Readathon 20/04/20 - Mystery of the Strange Messages

[Splodj]

I think "Don't you mean the Hollies?" would have been better than using Poplars as a juxtaposition to Ivies, and a nice link back to the earlier book.

[pete9012S]

There's something that I have to admit to, with great shame! I stood up in my conservatory this afternoon, and starting off with the first line of a 'pome' (as per Fatty's suggestion in the book), I then tried to let my 'tongue go loose' and finish off the poem with words off the top of my head. I started off with:

"The birds flew from the pore old tree",

I then followed up off the top of my head with "And now it's sad and bare"

And then, I got no further inspiration for any other following lines!
Try it, are you a Fatty or an Ern? Or does anyone know how my 'pome' actually finishes?

I have no poetry talent Perce, but I did as you advised and let my tongue go loose - here is my pathetic offering!

The birds flew from the pore old tree,
And now it's sad and bare,
A solitary cloud looked down from the sky,
Too lost and alone to care,
Strolled to The Bourne to improve my luck,
But could only spy a sad old duck,
So it’s back to The Weeping Willow beneath the hollow sky,
Where my own tears rolled like a river underneath that clear blue sky,
And just when I thought all my luck had run out,
A rotund old friend gave a stentorian shout,
‘Hey Ern, please don’t sit there pulling your pud,
Come with us to the dairy, we’ve got loot, it will be good!’
So now I’m with my all friends you see,
Eating cakes galore with hungry glee,
I eat and eat till I can eat no more,
Then gather every crumb from the floor,
I head back to the pore old tree, it’s still a shocking wreck,
And throw the crumbs onto the grass for all the birds to peck,
They eat and eat so happily and gaze with thanks at me,
Then I swear I hear a contented sigh come from my pore old tree!

[Perce]

Fabulous, Pete! So that’s how my ‘pome’ would have ended!

It definitely gives me an insight into how Ern felt when Fatty finished his poem! It’s great to see that the pore old tree was content at the end.

[Splodj]

The birds flew from the pore old tree
And now it's sad and bare
So I climbed it and went 'Tweet Tweet Tweet'
But the birds they did not care

I then thought I would bring them back
By shouting out my pomes
The birds they did indeed return
To stuff my mouth with worms

[Anita Bensoussane]

Brilliant "pomes"! I love your lines about a "rotund old friend" giving a "stentorian shout" and about "loot" at the dairy, Pete - and your second verse really makes me chuckle, Splodj!

Here's my effort:

The birds flew from the pore old tree
And now it's sad and bare.
Its leaves are limp, its branches droop,
But no one seems to care.

"My heart's as hollow as my trunk,"
It moans, in husky whisper.
"My sap once flowed and blossoms growed
But now I'm fragile; crisper.

The birds seek splendid, thriving trees
In which to build a nest.
A shell like me is shunned and scorned -
An uninvited guest."

But who's this ambling up the track,
A-sniffing eagerly
And padding through a hole into
The ancient hollow tree?

A great black bear who needs a home,
A place to snooze and rest.
His warmth revives the ailing tree
Which says, "Once more I'm blessed!"

[Daisy]

Those are all so good! I tried, but although I didn't get stuck with "Appeldy appeldy", I certainly didn't manage to proceed any further!

[Perce]

Anita, your 'pome' is so Blytonesque! Daisy, that was a very witty reply, and reminds us that we all need to be like Fatty, and stand up, with hands behind our back, feet apart, and look upwards and let our tongues go loose:

The birds flew from the pore old tree
And now it's sad and bare.
They flew over to The Ivies
To watch the lively party there.

'goon' was parading in his trunks
Saying, "I'm going to arrest you all"
But my search warrant says "The Ivies"
And this is Fairlin Hall!

Twit the Baker brought some cakes
And bread and milk and leeks.
But then he went and disappeared
And so did some antiques!

Enid and Kenneth finished playing tennis
And at the party let down their hair.
They were almost like the pore old tree,
Except they were happy and bare!

Mr Canley got out his bed
And joined in, with no regrets.
Because he now had a few more quid
From selling more state secrets!

Larry shouted, "I say, stop this!"
I'm a fine upstanding fella.
But Tupping wrapped him in a blanket
And threw him down the coal-cellar!

Fatty sneaked around the house
But couldn't find poor Buster.
For Mrs Hicks had kidnapped him
To replace Goon's worn out duster!

A rag-and-bone man looking for junk
Said, "This party's full of wrong-un's".
But it didn't stop his leaving a shilling
And taking all the Smith's belongings!

But Jenks and his men raided the party
The lockdown had been breached a-plenty.
For it turned out that the wild party
Was really the Enid Blyton Day 2020!

Lots more people from Peterswood were there
But from their antics I shall refrain
For when the party's over
The ivy will remain.

[Courtenay]

Brilliant, Perce!!!

[Daisy]

What a great 'pome ' Perce... I really enjoyed that.

[Anita Bensoussane]

A clever "pome", Perce! Oh dear, pore old Buster!

