Jolly splendid to see my son taking to Enid Blyton

26 October 2014 - 02:02 By Jemima Lewis
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My son has started talking like a prepschool boy from the 1940s . He begins his sentences with: "I say!" When things go wrong, he says "Bother!" or even "Blow!" Matters are sometimes "beastly", sometimes "splendid", occasionally "jolly mysterious".

You might recognise the symptoms of Blyton-itis. I certainly do. When I was my son's age (six), I developed an addiction to the works of Enid Blyton so powerful that, for about four years, I would read absolutely nothing else. Like a diminutive crackhead craving my next fix, I would race home from school, throw myself on to the bed without removing my shoes and, with a judder of relief, open up The Island of Adventure.

Back then, strange to relate, this was considered a seditious activity. The cultural taste-makers of the 1970s and '80s detested Blyton, regarding her as a simplistic storyteller with outdated attitudes. (This, of course, was precisely what children loved about her stories. But hey-ho. Sometimes there's no reasoning with grown-ups.)

Blyton was accused of being sexist, racist and xenophobic - a dangerous influence on young minds.

First Term at Mallory Towers was regarded as a sort of literary gateway drug that would lead to even worse things. Mein Kampf, perhaps, or Mills & Boon. Either way, the child's intellectual and moral fibre would be irretrievably rotted.

Curiously, none of this had much effect on Blyton's sales. Her books have maintained a steady presence in the UK's best-seller lists since the 1930s.

Eager though middle-class parents might be to raise liberal-minded, colour-blind, feminist offspring, there is one thing they have always cared about more: getting their children to read. So they kept buying the Famous Five, albeit guiltily.

My own parents, being impervious to fashion, never seemed worried by my Blyton habit. But I instinctively understood that it wasn't something I should mention in public.

I went to an ultra-progressive primary school in Oxford, where we sang Pink Floyd songs instead of hymns to show that, like, we didn't give a f**k about the Establishment, yeah? If the teachers found out I was reading the Secret Seven at home, I'd get taken away by social services.

My son, I'm glad to say, need have no such anxieties. Almost half a century after her death, Blyton is finally back in fashion. The film director Sam Mendes has announced that he is to bring her Faraway Tree series to the big screen.

Meanwhile, Working Title has bought the rights to all 20 of the Famous Five books. And the Old Vic theatre in London is planning to stage a musical version of the Five's adventures.

Even the books themselves seem to have a new confidence to them. The darkest days of revisionism - when over-zealous editors, not content with striking out all references to golliwogs or swarthy foreigners, started rewriting scenes to ensure that Dick and Julian helped with the housework - seem to have passed.

Hodder recently brought out a lovely 70th anniversary set of Famous Five novels, with covers by five contemporary children's illustrators. The fact that Quentin Blake and Helen Oxenbury should declare themselves proud to adorn the cover of a Blyton book shows the extent of her rehabilitation.

How has this literary resurrection come about? Perhaps the argument has gone on so long that it has simply burnt itself out. The golliwogs have been dispatched, Noddy has learnt the error of his ways, and what remains is a series of ripping yarns. The adventure stories - in which an interchangeable team of children and animals uncover a criminal gang in a forgotten maze of underground tunnels - seem more bracing than ever from today's sofa-bound, risk-averse perspective.

In the first of the Famous Five series, the children ask Aunt Fanny if they can spend the day rowing unaccompanied across a choppy sea to a deserted island surrounded by deadly, jagged rocks. And maybe stay the night too? No problem, says Aunt Fanny, or words to that effect, and lobs them a blanket and some sandwiches in case they get peckish.

My son read that bit aloud to me, his eyes as round as old-fashioned gob-stoppers. "I would NEVER be allowed to do that," he said. "Would I?" Well, perhaps in 20 years, once you've mastered walking to school on your own.

I worry sometimes that he will get beaten up at school for saying "I say".

(Or worse. There's a character in one of the books nicknamed Sooty, on account of his dark complexion. Bring on the red pen!)

But these dangers pall beside the pleasure of seeing him buried in a book.

I'm glad to have an addict in the house. - ©The Daily Telegraph, London

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