The Enid Blyton Society

I'm enjoying these bits and bobs from Sunny Stories, some of the uncollected poems are very good and all the illustrations are a delight, I hope others like them too. Here's November's selection:

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My grateful thanks to Tony for making these pages from Sunny Stories available to us.

Like Kate, I thoroughly enjoy looking at the Sunny Stories pages every month. They transport me to a different era.

'Bruno and Bimbo Play a Joke' is most amusing. I'd love to play that trick on someone! What lovely illustrations for 'A Good Deed Goes Astray', about Mick and Mack the pups. It's a pity the artist (whose pictures we see regularly) is uncredited.

I was interested in Enid Blyton's comment in Issue 44: "I am so very glad that you like the Secret Island stories so much. Aren't they exciting?" It's as though she wasn't thinking of The Secret Island as a novel at that stage, but as a sequence of separate but related incidents. And, as we've said before, it's unlikely that she had any idea she would go on to write four sequels!

The poem 'Topsy-Turvy!' is great, about the trees throwing off their clothes in winter! Enid Blyton expresses things so naturally and rhythmically. Barbara Woodward's poem 'At Granny's' is super too, as are the riddles by Joan Ruane and Beryl Cecilia Harris.

I also enjoy being transported to a different era: one before I was born. That’s a rarity!

Most enjoyable and this is certainly very timely:

Nice to see the poem about protecting your pets.

Lovely poem! I'm always a bit surprised to hear of cats being frightened though - its fairly rare for cats to be frightened unless the bangs are very loud and close by. I've known dogs to be terrified even if rockets are just banging in the skies all around, but cat's rarely are. Our cat goes out and will sit in the garden even if people are letting off fireworks fairly near to us, and doesn't seem to mind!

The picture above and several others this month are by the prolific E.H. Davie. Despite many years of trying I still haven't even found out whether they are male or female, let alone anything more interesting about them. Just for fun ( ) I went through the first 100 issues of Sunny Stories and found illustrations by 'EH' in 84 of them, the next best was Hilda McGavin clocking in at 52 issues.

Yes, I had no idea how versatile an artist E. H. Davie was until this thread started. I admire his/her work and would love to know more (or indeed anything at all!) about him/her! I tend to think of E. H. Davie as female for some reason, though of course that might not be the case.

I also tend to think that E. H. Davie was a female for some reason.

Funny - I have always thought of EH Davie as being a man! Maybe its a man/woman thing, lol!

I've always loved reading the poetry contributions by the children who read Sunny Stories - its interesting to see just how much influence Enid had on their writing style and the themes they write about! 'My Friend the Gnome' could so easily have been written by Enid herself!

Talking of Sunny Stories, I am reading the 'Wizards and Witches' anthology just at the moment and the other day I read a really great story called 'The Wizard Who Wasn't'. I really enjoyed it, but sadly only two chapters are included in the anthology, with a large chunk missing which explains briefly what happens in between chapter one and chapter four.

I looked it up in the cave and was interested to see that the whole story appeared in Sunny Stories 26 July 1927 and in a couple of books since, but unfortunately I don't have any of them. It struck me as being one of Enid's best stories - very much in the tradition of a 'quest' story' or old fashioned fairy tale. I didn't realise that Sunny Stories magazines in those days often just contained one longer short story separated into chapters as this one is (five chapters)

It includes a chapter all about the Witch Gobble-Up - who can turn herself into smoke, or a river, or any other object/animal, and anyone who touches her while she is transformed will become her property! I felt that was almost of horror story proportions!

This was actually published by Red Fox in 1994 as a very slim paperback. Several of the early Sunny Stories for Little Folks just consisted of one story divided into chapters.

Rob Houghton wrote:Funny - I have always thought of EH Davie as being a man! Maybe its a man/woman thing, lol!

No, because I always assumed they were a man - and I'm mostly definitely a female.

Same here