The Adventurous Four Series

[Lucky Star]

It is probably pretty difficult to envision the Adventurous Four in any plot that doesn't involve going off in a boat. With that in mind Enid probably couldn't think of any new ideas for them. I have always thought that these kids could have slotted quite easily into the Sea of Adventure plot but I'm still glad she reserved that idea for the Jack, Dinah and Co instead.

[Moonraker]

I have always thought that these kids could have slotted quite easily into the Sea of Adventure plot...

Probably why I always think the scene with the tents blowing away is in The sea of Adventure!

[Chrissie777]

I have just reread most of the Adventurous Four series and was trying to work out the duration of the stories as it struck me that they are much longer than other adventurous stories like the famous five etc. But I kept losing track of the days so I am so glad that Chrissie had already worked that out. Thank you so much.

Sorry for not reacting sooner, but I wasn't in this thread in weeks.
You're very welcome. I'm glad it helped.

[Chrissie777]

The WWII one.
I love the first one. It's different, surviving on the island is great, and I hero-worshipped Andy (along with the twins) when I first read it. The second I found a bit disappointing, as it was too much a copy of the first. Stuck on an island, Tom leaves something behind which mucks it up etc. I'd have liked more, but with more variation. Surely they could have done other things with boats, maybe found a smuggler along the coast or something.

I like both of them equally.

Wasn't it a camera that Tom left behind?

[Chrissie777]

This was most helpful - many thanks Chrissie!

Pete, you're very welcome!

[Debbie]

The WWII one.
I love the first one. It's different, surviving on the island is great, and I hero-worshipped Andy (along with the twins) when I first read it. The second I found a bit disappointing, as it was too much a copy of the first. Stuck on an island, Tom leaves something behind which mucks it up etc. I'd have liked more, but with more variation. Surely they could have done other things with boats, maybe found a smuggler along the coast or something.

I like both of them equally.

Wasn't it a camera that Tom left behind?

Yes, I think it was-both times!

[timv]

I know that the Adventurous Four books don't often get much credit or coverage, which may be due to their geographical and practical restrictions as to location - as Andy had to help support his villager family by regular fishing he couldn't really be expected to accept any invitations to join the other three for holidays elsewhere even if their parents paid for this. (Similar potential problems for Arthur Ransome's three working-class sons of boatbuilders, Joe, Bill, and Pete who appear in the later, East Anglian AR books with Dick and Dorothea and Tom Dudgeon? ) But it was a missed chance to show critics that Enid could write about working class teenagers as major fixtures in her plots, on equal terms with the usual middle-class 'leads', though probably in the late 1940s and early 1950s this line of criticism was less pronounced and she had other priorities anyway. (Also, she did not know Scotland as well as the SW of England as a setting.) Or Enid could get Jill and Mary sent off to a Highlands boarding school and have a half-term adventure for them with Tom joining them on a photography competition 'prize winning photo ' location trip and Andy visiting a local uncle and aunt?

But I was a bit disappointed after being engrossed in and really enjoying the second Adventurous Four book, aged eight , to find that there were no more - and Enid could have stretched the probabilities of Andy's availability for a plot in a different setting by, foe example, having his parents send him off to visit relatives at a Highland moors farm/ estate village or a different island while someone else filled in running his boat. I would have loved to see a 'conservationist' Blyton plot for the AF, extending their fondness for watching birds to some clash with poachers or egg-stealers that would be realistic enough for the time. An Enid version of Arthur Ransome's basic plot of 'Great Northern?' (pub. just after the Second World War so contemporary with the AF), with the four battling some money-making crook out to steal rare birds' eggs or even trap birds for wealthy collectors? Or a Five Have A Wonderful Time style spy thriller, with Russian spies or a defector who the four stumble upon ? (This kept on cropping up in 1950s children's magazine serials and I seem to remember was used a couple of times in the Pullein Thompsons' pony books.)

[TheAngryPixie]

I read these for the first time recently.

The first one, I thought was brilliant. One of Enid's strongest books. Loved the tie-in with WWII, and there was a real sense of danger there. It's one of the few Blyton books I think which actually tie-in with the war. It was different, and therefore quite exciting. Felt more grown up than her other books.

