Why kids SHOULD read Enid Blyton

When I was ten I went to boarding school. Tucked into the side of my overnight case was my favourite book: Claudine at St Clares by Enid Blyton. But by bedtime, the book was hidden at the back of my drawer ready to be surreptitiously returned home at half-term. Within hours of my arrival, I had discovered that Enid Blyton was banned at my new school. I do not remember ever having this explained to me, and at the time I would certainly not have been able to distinguish between the books which were on offer in the school library and the Enid Blyton books I loved. I simply accepted the ban and carried on reading her books at home with an added frisson of guilty pleasure.

The trouble is, of course, that parents and teachers feel they need to quality-control their children’s reading. Enid Blyton does use dull, repetitive language, and the pervading tone is of talking down to the reader. Blyton’s books are peppered with sexual and racial stereotypes considered unacceptable today (although in modern reprints the publishers have done their best to remove these). And that’s before you get to the whole middle-class thing...

But in spite of all this, and even getting on for half a century since her death, there are plenty of kids who still love Enid Blyton. The language we adults see as uninspiring gives many children their first taste of fluent reading. Because they don’t have to think too hard about what the words mean or how the sentences are structured, they may for the first time experience that feeling of running their eyes over the black squiggles on the page and having them transform into a story in their heads. Allowing kids to discover that they have this amazing, magical skill, is, I think, key to turning them into readers. And there’s a wealth of Blyton to read. With some series fiction, children may be left not knowing what to read next when they’ve finished the series. They may have discovered the fluent reading trick, but their focus has been narrowed. But Blyton’s prolific output means that once a child has discovered her books, he or she may read their way through all manner of stories: adventure, fantasy, family, detective.

So, let them read their fill of Blyton. Chances are they will one day turn round and tell you the books are boring. And you can always speed the process up a bit. Do they read and re-read the Malory Towers and St Clare’s books? So provide them with some other school stories. What about What Katy Did at School (Susan Coolidge) or Charlotte Sometimes (Penelope Farmer). Move Famous Five fans onto the Young Bond books by Anthony Horowitz or Robin Stevens fabulous Murder Most Unladylike books. You could introduce Faraway Tree and Wishing Chair fans to E Nesbit.

One word of warning though. Don’t ever, ever read Blyton out loud if there is any way you can possibly avoid it. Aloud, all the banality of the language comes plodding out, and you’ll find no matter what a skilled reader-aloud you are, you just can’t help sounding like a comedian doing an imitation of Enid Blyton.

Oh my, jolly hockey sticks and lashings of ginger beer!

Blyton to relish
The …of Adventure series
Kids go off on adventures in far-flung places. Remember Willard Price’s adventure stories? These are like that with a little less of the shrunken heads and shooting.

Naughty Amelia Jane series
Because everyone wants to believe that their toys get up and mess around when they go out of the room…

Sacred Texts?

Jacqueline Wilson is to publish an updated version of Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did in July (see Bookseller article http://t.co/v97KuTDMoQ), on the back of her success last year with Four Children and It, a contemporary reworking of E Nesbit’s Five Children and It. Why has she done it? Presumably the idea is to bring the stories she loved as a child to modern readers. Either that, or else after writing a hundred books she’s running out of ideas.

I’m saddened by the idea of this. What Katy Did isn’t a hard book to read, and Five Children and It is perfectly simple. Certainly there are some bits of language that might read oddly to a modern child's ears and they might come across mention of ways of doing things or objects or events that are unfamiliar. There’s always the possibility with old books like these that children are going to be exposed to attitudes that aren’t acceptable any more. But why should that be a problem? Surely coming across the unfamiliar in books, struggling to understand it, is how we learn.

It’s not that I think that original texts are sacred and shouldn’t be tampered with. If that were true we’d never have ended up with Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, or Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs or Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones or Clueless. But what these examples do is take something of the original and use it to make a new original, not simply an easy-read version. If an author can't add something of their own, they ought to leave well alone.

I’m not sure whether Jacqueline Wilson's intention is to do the same for these classic children's books as those abridged versions of classics they sometimes give children to read in schools. I hope not, because why would you do that? As if there weren’t plenty of fabulous books out there accessible to readers of all abilities. I can’t judge because Wilson's Katy isn't out yet and I haven’t read her Four Children and It, though I have to admit, I was curious when it came out, but had no excuse to buy it as my daughters have grown out of her. I’d like to think Jacqueline Wilson and her publishers believe that readers will read her versions and be brought around to the originals, on the same principle that people who see a film or TV series they like will then go out and buy the book. Maybe they will. It's possible, I suppose.

In my experience of working with children in primary schools I’ve noticed that a lot of children go through a ‘Jacqueline Wilson phase’. It isn’t always Jacqueline Wilson (when I was a child, it was Enid Blyton) and it isn’t always girls, but few other authors lend themselves quite so much to this phase because few are quite so prolific. During this time, unless forced, they pretty much won’t read anything else by any other author, but they will read and read and read from their author of choice. It’s not a bad thing. It’s a sort of initiation into being a reader, where a child suddenly realises the joy to be had from reading and relishes the passage of story from page to brain. And when they come out of the phase, suddenly the whole world of books is open to them. And when they do, maybe they’ll remember that in amongst all the other stories that JW gave them there was something about a girl called Katy, and look, here on the shelf there’s this old book, What Katy Did, maybe that’ll be good …