[db105]

Did anyone find it strange that in an old house that no one wanted to buy they paid the salary of the caretakers for 15 years? I mean, isn't that ruinous? Wouldn't it make more sense to spend that money in a complete renovation?

[Anita Bensoussane]

The Fatty / Ern relationship is very unequal. Right from the beginning of his involvement in the series Ern is obviously portrayed as the lower class oik who has been very fortunate indeed to have managed to get a toe in the door of the Find-Outers' world and who knows it. He is forever trying toi impress - and usually getting sternly ticked off for it. On one occasion he has dinner in Fatty's house but whereas the others are served in the dining room Ern has to eat in the kitchen!

Ern's constant exclamations of "Coo!" and "Loveaduck!" and his pronunciation of "poem" as "pome" also suggest that he's from a working-class family, as does the fact that he's nervous about using the telephone: "He wasn't very sure about it, because he had rarely used the telephone - but Mrs. Trotteville, amused by Ern's serious face, got the numbers for him, and he delivered his message faithfully, saying every word so distinctly that it sounded as if he were reciting!"

What really matters in the world of Enid Blyton is character, not social class, and Ern is made of fine stuff. Even though the Find-Outers sometimes poke fun at Ern and patronise him, they do genuinely enjoy his company and it's lovely that the final paragraph of the book is devoted to him:

"Good old Ern," said Fatty, and clapped him on the shoulder. And the others all said the same, making the boy blush as red as a beetroot. "Good old Ern."

I only have the kindle version and that mistake with Pip being simultaneously on guard and laughing at Bets for thinking the mouse trap is the diamonds has been corrected. In the kindle version it is Larry who laughs at the mouse trap incident and then shortly afterwords Pip is called in from his guard position.

It's good to know that the mistake has been corrected for the Kindle edition (maybe it was even corrected earlier - I've no idea). The error is still there in my 1979 Dragon/Granada printing.

Talking of mistakes, there's another one in Chapter 6 when Bets spots the name "Barton House" on a gate but Fatty writes it down in his notebook as "Barton Grange" and it's referred to as "Barton Grange" from then on.

Then of course there's the famous error concerning Mrs. Trotteville, who says she has lived in Peterswood for nineteen years when actually the Trottevilles didn't move to Peterswood until after The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage.

Talking of Mrs. Trotteville, earlier on in the series we had the impression that she and her husband didn't spend much time with their son and largely left him to his own devices. However, in this book she and Fatty seem pretty close. After quizzing his mother about ivy-covered houses over dinner, Fatty asks her to remind him of the story of a man who once knocked a dish of fish out of the waiter's hand at a dinner-party. That leads to her relating "a few more amusing stories, to which Fatty listened with enjoyment."

Another evening, when Fatty is examining the glued-on newspaper words, his mother says, "Would you like me to stay and help you sort out this queer puzzle? I like puzzles, as you know."

When his mother agrees to help Mrs. Smith, Fatty kisses her (his mother - not Mrs. Smith!) and says, "I knew you'd think of something, Mother. You always do. I'm glad I own a mother like you!"

He also helps his mother gather things for her jumble sale and buys her a bunch of red roses when he has inadvertently caused trouble. He tells the other Find-Outers that he feels bad about upsetting her as "she's such a dear." It's nice to see such a loving, congenial mother-son relationship.

[timv]

As the school leaving age in the UK was only raised from, I think, 11 or 12 to 14 in the 1944 Act, a lot of working-class people short of money insisted on their children leaving school early and getting jobs to supplement the family income until then. Hence all the errand-boys, telegraph boys (delivering telegrams from the Post Office to people's homes), garden boys (like Luke in the Disappearing Cat story), maidservants etc in their teens in 1920s-1930s books and plays. Enid was probably still thinking in these terms when she wrote about Ern, and though it is not clear exactly how old he is his largeish size in the early Find Outer books would indicate that he was then seen as not much younger than Fatty or Larry. Fatty's voice breaks in one of the books, so he is then seen as around 14 or 15. Even if Ern was around 14 he would have been able to leave school and get a job by this point, and might well have gone to a 'slack' state school whose standards were not as high as the Find Outers' schools (which were clearly all private and so would have had better-trained teachers). I have come across other instances of writers highlighting the problems that working class children suffered pre-1945 in learning and getting better jobs - or interacting with private school children - if their parents had pulled them out of school early - though these usually involve a generous middle-class character helping their affected friends with private tuition. The problem with perceptions of Enid may lie with her usually just employing the social difference for comedy, hence the wrath of modern critics.

So Ern's writing and general knowledge at the age of around 14 or 15 could well have been noticeably different to that of children who were still in education, quite apart from the fact that his erratic spelling seems to indicate a probable case of what would now be called dyslexia. But he does have a lot of imagination and determination in things he is interested in, eg poetry, and in the later books Enid expands on this - as said, she seems more interested in him than in the by now rather bland Larry who does not contribute much. The different levels and length of education for wealthier and poorer children pre-1945 and the latter's gaps in knowledge were a fact of social life, and I think that many of Enid's critics writing in modern times - and critics of other writers who present poorly educated' and semi-comic working class children/ teenagers - have tended to forget this.