The second one, I didn't think was anywhere near as good. It was basically standard Blyton fare with secret passages through the cliff--smugglers, though admittedly more hardcore smugglers as they were smuggling weapons, getting locked in a cave/room etc. Could easily have switched the Adventurous Four with the Famous Five and it would have been the same.

It had nothing stand-out about it, the way the first one did

[Lucky Star]

The first book is indeed excellent. It remains one of my favourites. The wartime atmosphere and the power of the writing make it a much overlooked classic in my opinion. I wonder if any other children's books of the time actively engaged with the enemy forces in anything like the way that The Adventurous Four did? Enid makes sure to define the German sailors as enemy forces but also shows the human side as they do ensure that the children are safe, sheltered and fed although not allowing them to leave.

The second book I found to be almost as exciting. Yes it's more "standard" Blyton but it had a terrific and suspensful plot with several twists and turns. I remember being gripped when I first read it and had the same feeling on subsequent readings.

[Anita Bensoussane]

As a child I had the Adventurous Four books in the Dean & Son editions. Dean & Son also published the stories about Amelia Jane, Mr. Pink-Whistle, Mister Meddle and Mr. Twiddle - not to mention titles like The Adventures of Pip and The Enid Blyton Book of Brownies. Therefore I came to the Adventurous Four books when I was about six, and they were the first full-length adventures I read. At that age I was unaware of the dates of the Second World War and knew almost nothing about the Nazis, so when I read The Adventurous Four I assumed that the war was a made-up one and "the sign of the crooked cross" was something that had been invented for the story. For that reason, The Adventurous Four Again! seemed no less real or exciting - though I noticed that certain elements of the first book were repeated. I loved - and still love - the ingenious use of the record in The Adventurous Four but The Adventurous Four Again! has some novel ingredients too, e.g. the trail of shells, and the fact that the criminals drug the girls.

It's ages since I read either of the Adventurous Four books, or the longish short story in Enid Blyton's Omnibus! I must reread them when time allows.

[John Pickup]

I wonder if any other children's books of the time actively engaged with the enemy forces in anything like the way that The Adventurous Four did?

One that comes to mind is the first Lone Pine book by Malcolm Saville, Mystery at Witchend. The Lone Piners pit their wits against a network of German spies who sabotage the reservoir at Hatchholt. This book was written and published during WW2.

[Debbie]

Also there's "The Children of Primrose Lane" by Noel Streatfield, where the children find a spy and stop him from getting back with information.
Then "The Chalet School in Exile" is one of Elinor Brent Dyer's best, where the children confront the Nazis to try and save a Jewish family and then have to flee Austria.
You might also count "The Machine Gunners" only their German Airman they look on as a friend.

[Anita Bensoussane]

Great suggestions, John (Pickup) and Debbie.

Mumfie is only a toy elephant, but in Mumfie Marches On (Katharine Tozer, 1942) he and his friends join the Home Guard. When Hitler invades Britain, they manage to catch him with the aid of a cream-puff, a mouse-trap and a length of rope! Like Bets of the Find-Outers, who keeps a photo of Churchill on her mantelpiece, Mumfie has a picture of Winston Churchill hanging above his bed and gazes at it "with intense admiration." Eventually, the elephant gets to meet Churchill and, thrilled to bits, takes his cigar stub home as a souvenir. Mumfie Marches On is heavily satirical for a children's book, and makes for a most surprising read.

There's also We Couldn't Leave Dinah (Mary Treadgold, 1941), in which the Germans invade a fictional Channel Island, Clerinel. During the evacuation of the island, Mick and Caroline, who are in their early teens, are left behind (Dinah is Caroline's pony). They make their home in a cave as their house has been seized by a German general. Hearing that the Nazis are preparing to invade the British mainland, Mick adopts a false identity to try to find out more. Although the bare bones of the plot sound promising, I found it an oddly dull book, lacking in pace and excitement.

