The Circus of Adventure

Enid Blyton's The Circus of Adventure is a holiday-turned-kidnap story for 9 year olds, and it belongs to her Adventure books.

What happens

Jack, Philip, Dinah and Lucy-Ann come home from boarding school expecting four weeks of mooching about. Instead their mother announces a holiday nobody mentioned in any letter, arranged in a hurry by Bill, who has a habit of hush-hush jobs turning up at exactly the wrong moment.

Philip wants to study badgers. Jack wants birds. Nobody wants the other bit of news.

Bill is bringing a boy.

Gustavus Barmilevo is eleven, foreign, and has the most magnificent manners any of them have ever seen. He bows. He kisses hands, which makes Dinah squeal and Lucy-Ann put hers behind her back. He shakes hands with Kiki the parrot, gets a talon through his finger, and announces tearfully that it "blids".

Then he tells them the parrot must be put in a cage. He ORDERS it.

The children decide he's a bit dippy. Bill says don't ask him about his family. You can see exactly where this is going, and the pleasure is watching them not see it.

Kiki is the reason to read this one. She shakes hands with the wrong foot, marches on the spot going "left, right, left", barks like a dog at cats, clucks at six new hens until they bolt into the hen-house, and hoots like a car horn at passing drivers who then look around for the car. She also stuffs old toffee papers into a stranger's trouser turn-ups on the train. Her running commentary is mostly muddled instructions. "Wipe your feet and blow your nose."

If you've got a reader who likes knowing more than the characters do, this is very satisfying. Gus is kidnapped, and so are Philip, Dinah and Lucy-Ann, and it's Jack and one extremely loud parrot who go after them.

One thing to square with your reader first. This was written in 1952 and it shows in how Gus is handled. His accent is spelled out phonetically on the page, the children privately call him a little foreigner and worse, and the joke is often at his expense. He does grow on them. But if your child is reading it alone, it's the sort of thing worth chatting about afterwards. For a reader who already enjoys old-fashioned adventures and takes the period in their stride, none of it will spoil the chase.

What to read next

To go back to where these four met, start with The Island of Adventure. It opens with Philip lying on a hillside being told off by a voice with no body attached.