Famous Five Fluffs

[Anita Bensoussane]

Brodie obviously feels very involved with the world of Kirrin - good for him!

[Hannah]

There are other books where Timmy is hauled up by a rope (Secret Trail is an example) but something like that isn't mentioned in Treasure Island.

(my post is about two-thirds down page one)...

Just a little hint for further postings, Bertie: You can link directly to a posting by using the little symbol left of "by <username>". It contains the url to the posting so the page will "jump" to the linked post instead of opening on top.

[Bertie]

Thanks for that hint, Hannah. I didn't know that and I'll try it out the next time I need it.

[Fiona1986]

Brodie obviously feels very involved with the world of Kirrin - good for him!

I'm loving it. He likes to play-act as Julian, and then assigns roles to whoever's with him. This week Gran had to be Anne and Grandad was Dick. Last week I was George and Daddy was Dick. He just needs more people to round out the Five

[Hannah]

@ Bertie: I've just noticed that the symbol is at a different place on the phone - left to the date and time.

[GloomyGraham]

In almost every Blyton story involving a pet dog, I used to read the chapters and then think 'how the heck did TImmy (etc) get up or down that tree, well, tunnel, etc' lol

[Morgan Jones]

I believe I’ve mentioned this before a long time ago, but in the book Five Get Into a Fix the sex of Aily’s pet lamb Fany changes as the book progresses.

At first the lamb is referred to as “he”, then becomes “it” for a while, and by the end of the novel it is referred to as “she”! I’m no expert when it comes to Welsh names, but, as I understand it, the name is pronounced “Fay-nee” rather than “Fanny” - though I’ve no idea if it tends to be a male or female forename.

[Courtenay]

Enid does seem to have had trouble at times with remembering the sex (or gender??) of animals in her stories. Mr Pink-Whistle's cat, Sooty, is a "he" in some stories and a "she" in others. Lucky, Jimmy's dog in the Galliano's Circus trilogy, is definitely a "she" most of the time, but two or three times in Hurrah for the Circus!, Lucky gets referred to as a "he" — I think in each case it's when another character, rather than Enid-as-narrator, is speaking about Lucky. Then at one point in the same book (and this is in the narrator's words), Lotta's new horse Black Beauty, who has been consistently male since his introduction, suddenly becomes "so startled that she stood up on her hind legs", just in that one sentence!

The most bizarre example, though, came up a few years ago when Anita was posting a link each week to Enid's letters to children in The Teacher's World magazine, and I think this was from some time in the early 1930s. Enid referred regularly to her two dogs at the time, Bobs and Sandy, both of whom were "he". Then all of a sudden, one week Enid announced to her readers that Sandy had just had puppies — and thereafter Sandy was referred to as "she", for several months until the puppies were grown up and all sold, at which point Sandy became "he" again!!

I know Enid was known for not always being strictly factual in her accounts of her home life for young readers (her older dog, Bobs, continued "writing" his own letters in Enid's column for several years after the real Bobs had died, for example), but Sandy's sex change and subsequent reversion have had me baffled ever since I read that series of letters...

(Sorry this has gone off the specific topic of Famous Five Fluffs!)

[timv]

I expect that Enid was always more interested in the storyline and working out the plots than in getting the logic of what happens right - and she wrote at speed too. But there are one or two episodes in the FF series that did make me wonder when I first read the books 'how come she didn't notice this?' , though most only appeared when I read them again later at more leisure. One of the ones that I noticed was relating to Timmy, again - he is supposed to have a superb sense of hearing and smell and to be able to warn the children of lurking baddies, so how come they were caught by surprise down the wreckers' tunnel in Five Go Down To The Sea? They walk down the tunnel from the tower to the cave where the smugglers are storing their goods, and are inspecting the place when the latter creep up and lock them in. Yan eventually finds them. But how does Timmy not hear or smell the crooks creeping down the tunnel up to the cave door?

This is more like the scenario in numerous episodes of Scooby-Doo, where our heroes and the incompetent dog keep on getting locked up by the crooks and never think to post a 'guard' on the door every time they go into a secret room or cave - or to take out any keys that are in the door when they arrive! I suppose you can work out a logical explanation, eg the strong smell of seaweed in the tunnel confusing Timmy....

If the plot aim was to get them trapped for hours and so available in the cove after dark to see the smugglers at work, how about having them trapped in a cave on the beach by an unexpected high tide - as Jack is caught by the tide and has to wait for ages as he is escaping from his first search of the Big House on the cliff to contact Prince Paul in Spiggy Holes?

[Anita Bensoussane]

Regarding animals which change sex, a dog called Leppi in Three Boys and a Circus is also referred to as "he" in some passages and "she" in others.

[Sooty]

How about there being no electricity at Tremannon Farm, yet Mr Penruthlan listens to the radio…

[Kate Mary]

Enid is not guilty with this one. In the 1940s the wireless would have used an accumulator which would have been recharged at the local cycle shop, garage or hardware shop. You always had two accumulators so you could use one in the radio while the other was being recharged.

[Sooty]

Well I’ll be — today I learned.

Another moment from the same book that confuses me is Dick telling George that Timmy can’t hear them down the passage — despite them being able to hear him.

[Boatbuilder]

How about there being no electricity at Tremannon Farm, yet Mr Penruthlan listens to the radio…

There were battery-operated radios around from the 1930s made by Ever Ready.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q ... i=89978449

[Anita Bensoussane]

Good to see you posting, Sooty!