Five Go Off In A Caravan

Five Go Off In A Caravan is Enid Blyton at her most holiday-ish, an adventure for 9 year olds that starts with four children lying in the sun with absolutely nothing to do.

What happens

Julian, Dick, Anne and George are stuck at home for the summer. Nobody wants a walking tour. Nobody is old enough to drive. Then a circus comes down the road behind an elephant, and George has her idea.

Two caravans, one red and one green. Two horses. No grown-ups. Julian is put in charge, and Timmy the dog is put in charge as well, depending on which of them you ask.

Before they set off they meet Nobby, who turns cart-wheels without seeming to try and owns two performing terriers called Barker and Growler. They also meet his Uncle Dan, the chief clown, in dirty flannel trousers and a dirty red shirt, scowling round an old pipe. Anne thinks it is odd that a man like that gets paid to be funny. She is not wrong.

Then it is days of plodding along lanes, frying bacon outside, and finally the whole blue sweep of Merran Lake with the circus camp smoking away a mile round the shore.

Reading it is pure wish fulfilment. Your child is not being looked after. Your child is doing the looking after. There is a stove to light, eggs to crack, a horse who tries to walk the caravan into the water, and a chimpanzee called Pongo who shakes hands with Timmy and then goes round the back to shake hands with his tail.

It also drops you well into the series. Kirrin Island and Uncle Quentin's experiments come up as things everybody already knows about. They will manage, but they will be joining mid-flow.

One thing to flag. This is an old book and it reads like one. Anne asks whether the vans will be "gypsy caravans", and the word sits there unremarked, the way it did in children's books then. Your reader may well ask about it, so it is better to be ready for that conversation than to meet it cold. Everything else here is gentle, and the only real threat in these opening chapters is a grumpy man who looks like he would box your ears.

What to read next

If the caravans and the cooking are the bit they love, go back to Five on a Treasure Island, where the four of them meet for the very first time and George would honestly rather be a boy with a dog than anybody's cousin.