The Island of Adventure

Enid Blyton's The Island of Adventure is a holiday mystery for 9 year olds, and it starts with a voice on an empty hillside telling a boy off.

What happens

Philip Mannering is lying under a tree doing algebra in the school holidays, which is punishment enough. Then something starts shouting at him. Shut the door. Wipe your feet. Don't sniff. Where's your handkerchief.

There is nobody there. Philip has a good look round three times.

It's a parrot, obviously. Scarlet and grey, with a crest she works up and down while she considers you. Her name is Kiki and she belongs to Jack, who has just arrived with his sister Lucy-Ann.

Jack is bottom of everything at school and absolutely brilliant on birds. He plans to be an ornithologist and cannot see the point of dates and capes. Lucy-Ann has red hair, more freckles than anyone has ever counted, and no intention of letting her brother out of her sight.

The reason Kiki says all those cross things is the saddest and funniest detail in the book. Jack and Lucy-Ann's parents are dead and they live with an uncle who does nothing but nag. Kiki just repeats the house. So you can hear what their home is like without anybody explaining it.

Philip's own set-up is not much better. A crumbling old place on a cliff called Craggy-Tops, a sour aunt, an uncle buried in old documents, and a sister he fights with constantly.

Which is rather the point. Four children nobody is watching very closely, a lonely stretch of Cornish coast, and an island out in the water that the locals do not talk about. There are old copper workings on it and tunnels that run out under the sea.

What makes it fun to read is Kiki. She interrupts lessons, she copies the teacher's sniff back at him, and when she is shut out of the room she sits in a bush outside the window and carries on. Philip is nearly as good value, mostly because of what keeps walking out of his sleeve. A caterpillar one day. A young rat the next, straight up the teacher's trouser leg.

This is the book where the four of them first meet, so it's the one to start with.

A quick note on the vintage. It was written a long time ago and sounds it. Golly, jolly, and boys and girls who get handed very different jobs. Nothing unkind, just old.

What to read next

The same four turn up again in The Castle of Adventure, this time in a lonely cottage below a castle where lights keep appearing in a tower that is supposed to be empty. Kiki comes too, still telling everyone to wipe their feet.