The Enid Blyton Society

The Silly Storyteller - Percival Jonathan Jenks

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The recent discussion about first and last names makes this story quite interesting.
I had never heard about Percival Jonathan Jenks before,but perhaps Enid gave him a triple barrelled name to enhance and illustrate his character...

An entertaining story. I read it as a child in Every Day Stories (Purnell Sunshine Library).

Yes I've got this story, and in that same book too. One of my favourites of the short stories books.

I first read 'The Silly Storyteller' at the age of 4 or 5 and remember being puzzled by the opening paragraphs. Percival was criticised for "making up the silliest stories" and Jane said she considered them to be "untruths". I was confused by that because 'The Silly Storyteller' was itself a made-up story, as were all the tales in the book. What was wrong with making up and telling stories, I wondered - even silly ones? It was only as I read on that I realised that "telling stories" and being "a storyteller" meant much the same (in certain contexts) as "telling lies" and being "a liar"!

When I was a youngster there were quite a few things in Blyton books that puzzled me momentarily, e.g. the mention of "braces" (the sort that hold up trousers) or "goloshes". However, I wasn't left bewildered for long - I just carried on reading and the meaning soon became clear from the way the word was used in the narrative. That's one reason I don't like the books being updated. I think it's good for young readers to have the opportunity to work out unfamiliar things for themselves. They expand their vocabulary and gain an insight into history while enjoying a cracking story.

'goloshes' was one of those words (and were one of those things!) that I imagined only lived in EB books, like dinner gongs and 'playrooms' and 'Nannies' who looked after children (rather than Nannies who were Grandmothers!) As you say, Anita - these things enhanced the books for me, and gave me an early interest in history and words in general.

I was always interested in the fact that Enid's characters never told 'lies' - I'm not sure she even ever used that word. People would tell stories, or be a 'silly story-teller' or tell fibs or be a fibber...but she rarely accused her characters of telling lies - these seemed more serious than 'fibs'!

When I read the first Famous Five,I couldn't understand how George could go swimming and still look like a boy,as in my generation boys just wore swimming trunks and went topless.

My Dad explained that earlier swimmers (boys & girls) both wore 'bathing suits'....

Now I'm not quite sure how Betty Maxey got around this problem??

Rather like Jack being able to 'fall into' the boot of the car in Circus of Adventure! Without the illustration (which has often been missing in more modern reprints) this would make little sense to a reader used to car boots of the last 40 years!




I think in later books Enid describes the boys in Famous Five as wearing 'bathing drawers' - but not sure what George did by then - and the illustrations don't back this up! Betty Maxey doesn't even try to depict swimming scenes. Even in 'Five Have Plenty of Fun' which is set partially on a beach, she has no illustrations of the children in swimwear - what a cop out!

Either I wasn't a very deeply thoughtful child or I simply didn't consider it, as I don't recall ever thinking too much about such things . Goloshes I'd already come across and knew what they were, courtesy of my other favourite childhood author, Beatrix Potter's Mr Jeremy Fisher. Mary Poppins taught me what a nanny was long before I read of them in Enid's books and as we had a dinner bell at school, I took a dinner gong to be the same thing. I never thought of Julian's bathing costume or how anyone could 'fall into' a car either, I just took it as if that's what the book said, that's what had happened in the story, no need to question it! I wasn't a very curious child, I didn't question the ins and outs or how's and why's of what I was reading, such as asking how could anyone live in a tree or how could two children fit safely to fly in a chair. I was perfectly content to simply enjoy the stories I read.

It was in Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit that I first came across a "pretentious tea", as Nigel calls them. Peter Rabbit's mother gives him a dose of camomile tea as a medicine when he feels unwell! My mum used to grow camomile in the garden and it smelt horribly pungent and overpowering. As you walked past it, you felt you were being suffocated and couldn't breathe.

No, I was never worried about old-fashioned words in EB stories either. My mum would usually be reading them with me or to me when I was little and would explain that galoshes are like what we call gumboots (you call them wellingtons) or that a mackintosh is a raincoat, or any other words that were unusual to a young Australian reader in the 1980s. People having dinner bells, or cooks and other servants, I just took for granted as well. I knew that these books were set in another country (England) and a long time ago (my parents had read them when they were little!), so I had no problem with accepting that they portrayed a quite different world from anything I knew. That was all part of the fun of reading them!

Anita Bensoussane wrote:It was in Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit that I first came across a "pretentious tea", as Nigel calls them. Peter Rabbit's mother gives him a dose of camomile tea as a medicine when he feels unwell! My mum used to grow camomile in the garden and it smelt horribly pungent and overpowering. As you walked past it, you felt you were being suffocated and couldn't breathe.

I've never seen or tried camomile tea, but Peter Rabbit wasn't too happy about being given it, so I always assumed it must be pretty nasty. Anything given as a medicine always tasted nasty. Expect Calpol, my mum had to keep that well out of the way or I'd have drunk it down like pop! I'd say I wasn't feeling well just to be given some, it was more like a treat than a medicine .