Five on a Treasure Island

Enid Blyton's Five on a Treasure Island is an adventure for 9 year olds about four cousins, one dog and an island with a wreck lying off it.

What happens

Julian, Dick and Anne are packed off to Kirrin Bay for the summer because their parents are going to Scotland without them. They have met their cousin Georgina exactly never.

She does not want them there. She does not answer to Georgina either. She is George, her hair is cut as short as a boy's, and within a minute of waking up she has told Anne that liking frocks and dolls makes her a baby.

Then she takes them down to the beach and tells them the thing she has told nobody. The little rocky island at the mouth of the bay is hers. So is the ruined castle standing on it. So is the wreck on the far side, which belonged to a great-great-great-grandfather who went down bringing home bars of gold.

George is the reason this one still works. She is rude and proud and absolutely truthful, and her moods come off her like weather.

The best of her is the dog. Timothy lives with Alf, a fisher-boy, because her father said he had to go, and every penny of George's pocket money goes on feeding him. So she has nothing left for ice creams. When Julian buys her one she will not take it, because she cannot buy him one back and she thinks taking without giving is mean.

That tells you more about her than any amount of treasure does.

The adventure is slow to start and then very hard to put down. Storms, an old wreck brought within reach at last, a box that has been underwater for a very long time, and what turns out to be inside it.

A word about the age of it. George's whole argument with herself is that girls are not allowed to be brave, so she has decided to be a boy instead, and nobody in the story ever suggests she could simply be both. Her father says out loud that she wants spanking. Plenty of children read straight past all that. Others will want to argue with the page, which is honestly not a bad thing for a book to provoke.

The language is dated in a cosy way too. Everyone says jolly and queer, the grown-ups vanish for whole chapters, and the picnics get more loving description than the villains do.

Give it to a reader who wants somewhere to go rather than something to solve. The island does most of the work.

What to read next

Five Go Adventuring Again brings the same four back to Kirrin for the Christmas holidays, this time with a tutor nobody asked for, a thief in the cottage and a very old map. Timothy is under the table throughout.