Other perceptive but themselves resolutely middle-class and 'genteel' authors of the 1940s, eg girls' school / family story author Elsie J 'Oxenham' (Dunkerley), have also come in for a lot of 'stick' for this portrayal of working-class characters making a lot of mistakes and not talking 'proper' as snobbery when it was at least partly just reality. (Again, they fall into the trap of making it comic - working class characters in Ransome, eg his boatbuilders' sons in Coot Club written in the 1930s, are on a different educational level to AR's brainy future writer Dorothea but AR shows them as equals despite their misunderstanding each other.) There is certainly a hint of snobbery in some of Fatty's remarks about Ern in the earlier books, though in these he is a more ambivalent character, and his hero-worship of Fatty reads a bit uncomfortably given their different social status.

As to Mr Goon throwing the Smiths out - I suppose that they had not legally changed their names by deed poll, just assumed a new name to throw people off their scent, and so technically they had committed fraud by signing their tenancy agreement for The Ivies/Fairlin Hall and registering with the authorities in Peterswood under false names. So Goon could say their tenancy agreement was illegal and they were trespassing - though it is typical of him that he did not bother to inform their landlord and the relevant solicitors first! Telling them to clear out at once shows up his nasty streak, as Enid shows his parsimony in the way he doesn't provide enough new cleaning stuff for his housekeeper. Probably he underpaid her too, so she was keen to earn some extra cash from the Burmese visitors and play tricks on him to pay him back.

[Splodj]

Richmal Crompton's William doesn't 'talk proper' either and when I started reading the stories I assumed that he was working class. It was something of a disappointment to discover he was middle class and went to grammar school.

[Courtenay]

I'm really enjoying everyone's comments and observations here, just as I really enjoyed the book!

I also cringed a bit at the patronising attitude towards Ern in some places, but it definitely is a class thing and as Tim and others have observed, it is based on the reality of the times. If I were adapting the FFO stories for a TV series (set in the correct period and being as faithful to the original books as possible!), I would tone the condescending language down somewhat, but still make it clear that Ern is of a lower social class than the Hiltons, Daykins and Trottevilles and he does genuinely feel awed that they accept him and value him. I'd also like to play up the idea that Ern would love to be a policeman himself one day — a better one than his awful uncle! — and that's one of the main reasons for his hero-worship of Fatty, because Fatty is already determinedly working towards becoming a professional detective and Ern would love to start out as his assistant. Bit like Morse and Lewis, as I know others here have joked!

I also thought the ending was a little bit rushed, but still satisfying — I think we can be sure Mrs Hicks was also punished for her collaboration with the crooks, although she played only a minor role overall. It's not clear what her motives were — it would have been interesting if Enid could have given us some more insight into her as a character — but I like Tim's suggestion that Goon was underpaying her and she was happy to earn some money for playing tricks on him, which makes sense.

Very interesting too to see that note of moral ambivalence about Mr Smith / Canley — I was quite surprised, as Enid's usual attitude towards traitors is pretty much that they should hang. Also, with this book being published only 12 years after the end of WW2 and with the Cold War now well underway, I can imagine even young readers could easily understand that selling secrets of war planes to the enemy was a very, very, very serious matter. But he's portrayed as having done it only because he was desperate for money to pay for his wife's medical treatment, and he's had his time in prison and suffered severely for his wrongdoing. I assume the actual crime was committed during (or maybe even before) WW2, when there was no NHS yet! So there's another of Enid's references to the war, however indirect — it's not nearly as absent from her works as some critics assume.

I was also surprised at Mrs Trotteville being shown as having such a warm relationship with her son — in the earlier books we're more or less given the impression that Fatty's parents pretty much allow him to do anything he likes and they don't seem particularly close to him emotionally — and yes, I also picked up the continuity error where Mrs Trotteville has now lived in Peterswood for many years! But again, in a TV adaptation (how I wish they'd do one!) I can imagine that part could be easily left out or given a reasonable explanation. Maybe she had lived in Peterswood as a child and young woman, up until she got married, and had maintained contact with family and friends there until she and her husband decided to move back there permanently when Fatty (Frederick, sorry) was just entering his teens.

Overall, a really enjoyable, intriguing, exciting, downright fun instalment in the FFO series! I'm impressed, as are others, that this was actually the second-last one that Enid wrote, not long before there was a noticeable and increasing decline in her mental clarity and her writing ability. I don't dislike the final book, Banshee Towers — I read it as a child without knowing it was the last one in the series and written when Enid was in the early stages of dementia, and while it's quite a weak book plot-wise and mystery-wise, it has a lot of fun and memorable moments. I certainly don't find it much worse than some of the other weak-ish books in the series, like Secret Room and Hidden House, where the mystery itself isn't very exciting or complex but it's still a decent read. I probably should re-read Banshee Towers now, directly after Strange Messages, to see just how noticeable the drop in quality is between the two. But I still reckon the Find-Outers series is one of Enid's strongest and best all the way through!