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?

We used to go on holiday in a famous five type village (in a tent not a large seaside cottage with a cook, unhindered by adults). I totally thought I was in the famous five there. Was always on the look out for a secret passage or a smuggler. My only proper FF adventure though was me and my friend went off for a long walk aged ten with a picnic (or maybe just some biscuits) in a bag, but we got followed by some cows and escaping through a hedge screaming somewhat ruined the mood.

I had a wonderful 70s childhood in the countryside by the sea and spent summers in boats, on ponies, fishing and cooking bullet-hard potatoes in bonfires. Never caught a criminal or rescued a foreign princeling but it was bloody fantastic. I loved all the Enid Blyton books and fantasised about running away from cruel aunts - unfortunately all mine were lovely ...

Midnight Feasts and Picnics sounded deli but High Tea was another level!

More swallows and Amazon's here - lots of camping, dens, hikes, bikes and even a bunch of boats.

My cousin came for a sleepover and we decided to have a midnight feast like they do in Malory Towers. However, the only spare food we could find was a couple of oranges. After we had gone to bed we could only wait until it got vaguely dark and then we ate the oranges.

The problem then was what to do with the orange peel. There was a flat roofed outbuilding that ran between our house and next door and my bedroom overlooked this building, so we threw our orange peel out of the window on to the roof of this. The next morning my Mum came in and opened the curtains and as soon as she saw the orange peel on the roof she went in to an exasperated tirade about those dreadful boys next door and whatever would they do next! 😊

Another experience was playing on a rope swing over a ditch. Great fun until my friend fell in. Oh she got out OK but turned out this was a drainage ditch beside a cattle field and she was covered in very smelly stuff all the way up to her waist.

Probably a bit outing but I grew up on an remote island that had a population of less than 30, we were the only kids. My brother and I had the full run of the island. We were huge Enid blyton fans and used to hide and spy on the few other inhabitants hoping to find a mystery to be solved, unfortunately for us they had even more boring lives than we did and were mainly raging alcoholics.

I did have a note book full of clues and badly spelled descriptions of criminals. Still got it actually

" Very tall about 5 feet with a mustash"

We had a gang hut, which was a disused changing hut of a long ago coastal swimming club ( wild swimming is not new😁).

One day whilst spying on "criminals" they got a gun/rifle/ air gun out of the boot of their car. In a very un FF fashion we shat it and I remember we all crushed into a spider filled cupboard in the hut to hide! I imagine they were going to shoot at cans or maybe rabbits, rather than being international criminals!

The reg plate of the car was LSJ 999P. We all still remember that reg and quote it to each other when we meet up every decade or so!

The note book also has a note to my mother

"Dear Mum, I have changed my name to Susan. Gone swimming.
Love
Susan

No idea what that was about.

Oh and drawings of the "footprints" of a puma!
Remember when every area had an escaped big cat?

I wasn't a fan of Enid Blyton, but loved Swallows and Amazons, and Jennings and his school chums Darbishire and Venables.

We lived close to a large woodland area, so summers often included building dens and basic picnics, trekking and "hunting", (we never caught anything!).
The most exciting thing that happened to our group was one day as we were in our various dens along a small valley, a completely naked man with a large axe over his shoulder came running along the valley floor. Naturally, we followed him, but disappointingly, he got away from us, so we were never able to question him!
Needless to say, once our parents had heard this exciting tale, "our" valley was declared out of bounds.

After I explained Midnight Feasts to my Mother, she would sometimes provide sandwiches & cake for one, to cheer me up after I'd been ill. I'm sure they were actually nine o'clock Feasts mind.

@ScarabBright That is totally The Railway Children!

Just having adventures.
walking around rocks to the next bay
collecting wood for bonfires
building forts in the sand dunes with snacks
catching fish and eels
playing spot light

I learnt that National Trust attendants get upset if you try knocking on all the wooden panels, trying to fond the secret passage.

