Five Go Off To Camp

Enid Blyton's Five Go Off To Camp is a Famous Five mystery for 9 year olds about trains that come out of a tunnel at night with nobody driving them.

What happens

It opens with a kit list. Two tents, four groundsheets, four sleeping-bags, and a long argument about whether Timmy the dog needs one too.

Julian, Dick, George and Anne have been allowed to camp on the high moors by themselves. Sort of. Mr Luffy is camping nearby to keep an eye on them, although he is a schoolmaster who cares about beetles far more than he cares about children, so the four of them suspect they will end up keeping an eye on him.

This is the seventh of their adventures, and you can feel how much they have grown into it. They plan the food, they cook it, they row about who ate all the tomatoes.

Then they wander over a slope and find a deserted railway yard below them. Old lines running out of a black tunnel mouth. Wagons that look like nobody has touched them in a hundred years. The boys give one a shove, it crashes into the buffers, and out of a hut comes a one-legged watchman in a temper.

His name is Wooden-Leg Sam and he tells them about the spook-trains. Trains that come out of that tunnel at night on their own and go back in again. He locks himself in his hut and blows out his candle so they won't know he is there.

Anne is scared stiff. Julian says there is no such thing. Then an old shepherd says he has heard them too, clanking away in the dark, and Julian rather quietly starts hoping he is wrong.

It is a lovely one for a child who likes the planning as much as the peril. Half the book is bread from the farm, hard-boiled eggs and lime juice in the sun. The other half is four children deciding to sit out on a hillside in the dark and see what comes out of a tunnel.

One thing to flag. Sam is not treated kindly. The children decide he is mad, the narration calls him funny in the head, and he throws a lump of cinder that hits Dick on the head. It reads as very much of its time, and if your reader is the sort to ask why the grown-up is being laughed at, you will probably want to be in the room for it.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, they might like to start at the very beginning with Five on a Treasure Island. That one has a wreck, a dungeon and an island George will not stop calling hers.