Enid Blyton remembered - Tony Cunnane's Afterthoughts

Written 20 November 2009

From the age of 6 (in 1941) I was an avid reader of everything Blyton wrote. My tastes changed, of course, as the years passed but that was the appeal of Enid Blyton – she wrote for boys and girls of all ages from babies to early-teens. My parents and my primary school teachers introduced me to Five Minute Tales (a book of 60 stories, each no more than a page in length), thenTen Minute Tales (29 rather longer stories), followed by Fifteen Minute Tales. Each and in every tale there was either an educational element or a lesson about good manners built in. I, like thousands of other children, learned a lot about life in general from those stories.

The image below, taken in 2008 before the more recent extensive road works connected with the Merchant Gate development, shows the library little changed from the 1940s. The Children's library was at the left hand end. In the small room at the right hand end, behind the circular window, was a fascinating reference library where I spent many happy hours in the early 1950s when I had returned to live in Wakefield after our rather unfortunate move from Salford (unfortunate for my chosen career anyway - see here!).

I discovered the Children’s Section of the local library when I was about 8 years old and there I found Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’ books. I see from the Internet that the first book in that series, Five on a Treasure Island, was published in 1942. I certainly read that and the next few but as I approached my 11th birthday I discovered a shelf of Arthur Ransome books. The female librarians (the males were, presumably, all away at the War or in 'reserved' occupations), who by then knew me well, recommended Swallows and Amazons. I read it in about three days and then borrowed all the others, one after the other until I had read the lot. Winter Holiday has always been my favourite. I still have paperback reprints of the books and I read them all again recently. Then the librarian introduced me to Malcolm Savile (Mystery at Witchend, Seven White Gates, Lone Pine Five, etc) followed by Captain W E Johns (his Biggles and Gimlet books – but not the Worrals books which were definitely for girls only!) I cannot, however, claim that it was Biggles who persuaded me to join the Royal Air Force years later. (A friend from those days still calls me Biggles when we meet, as we do most Sundays, in the local pub.)

During the dark, wartime winter evenings there was little to do apart from reading and listening to the wireless (and watching the stars and planets in the inky-black night sky) which probably explains why I was always a voracious reader – often reading a complete book in a single day. I have a special memory of Enid Blyton’s Castle of Adventure – the second of the ‘Adventure’ series each of which had over 300 pages, twice the length of the Famous Five stories.  My parents bought it for me after I was admitted in a rush to Wakefield’s Clayton Hospital in 1946 for an appendicitis operation that turned out not to be appendicitis (read about that here). I had been told that I would be in hospital for at least seven days so I rationed  myself to a maximum of about 50 pages per day. The book was very exciting but I stuck to my daily ration without exceeding my ration, albeit with some difficulty.