Bless you, Enid Blyton!

     

 

       I’m overjoyed to be given a Kindle for my birthday. I’ve wanted one for ages so I’m delighted that all my dropped hints landed in the right place. It won’t replace my books, it’s a modern addition. Nothing can take the place of reading. Well, okay, writing can, but good writing is built on a foundation of lots of reading.

       When I was seven, my family moved house and in the new place was a box of old children’s books ‘for the little girl’. What treasure that box held for me! There was a book about ballet, a girl’s annual that introduced me to ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, some junior encyclopaedias and a stack of hard-back books by someone called Enid Blyton.  Looking at the beginning of a ‘Secret Seven’ book, I discovered that not only could I read and understand it, I loved it. The story was about children playing and having fun making up their own games. Children like me and the friends I had in my new school.  It was tons better than ‘Janet and John’ or ‘The Green Reader’. Throughout my childhood I read and re-read Enid Blyton. I would reach the end of ‘The Rilloby Fair Mystery’ and go right back to Chapter One and start again because I loved the characters so much. I couldn’t get enough of The Famous Five books and all ‘The Mystery of…’ stories. When I read the school stories of Malory Towers or St Clare’s, I longed to be at boarding school with those girls.

       All this reading did something else. It gave me the desire to create characters and write my own stories. Bless you, Enid Blyton!  I’ve kept those old books, but I’m going to enjoy reading you on my Kindle.