To ask if you had any Famous Five type adventures when you were a child?

[Ollyander]

I loved the books and me and my 9yo mates did try to track local 'criminals', who mostly turned out to be lecturers at the local poly (tbf, lots of them looked well dodge). But I always wondered if children elsewhere were actually solving mysteries and having adventures. Or maybe you just loved ginger beer?

No. Unfortunately my childhood socio economic background would have had me firmly cast as the cooks ghastly daughter suspected of letting the butchers boy with the fat fingers into the masters study to 'ave it h'away wiv 'is new h'invention. Cor lummy Master Julian you ain't 'alf a caution.

Most summer holidays I made plans to meet friends at 6am and run away together for an adventure. Needless to say, we were never awake early enough.
We did spend the holidays making camps, trying to cook potatoes on bonfires and generally going to places our parents never knew about.
I also remember us searching for the Black Panther at one time as everyone was searching for the poor girl he kidnapped.
I had a brilliant childhood 😃

Totally. I was mad on the FF when I was young!

I longed to have them, but firstly I'd have been Anne and enjoyed far more the looking after the caravan, and secondly my parents were far too protective to risk us going off 5 minutes away let alone camping with friends.

The nearest was one time being at a friend's place and she asked if I wanted to go down to the canal. We hitched a lift in an open-top van with one of her dad's employees, standing in the back of the van (along a dual-carriageway and twisty country roads) and falling down when he went over bumps. My dc think that is absolutely shocking!
We then spent a happy afternoon playing by the canal, talking to the people on boats, with her dog, pretending to fish and eating blackberries. We then spent the next 6 weeks with a cunning plan of making a boat we were going to live on for the summer holidays.
The boat was never even started, but we loved planning it.

Dm never found out about our trip otherwise I'd never have been allowed around there again!

I m Welsh so I would be the poor wretch in the story where they went to Wales, called Aily, who barely spoke English, had bare feet in the snow, seemed to be some kind of ethereal magical being, and took a sheep everywhere she went.

And Timmy would become attached to you, and Anne would think you had pretty hair, which would make George storm off in a strop, but she'd reluctantly forgive you when you led the others (wordlessly) to the old tin mine she'd been imprisoned in.

My friend and I had the Detective and Spy books by Osbourne from which we learnt things like how to dress as a spy and lay trails. We absolutely lived it and even gave ourself spy names. She was Agent Exx, I was Agent Zed! We continued our adventures on the acre of land next to my house, climbing trees and tractors, building dens, and laying traps - a shallow hole covered with leaves! I had a wonderful childhood.

We lived in the countryside and had a lot of freedom. We would go roaming about the villages and moors and definitely came across a few mysteries, nothing dangerous though and we didn't stay out overnight. I'm not sure my parents would have been happy to know how far away we were and some of things we got up to. Crawling through disused tunnels for miles, climbing into quarries like stig of the dump.

We were more Swallows and Amazons to be honest.

When we were on holiday we would go feral. We holidayed with other families and we all had either motor or sailing dinghies. We'd grab a dinghy and sail across the estuary to Salcombe where we would buy sweets and pop before sailing back.

No mysteries solved although I once followed my border collie (yes!) through very long grass and round bushes on a common as she was following a scent very excitedly, only to find a couple 'having it off' as I put it at the time. All four of us beat a hasty retreat.

George was my role model. I spent days out on my bike with a pack of sandwiches and the dog. It hadn't occured to me before this thread that I took would have been the odd, 'frightfully common' child they would find eating bread and dripping and drinking out of a stream, while pointing the way to the local overgrown big house.

I was also obsessed with the boarding school stories and my lovely Mum used to indulge me by making me a midnight feast of snacks now and then, to eat in bed by torchlight.

I had a neighbour who was a few years older who told us all to pack our things ready to run away, my brother and I stashed a pile of things under his bed, but then we all forgot about it. Weeks or months later my mum found all the things. We also dug a big hole in the veg patch as we were looking for treasure.

Oh I was an avid reader of all things Enid Blyton - Famous Fave, The mystery series with the find-outers, Secret Seven, Mallory Towers.
I would absolutely have been Anne, keeping house and feeling not very brave, so no real life adventures for me! They also made me desperate to go to boarding school, I suspect it may have been a bit of a warped view 😂

I loved FF and my childhood was rather like an Enid Blyton book.

A couple of true stories.

Harvest and the whole village was invited to the big house for the harvest supper. While the adults were chatting us kids ran off to explore the house. We ended up in the kitchen where we found stairs hidden behind a wall. I now know they were the back stairs to the servants quarters. There were no live in staff so the stairs were dusty and unused. We all snuck up the stairs and found ourselves under the eves. We walked along the corridor looking in all the old rooms with long forgotten furniture in. When we got to the last room we opened the door to find the abandoned nursery complete with cot, dolls house and rocking chair. We ran!

My family lived in an old farm house with land to the side. Every year in the summer a Romany gypsy family would stay in the field, with our full permission. They were proper Romany gypsies. Horse drawn caravan, cooking in a pot over the fire. I got home from school one day, I was about 8, when they arrived. They had just started to get settled when the bus dropped me off. The dad asked if I’d like a ride through the village on the caravan. I asked mum who was fine with it. So we set off on this beautifully painted caravan through the village. All my friends saw! When I got back mum knew exactly where I had been because her phone had been ringing off the hook with people asking if she knew!

Closest we came was nearly being abducted by a guy claiming to be a friend of my dad's. We went off up the road with him to the common for a "picnic", until my brother came cycling after us saying mum said we had to come back. Luckily he caught up with us before we'd got to the common and with other people around, the bloke couldn't really do or say anything to object. Christ knows why we went with him. Shocking really.

DB was def hero of the day!

No, not really although I did try. But I was a greasy working class oik so it was more mooching along dodgy canals and underpasses and finding discarded 70s porn than secret tunnels and treasure maps…

My brother and I used be flat out pretending to be in Enid Blyton adventures in the forest or about the farm. Even named our dog Timmy🤣

My parents would never have tolerated me cheeking the local policeman and interfering with his work like the Five Find Outers and Dog did.

I once found a secret passage from ine beach to another in Wales. Possibly still the most exciting experience of life. Dd1 had a secret seven birthday party. We set up a mystery in the garden. There was a circus tent and a home made scamper pinata

No. I did try but there was an inconsiderate lack of Baddies in my hometown.

And our house (built in 1986) did not have a single secret passageway.

It was very disappointing.

Me too!! I loved those books!

I lived in a 1970s council house with not a hidden passage in sight, but we did have one magical holiday with an aunt who lived on Dartmoor in a stone cottage. I was there with my normally very protective grandmother but for some reason she took this huge step back and I got to wander Dartmoor by myself (go down to the village shops and buy as many sweeties as I want with no-one bothered about what time I came back).

Not really but I loved Enid Blyton. Losing myself in her books got me through a turbulent childhood.

I found a load of gold bracelets stashed in a box in a block of garages. I was going to sell them and become rich but then my mum found me playing with them and called the police.

We came up against dangerous criminals in 1991 when the Wolfman escaped the nearby high security hospital. We weren't allowed out to play so my neighbour friend and I ended up communicating with signs in our windows.

Loved Enid blyton as a child

Tried very hard to have lots of adventures, most of which happened within around 100 meters of the house

I especially fancied the food from those books! Midnight feasts
🤤