Uncollected Pip the Pixie Stories in the Cave

[Anita Bensoussane]

Thanks, Courtenay. I don't have a copy of that story but I've read similar tales about fairy folk visiting nursery toys.

[Anita Bensoussane]

An imaginative story but I'm still not used to the Pip tales revolving around toys. The information about owls doesn't really stand out as there is so much else going on.

https://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/bly ... perid=4199

[Courtenay]

That's a cute story, but it does indeed seem to be going off the track of what the Pip stories traditionally were. Maybe Enid felt she was running out of ideas for nature stories and that's why she decided to introduce the toys? And yet she wrote so many stories about toys, while the Pip stories were something different precisely because, although the main character is one of the fairy folk, the tales almost always focus on the natural world and Pip's encounters with it in various ways. Having toys as part of that world just seems, well, artificial!!

Especially with this story, too, the suspension-of-disbelief thing is stretched a bit too far for me. In most of the earlier Pip tales, the things Pip does with objects from nature are things you can easily imagine a small pixie doing — taking glue from chestnut buds, having a suit made from autumn leaves, using a poppy seed head for a sugar shaker, painting black bibs on the male sparrows or dipping the blackbirds' beaks into a crock of gold, and so on. But taking "hoots" and "tvit-tvits" from an owl and putting them into a toy car's horn... sure, it's magic (duh!), but that just somehow makes less sense and seems far less likely...

[Anita Bensoussane]

Yes, Enid Blyton may have felt the need to change tack in order to avoid repetition, but it does alter the whole feel of the Pip universe.

[Anita Bensoussane]

Pip and Jinky go in search of spears for toy soldiers in this week's story:

https://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/bly ... perid=4201

[Courtenay]

Oh dear, it's all getting a bit potentially violent between Jinky and Pip... And while beech tree buds are certainly pointy, I wouldn't have thought they would be as sharp as hedgehog prickles — not that I've ever compared the two — so I suspect Jinky's army would win!

Really though, even apart from the inclusion of the toys, this does seem to show Enid going off the track of the original Pip stories. In this case, we have Jinky cutting prickles off a sleeping hedgehog — who isn't at all happy when Pip tries to do the same while he's awake — and Pip cutting buds off a living tree. I'm sure none of the earlier stories ever featured the pixies deliberately taking something from an animal without permission, or doing any actual damage to trees and plants, AND going unpunished, with the implication that this is a perfectly OK thing to do. In all the stories I know well (mainly from the published collections), Pip and/or Jinky make a point of asking an animal or plant before taking something from it, and whenever they do, it's always something expendable — seed holders or acorn cups or a caterpillar's shed-off skins, for example.

A case that I remembered immediately (and I've just looked it up in the book) is "A Nice Little Pot of Glue", in which the chestnut tree tells Pip to take "only just a little" of the sticky glue from its buds, and that's what he does. Or in "A Nice New Purse", Pip asks the shepherd's purse plant for one of its "purses", and the plant gives him one on the condition that he'll plant the "money-seeds" from inside it. Whereas taking living, growing buds off a beech tree... that's quite un-Enid-like, to feature something like that in a story with no regard for the tree. Is she meaning to encourage young readers to go and pull off beech buds to use as spears for their own toy soldiers?? I hope not... (Cutting prickles off a hedgehog isn't a good idea or a nice thing to do either, but at least it's made clear that the hedgehog objected once he was awake. Still very unusual for Enid to allow Jinky to get away with that, though.)

[Anita Bensoussane]

I too had the impression that Pip and Jinky were normally taught a lesson when they went too far in the earlier stories, e.g. when they tried to prise limpets or mussels off rocks at the beach, or shot at a dragonfly with a bow and arrow. Like you, Courtenay, I prefer the tales in which the pixies show consideration for the creatures around them.

And yes, Jinky's army does seem to have an advantage!

[Anita Bensoussane]

The battle commences and the poor woodlice suffer the most! However, there's no soldier more formidable than Aunt Twinkle!

https://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/bly ... perid=4202

[Anita Bensoussane]

A robin's nest provides what's needed this time:

https://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/bly ... perid=4204

[Anita Bensoussane]

Pip and Jinky have become so involved with the nursery toys that they now call themselves "the Toys' Best Friends". When the toy lion asks for claws, they're able to help him immediately - using a method that features in a number of Enid Blyton stories about claws.

https://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/bly ... perid=4206

[Anita Bensoussane]

An interesting fact about beech buds this time:

https://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/bly ... perid=4207

[Anita Bensoussane]

Pip and Jinky make good use of the "wool" from poplar catkins. A park where I used to live had lots of poplar trees and there was so much white fluff on the ground when the seeds were being shed that it looked like snow in places (even if Enid describes it as "grey"!)

https://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/bly ... perid=4208

[Courtenay]

Well, at least this time Pip and Jinky are taking something that doesn't involve damaging a living plant. I was again perturbed with last week's story that had them pulling young leaves off the beech trees to make fans!! As I know I said before, apart from the toys still seeming to be a strange and unnatural addition to the Pip "universe", I don't like how several of these later stories have Pip and Jinky doing things that would actually cause harm to plants or even animals. Would Enid really have wanted her young readers to go ripping newly-sprouted leaves off trees to make "fans" for their own tiny dolls? That's what the previous story is essentially encouraging...

[Anita Bensoussane]

Groundsel comes to the rescue this week - a plant I used to pick with my friends when I was little, for their rabbit. Even though I preferred the tales which weren't linked to the toys, I'm still impressed that Enid Blyton covers so many aspects of nature in her Pip stories.

https://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/bly ... perid=4210

[Courtenay]

Now that's doing my head in a bit... a golliwog, i.e. a stuffed toy, growing a beard?? Very creative idea for using the groundsel "brushes" (I had to look up what they look like, as that's one British plant I don't know yet), but I reckon Enid really missed a trick in this case, obviously having committed herself firmly to writing all her Pip stories about toys. It would have made far more sense for a brownie or gnome or similar male "fairy folk" character to want to shave his beard off and to ask Pip for help!!

I wonder why Enid decided to introduce toys to the Pip stories in the first place? Did she genuinely start running out of ideas and decide herself that the series needed a "reboot" with a slightly different theme? Or did her publishers decide that children would be more interested in the stories if they included toys as characters? It's all a bit of a mystery...