I did nor find a secret passage, despite living on a farm which was rumoured to have a secret passage from the time of the Reformation. (Though as Dad pointed out, they'd dug up a fair bit of the farm over the years, sorting out water leaks etc, and they'd never come across one.)

Oh yes! In our street we had an Adventure Club, inspired by the FF. We made absolute nuisances of ourselves, imagining coded messages between "suspect" neighbours and the ice cream van man, who were obviously in cahoots about some major plot. We explored abandoned buildings (70s, no H&S) and dug up building sites. We once found a bullet shell, which caused major excitement and launched a month long stake out of a relatively new neighbour (because of his convo with the ice cream man). Eventually my mum told me to stop pestering the man, who turned out to be a policeman, and we had to move onto the mystery of whose cat had shat in the sandpit!

I'm a child of the 1970's lax parenting style, we moved to Cumbria because my dad was a massive Arthur Ransom fan (Swallows and Amazons) when I was 7. We were properly working class but lived in the countryside and were allowed to roam freely. I was an early riser and frequently let myself out of the house from around the age of 8 to wander around the village in the summer. Had a lift home on the milk van more than once. Also, we had a small dingy and our summer holidays were all being packed into the car with the dinghy upside down on the roof rack and heading off into Scotland where my dad would find a farmer with a Loch on his land and we'd camp next to it and stay in 3 small tents, 1 for my parents, one for me and my sister and one for my brother. We'd have a camp fire, and all cooking was done on that for a fortnight apart from I think once a week getting a chippy tea as a luxury. Very happy memories of those trips. Also, as an adult looking back absolutely amazed that my mum and dad managed to not only sleep in sleeping bags on a groundsheet for 2 weeks as 35 & 40 year olds (roughly) but that my mum managed to do two weeks with just 1 trip to the local laundry half way through to wash everyone's clothes for the second week. We probably spent most of the time in swimming costumes and shorts and T-shirts but still it's impressive along with making dinner for 5 people on a camp fire every night!

Your mum sounds lovely

Not criminal tracking but my uncle was a lighthouse keeper off the coast here and in summer we would all head off on dads boat for the day to explore the island

LOVE that you still know their reg!!! 😂Why aren't you running Scotland Yard? Maybe you are...

We didn't solve any crimes etc but we did have lots of adventures out on our bikes from sunrise to sunset. Including swimming across lakes to little islands, building dens, exploring abandoned farm buildings etc. To be honest I'm surprised we are still alive after some of them and can't believe our parents just let us get on with whatever we wanted

@redastherose That sounds ace. I thought it was a bit odd the Five and other adventurers in books were so middle class as it seemed like my very middle class friends often had less freedom (I was in a very socially mixed area, probably more common in 1970s than today). I got excited when I read a library book about an Irish family who were clearly working class, rural, and had adventures, because it was unusual to find that in the children's books I read. Annoyingly I have never been able to remember the title...

We had midnight feasts, sometimes we would 'disguise' ourselves, take notes about various people coming and going on our street, that sort of thing. We often brought picnics to our local woods, we would pick a tree to be the magic faraway tree. Happy, innocent, times.

Thank you everyone your messages have given me so much laughter (with no disrespect to our earnest and intrepid younger selves).

To be honest I'm surprised we are still alive after some of them and can't believe our parents just let us get on with whatever we wanted

I blame Ransome for that. Definitely some parents had a "better drowned than duffers" attitude.

Of course, the ones who didn't survive won't be posting here.

I lived on a culdersac that was on a wee point of land surrounded by mangroves and a muddy river, trees & cliffs.

There was loads of wild land around us and from age 8 my friends & I played there. Never saw adults there at all - it was ours and so much fun.

We invented all kinds of mysteries & adventures there.

From about age 11 my friend and I would go on day long bike rides around the semi rural edges of our city. We were free to roam and I was always exciting & fun.