[timv]

In the Chalet School series, there's also 'The Chalet School Goes To It', the successor to The CS in Exile - where author Elinor Brent Dyer seems to have been caught out by the Second World War leading to the invasion of the Channel Islands as she had just relocated the CS to there! She hastily relocated it again , this time by evacuating it to a remote area of Herefordshire W of Hereford - in fact, based on real places (which I have researched while living not far away) around Peterchurch in the 'Golden Valley' where she had been a governess a few years before in the late 1930s. (She was running a school in Hereford at the time, as one of the few major school story authors actually to be a teacher/ Head.) The lead heroine, Joey Maynard nee Bettany, and her family leave Guernsey by yacht just before the invasion and are 'buzzed' by a German bomber with shots being fired - rare 'action' for characters in a school book written during the War. The girls and teachers (some of international origin as refugees) of the school, minus a few refugee anti-Nazi German teachers who are temporarily deported to internment on the Isle of Man in 1940s as happened in real life, then 'Dig For Victory' in the school allotments, solve mystery lights at night that the Home Guard think are Nazi spies (in fact it's local black marketeers smuggling goods), and receive a goodwill message from former German pupils left behind in Europe - delivered in a cannister dropped by a passing Luftwaffe plane en route to a bombing raid, piloted by the brother of one of the girls. The school personnel are sheltering in the cellars as they hear the plane overhead, and do not know at first if they will be bombed - bringing the War home to readers. This was all mingled with skilful and accurate pictures of wartime rural life in the countryside plus the usual CS 'high jinks' of riotous Middles breaking minor rules - St Trinians meets grim wartime reality.

This - showing that not all Germans were keen Nazis in a book written soon after the Blitz - the school's 'Peace League' which stresses ditto, and the way EBD stressed constantly that the words Nazi and German were not identical in her wartime books shows that she approached the war in an unusually brave and risk-taking way, not following the official 'line' - and didn't get censored either. Her German and Austrian characters are present in the wartime books if they have fled to the UK, and if not are still referred to and reappear in post-1945 books . In her next wartime book 'Lavender Laughs at the CS' the independent-minded new girl Lavender Leigh, a bright but mildly spoilt type who has until 1939 been touring Europe with her travel writer aunt and is indignant at the bombing and conquests of countries she knows, is shown being indignant at the 'Peace League' but being shut up (literally, with a classmate putting a hand over her mouth as she tries to start an argument about it in assembly) and told firmly that the school has plenty of 'good' German ex-pupils and adult friends who were left behind as they fled and are stranded in Europe and need to feel they have not been abandoned.

EBD was clearly of this opinion, and did not flinch from later referencing some ex-pupils from the school's 1930s years in Austria as having been Catholic pacifists who were killed in Nazi camps. The EBD of the 1930s and 1940s was a far more unusual character and more of a 'fighter for justice' than her later reputation for bland conventional stories about well-off girls suggests, with her wartime books at the centre of this; and now it is mostly forgotten that she had written a number of family and school stories about the Channel Islands pre-1940 (hence her moving the school there in 1938/9), which were 'multi-cultural' and full of affection for local CI French village life and customs if a bit 'well-off middle class' in their main characters and so not appealing to 'social justice egalitarian' publishers for republication in the 1960s and 1970s. (As with Enid's family books, we can see better-written and non-series books with strong characters sidelined, to the detriment of the author's reputation.) Exile's original cover was withdrawn by the publishers after parents objected to it showing a Gestapo officer menacing two of her leading characters - gritty realism by 1940 standards.

[Anita Bensoussane]

Interesting, Tim. I've read two Chalet School books but they weren't wartime ones.

Gwendoline Courtney's "Denehurst" books are school stories set during wartime - The Denehurst Secret Service (1940) and Well Done, Denehurst! (1941). The girls investigate suspicious goings-on to do with suspected traitors and spies, but I can't recall what level of engagement they have with the enemy - probably nowhere near as much as the children in Enid Blyton's The Adventurous Four. Like Elinor Brent-Dyer, Gwendoline Courtney makes a clear distinction between the Nazis and the ordinary German people. In The Denehurst Secret Service some pupils speculate that one of their schoolfellows may be German, but a girl named Elaine remarks that it wouldn't matter if she was - "we're only fighting the Nazis, not the Germans."