Drawn back to Enid, or always a fan?

[Anne's Sandwiches]

Hello,

As a newcomer to this wonderful site I have been wondering whether you have always been fans and collectors of Enid's work or if you have returned to it.

Personally I have always had a fondness for the books but I have rekindled my collecting lately and I suspect that is due to a recent bereavement. There can be something so comforting about memories from your childhood during tough time (I think!)

I just wondered if I was alone in rediscovering my love of 'all things Enid' later on in life? I wish I had known about you all before, I have been missing out on so much fun!

[pete9012S]

I have never strayed from Enid except for a very brief interlude when I started senior school.
I threw all my books away because in my opinion 'I was too old for them now.' My Mum said,'You'll regret doing that Peter.'
She was right.Within twelve months I had started to recollect my Blyton's all over again.

[Katharine]

I went through a period of indifference in my late teens/early 20s. I still had all my books, just didn't bother to read them. My interest in Enid came back gradually, I remember 1997 was her centenary year, and I watched a couple of programmes about her, and would have been reading Noddy to my children at that time.

I think there might be a similar topic somewhere else on the forums, which hopefully someone can give you a link to.

[Anita Bensoussane]

I'm not sure whether we've had a thread dedicated to this topic before (if we have, I can't find it) or whether it's just been mentioned in passing. It's an interesting subject though.

When I was ten or eleven, my parents thought I should be growing out of Enid Blyton and would comment that I ought to be moving on to more "adult" authors. I continued reading the books in some guilt and secrecy until the age of about thirteen, when I gave in to pressure and put them aside, eventually packing them away in boxes. However, I hadn't lost my affection for the stories and I knew I'd return to them one day. Indeed, I "rescued" the Adventure books to re-read as a bit of light relief while revising for my 'O' Levels. I used to revise sitting on my bed, and I'd put the Adventure book inside a school book so that if anyone came into the room they would think I was studying and wouldn't know I was really exploring caves, voyaging to remote islands or communing with puffins!

Life became busy with studying, working, getting married and starting a family, and Enid Blyton faded into the background for twelve years or so. But in my late twenties I started reading the books again and enjoyed them as much as ever. At first I thought I must be the only adult in the world who still read Enid Blyton, but the discovery of Green Hedges Magazine in 1999 - and then The Enid Blyton Society Journal and the Blyton Yahoo Group - taught me that, thankfully, I was far from alone!

[number 6]

I must admit, I was a late comer to Enid's books. Apart from a few Noddy stories being read to me at an early age, I have no real recollection of reading any other Blyton before I read the F5 books at the age of 11. I got into the F5 purely through watching the 1978 TV series. I must also confess that I'm probably the least knowledgeable fan of Enid's on the forums! Anita & Tony amaze with their incredible wealth of knowledge!

[Julie2owlsdene]

I too think we've had this discussion somewhere else on this site, but woudn't know where to look for it.

I've always been an Enid fan, and always read her books when young, and from then on never really stopped. In adulthood I read other authors, but always read Enid's books for light reading, and for when I felt I needed to escape back into childhood.

[Courtenay]

I'm sure we've had this discussion, or ones like it, in more than one thread in the Introduce Yourself forum, where a newcomer has done their first post or two and asked how others came to be Blyton fans.

In my case, like a lot of people, I went off Enid's books when I was 12 or 13... well, sort of. Outwardly I quite enjoyed ridiculing them for being old-fashioned and a bit sexist (as I saw it then), but deep down I knew I could still pick up any of her books and enjoy it as much as ever, which I sometimes did while visiting my parents. (Fortunately, both Mum and Dad have been fans of Enid since childhood as well, so they never got rid of any of our Blyton books.) But I never thought all that much more about how much I really loved Enid's works until a few years ago, when I moved to Britain (from Australia) and started to see the kinds of landscapes and locations that she was actually writing about.

While visiting Dorset, I unexpectedly discovered I was in Blyton country - thanks especially to the excellent Ginger Pop Shop in Corfe Castle village - and decided to learn more about her. The first website I found was this one; within about a year, I joined the Society and haven't looked back!

[John Pickup]

Like others, I was a fan of Enid from when I could read by myself until the present day but stopped reading the books when I was a teenager until my son was born 35 years ago. Since then I've read the paperbacks that we bought for him and about ten years ago, at a book fair, my interest in Enid and other childhood authors I'd enjoyed was rekindled. I now have a modest collection of hardbacks which I read quite regularly.

[walter raleigh]

My story is very similar. I always loved Enid's books but during my teen years due to a combinaton of factors (peer pressure and parental pressure to grow up and move away from supposedly childish things) I drifted away and lost most of my childhood books.

During my early twenties I started buying my favourite books of hers again (mainly the 'Famous FIve' and 'Adventure' series). Then with the rise of the internet and being able to buy online, rather than suffer the potential embarrasment of buying 'children's' books in a real shop, my interest was totally rekindled.

Unfortunately I didn't discover this website until about 18 months ago. I never really thought to look online for a place like this as I assumed there weren't many people like me who still loved Blyton as an adult. How wrong I was! I wish I had joined up years ago as it's the friendliest and most welcoming forum I've ever encountered.

