Five Have A Wonderful Time

Enid Blyton's Five Have A Wonderful Time is the eleventh Famous Five book, a mystery for 9 year olds that opens with George stuck at home in a sulk.

What happens

Julian, Dick and Anne are already away. A school friend has lent them two funny old caravans on a grassy hillside, and George is back in Kirrin with a cough she flatly denies having.

She got it bathing in April. She fully intends to do it again.

Her father bangs his newspaper on the table. Her mother says she can go tomorrow if she does not cough today, so George goes purple in the face swallowing one (Timmy is under that table the whole time, being trodden on by everybody).

Then she is on the train with her new field glasses, and the five of them are together again.

The field they are camping in sits opposite an enormous old castle on the hill. Four towers, three of them crumbling, about a thousand jackdaws wheeling round the tops. Anne announces that this is a lovely quiet spot where they definitely will not have an adventure. In a Famous Five book that is practically a promise.

Some fair folk are moving into the same field. There is a fire-eater. There is a man who can get himself out of any rope in under two minutes. There is Mr India-rubber, who can bend himself through a drainpipe or in at a window that is open barely a crack. There is also a man with snakes, which Anne would rather not think about.

And there is somebody moving about inside a castle that is supposed to be empty.

The pleasure of these is how solid the everyday bits are. Boiled eggs timed by Anne's watch. Three ice creams each in the village dairy. Primroses stuffed into a blue bowl to match the curtains. Then the plot arrives and the children simply get on with it, because the grown-ups are elsewhere.

It is worth saying that the book is of its time. George's mother tells her she wonders when she will grow out of wanting to be a boy, and nobody in the story treats that as a mean thing to say. Some readers will sail past it. If your reader is the sort who notices, you might want to be nearby for that bit, because George herself never gives an inch.

What to read next

If they finish this one wanting to know how the cousins and that dog ever found each other, Five on a Treasure Island is where it starts. Julian, Dick and Anne are packed off to an aunt they barely know, and their cousin Georgina is not remotely pleased to see them.