf of Bill Smugs/Cunningham. (When I was a child I never understood why she wasn’t able to look after her own two children while holding down a job, and why there was all that stuff about it being absolutely terrible she had to work so hard and ‘couldn’t make a home for them’. I mean, she was paying two sets of boarding school fees, plus paying the aunt and uncle to look after them in the holidays, so child me thought it would be a lot less financial strain for them to live together while Ally worked and the children went to a free day school…?)

I would say that to a certain extent, EB books shaped my childhood play.

Living on the edge of a village, our (huge) back garden opened out onto countryside (fields, woods and a lovely canal).
So much time was spent walking, making dens & camps with us often being out all day. Sometimes we would be allowed to sleep at the bottom of the garden in tents with a camp fire burning away.
All we needed were the villains that EB always managed to supply, sorry to say (or perhaps luckily) they never materialised!

Another childhood memory unlocked! My friends and I played similarly. We used to hide among hay bales pretending we were on an adventure. There was a hedge in a field that we made a den in. I remember one day we found a box of stuff in it - a couple of plates and mugs and a load of porn magazines 😱🤣 We never went back to that den. There was a small stream going through the fields and a couple of very low bridges going over the stream - we had to commando crawl through them because they were so low 😱 I remember once the farmer yelling at us to get out his wheat (corn?) fields because we were making dens in there too but that just added to the adventure when we had to make a run for it. The same farmer would let us sit on his trailer whilst he drove the hay bales back to his farm which we thought was amazing.

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.

From King Lear:
LEAR
Death, traitor! Nothing could have subdued nature
To such a lowness but his unkind daughters.
Is it the fashion that discarded fathers
Should have thus little mercy on their flesh?
Judicious punishment! ’Twas this flesh begot
Those pelican daughters.
EDGAR Pillicock sat on Pillicock Hill. Alow, alow, loo,
loo.

She was changed to Dame Snap in the reprints, when they changed from Fanny to Franny. She also didn't slap the children just lost her temper from what I recall.

CurlewKate · Today 12:56
I wasn’t allowed to

Did you allow your children to read them?

The Naughtiest Girl in the School and Malory Towers…. So nostalgic and warm

I allowed my children to read anything.

You’re only meant to admire Alicia at the beginning. Then you’re meant to learn that actually she has too much fun and is hard and cruel which often gets her into trouble. She’s not a bad person… but she’s not a good friend to have.

Darrell isn’t perfect hence why she learns lessons along the way - to be kind, control her temper, give people a chance and help others. But at heart she’s smart and natural, loyal and good hearted.

I allowed my children to read anything.

So did I - as did my parents who felt reading should be encouraged by any means.

That’s certainly what we’re supposed to think. That her flaws are fundamentally forgivable, human ones that she works on, and that by the times she’s in the Sixth, she’s the perfect example of a Malory Towers girl. But Darrell has always been popular with girls and staff, one of the in-crowd, sporty, looked up, given roles of responsibility, enjoys boarding, does well academically, happy home life etc. It’s comparatively easy for her to overcome her temper and behave well.

Gwendoline, on the other hand, is unpopular, unsporty, fat (at least some of the time), homesick, widely mocked and belittled, has no talents, does badly academically, has been spoiled at home, is lonely and desperate to befriend any new girl etc. She’s not a nice girl by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not hard to see that spending six years in an environment where she’s despised by literally everyone is hardly likely to create conditions where she can flourish.

But EB just writes her as a ‘flat’ character. She’s just there to be the antagonist. Every other ‘bad’ girl reforms and finds a friend (apart from Maureen, who is kind of Gwen’s ‘twin’, and Jo in Felicity’s form.) She fakes illness to miss exams she knows she can’t pass and is horribly punished by her father’s near death and the family’s financial ruin, meaning her own future is sealed.

@DoubleYellowsyes because Gwen never learns her lessons. That’s the fundamental difference - the others learn and grow and then get good things. Gwen remains mean spirited, selfish, lazy, rude and ladder climbing. If you don’t learn and grow then why would you get good things?

This. Also apart from in book one when she deliberately breaks Mary Lou's fountain pen and then tries to set Darrell up for it I can't think Gwen did anything that bad. True, she was a bit shallow and conceited but she was often treated with outright distain, had some shocking personal comments directed at her (your too fat, you've got spots) sneered at for struggling with being away from home for the first time.

Reading as an adult she certainly didn't do anything to deserve the villain title her classmates were determined to pin on her and was never allowed to grow or develop from book one. As a PP pointed out by contrast Alicia pulled a cruel trick, got Belinda and Sally into trouble and refused to own up. But everyone still loved and admired her because she had a quick wit and was good at playing tricks.

Storyline-wise, I always thought it made no sense that Gwendoline was spoilt at home, and yet her parents sent her to board at a school where she was so unhappy.

Fine. Not sure what point you’re making, though!

But EB writes her as a ‘flat’ character so she doesn’t develop at all. Every other ‘problem’ girl reforms, from the arrogant sports star Amanda to mousy Clarissa to closed Sally who denies she has a sister to Daphne the thief and liar to cocky June to Moria the dictator— even arrogant, hard Alicia has that moment where she gets ill before the exams and understands for the first time what it’s like to struggle with schoolwork. But Gwen isn’t written that way. EB gives her experiences that would have been life-altering for another character (the experience of seeing all her awfulness reflected in Maureen, every new girl she befriends rejecting her for someone else, the public disgrace of having faked illness to avoid exams), but is unchanged. And then horribly punished.

I can't remember which FF book it was now (Five go to the Island)? but there's one book where a big tree falls on the house and nearly kills Anne and George. I think that's one of the reasons I've never liked the wind especially when I've been near trees!

Just edited - I see it was Five goes to Smuggler's Top.

Also in the Castle of Adventure where the castle gets struck by lightning.

Maybe she’s not flat maybe she’s just a horrible person who doesn’t grow? Plenty of problem kids continue to be unpleasant as adults… is she flat or is she a lesson about how if you’re horrible over and over and over and don’t change your life will be shit?

My mother used to threaten me with being sent to boarding school if I was naughty - she had been, hated it, apart from lacrosse games which she loved, and deeply resented her parents for sending her.

I loved the Mallory Towers books and would plead with her to send me - would run around the garden waving her old lacrosse stick, being an entire team.

There was more than a touch of disfunction about my home life…….

I hated that story arc for Clarissa too. Like isn't it a shame she had to have to have glasses and braces on her teeth because she could be so pretty. But it's ok at the end because she can she'd them both and be revealed as an attractive girl worth knowing. Phew.

Read so much Enid Blyton as a kid. Weirdly never Secret Seven, for some reason. But devoured everything else.

Yes, l enjoyed this book as an eight-year-old in the seventies and worked out even at that age that the reference to the crooked cross was a nazi cross. I suppose that, less than thirty years after WW2 ended, we had imbibed a lot of our parents' memories and there were a lot of ŵar films on the television at the time as well as drama series about the war.

Which was the book where the characters are underground and meet a huge worm tunneling along and blocking the way? I don't remember how they resolved that issue.

I read so much Blyton as a kid in the early 90s. I liked most of the series novels, but some of the one offs were good too - I remember Come to the Circus because I thought Fenella was such an incredibly interesting and unusual name.

I always felt it was her father's choice because he could see that she was becoming spoilt and wanted to broaden her horizons. Even though we don't do much of him Mr Lacey was always one of my favourite fictional dads.

What always baffled me was why they kept Gwen's nursemaid on even when she went to school. Did Miss Winter just stay living with them? What did she do all day with no child to look after?