[Lucky Star]

I gave up Enid when I was about 14 or 15 and never gave her another thought until about the age of 37 when I strolled into an Oxfam shop in my town to browse their History section. There I came across a copy of The Castle of Adventure which someone had misplaced there. I gazed at it in some astonishment as a distant memory began to stir. I opened it randomly at the bit where the children are preparing to enter the castle via an old plank laid across to a window and I realised that I knew the text virtually off by heart after all those years. Everything came flooding back and I almost felt dizzy standing in the shop.

Of course I immediately bought the book and took it home where I began googling Enid and found this website. I was soon hooked again and began replacing my childhood copies from ebay and reading my way through all the major series' for the umpteenth time in my life but the first time as an adult.

And I'm still here nearly nine years later.

[Rebeccadanielle]

I never gave up Enid Blyton, but I do need to take breaks from her books. I'm currently on a bit of a break and reading other things right now. I do the same with all authors I read a lot of. I was the only kid at my two schools who read Enid Blyton, and my older sister outgrew the books pretty quickly and my younger sister never liked them. It's always the school stories that draw me back to Enid Blyton, and the farm books and of course The Faraway Tree books And with the forum, I saw it a long time ago but was hesitant in joining. I don't post a lot but I do come by for a visit quite often.

[Francis]

I went through a stage of intense love of Enid's books until aged about 13 - but I only owned one book which I kept. Discovering adolescence it all its' forms and having a family kept me away from her but I reconnected when my daughters reached 8 when I bought some Famous Fives to read to them and I was hooked again.

[John Pickup]

I wonder how many of us returned to Enid when our children started reading. Like Francis I reconnected when I bought some Secret Seven paperbacks for my son.

[Rob Houghton]

I was lucky to have a mother who loved Enid Blyton books and had Sunny Stories as a child. She passed on her love of the stories (particularly The Farway Tree which she had remembered from childhood) to my sister and myself, buying many of the paperback and Dean editions. Because my sister was six years older, I had a vast array of Blyton's as I grew up - plus those I bought myself or had as presents. My sister had the whole library of Famous Fives, but for some reason they never interested me - so I grew up having never read any of them except Smugglers Top and Mystery Moor in annual form. During the 1970's most children I knew were pro-Blyton and girls swapped the Famous Five books at school, so it was looked on as quite respectable.

When I was 13 I bought 'The Mystery That Never Was' and this book pretty much single-handedly killed my love of Blyton. I found it incredibly second-rate and presumed this was because I was growing out of Enid, not realizing at the time that it is definitely one of her weakest books. I didn't read another Enid Blyton book (except Smuggler Ben and Cliff Castle which I also found lacking) until I was in my mid 20's.

The reason I got back into Enid Blyton was due to an elderly friend, Colin (some of you may have met him, as he came to four or five EB Days), who remembered reading 'Five On A Treasure Island' when he was about 11 (he was born in 1931 so must have read it as a new book!) and remembered he loved it so much that he read it from cover to cover without stopping. This was even more remarkable because he was a reluctant reader, so obviously Blyton worked her magic on him! Having never read Five On A Treasure Island myself, I bought a paperback copy in a second-hand book stall in the local market, with the intention of reading it. Colin asked if I'd read it him, as he preferred that to reading books himself. I read it, then bought others to read to him. This kick-started my rediscovery of Enid Blyton, along with buying a copy of Enid Blyton's Dossier in Waterstones. I realized there were far more Blyton books published than I'd ever imagined, and so started to collect her books more seriously, eventually creating my vast Blyton collection!

[MJE]

I have never strayed from Enid except for a very brief interlude when I started senior school.
I threw all my books away because in my opinion 'I was too old for them now.' My Mum said,'You'll regret doing that Peter.'
She was right.Within twelve months I had started to recollect my Blyton's all over again.

     I'm the opposite of this, in a sense. Some time in my teens, my mother suggested to me that I might like to give the books away (I forget where) since I had now outgrown them. I was far from sure about this, but too embarrassed to disagree. (Although I might have liked to keep the books, it is probable that the intensity of my interest had died down by then.)
     I started collecting the books again many years later, although unfortunately many of the copies are tatty and without dustjackets, and I don't really think my Blyton collection is all that good, although I do have some kind of copy of everything I had as a boy, and some more besides. I've occasionally made efforts to buy good copies, but they are both rare and expensive, especially if you want dustjackets.
     Even when I started to regain interest, my collecting was held back by the fact that, to begin with, I was too embarrassed to be seen by the seller buying children's books. I seemed to get over that eventually, though.
     The fact that I regained interest is more or less secret, and almost no-one in my real life knows of it, and they all think I outgrew her decades ago. It's not something I'd feel comfortable disclosing, either, as I get the feeling it would not be looked favourably upon by many people I know, although they'd probably hide it and be polite - but you can still tell when someone thinks badly of something.
     I wonder if that unfavourable attitude is an Australian thing, because reading the forum (populated mainly by British people) gives me the impression that nothing unfavourable at all is seen in adults being interested in Enid Blyton.

Regards, Michael.