As it is April Fool’s day today, I had thought about opening this post with a false story about a brand-new and never- before discovered Enid Blyton book. But I wasn’t sure that I could carry it off convincingly.
March round up
and
Letters to Enid
Andy made the girls lie down together, and then he piled sand high over them, leaving a space over their noses for breathing. Then he dragged handfuls of seaweed from the rocks and threw it over the sandy mound. When he had finished, the girls looked exactly like the seaweed-covered rocks nearby! It was really marvellous.
Andy hides Jill and Mary before hiding himself in The Adventurous Four
Mr Twiddle is one of the most foolish fools in any of Blyton’s books. In Hello, Mr Twiddle, the foolish man ‘loses’ his hat by hanging it on the horns of the cow he is leading, mistakes a snowman for a burglar, and loses his mackintosh by putting his coat on over the top of it. What’s worse is, he can never work out why things have gone so wrong for him! His poor wife is always in despair.
Fiona
worldofblyton
With “Hello, Mr Twiddle”, I found that I couldn’t decide whether Enid was trying her hand at a story that was simply meant to be funny? Because I didn’t read this book when I was a child, I get no perspective from looking back on what I felt about it at that stage. Did you read it when you were younger? Did you laugh along with her at silly Mr Twiddle’s funny antics? I can’t quite make up my mind if the reader is meant to laugh along at the jokes, or if the tale is supposed to evoke some other response.
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I first read them (and also Mr Meddle’s books) as an adult, Stephen. I find them quite amusing now – though also exasperating as I keep thinking ‘no-one can be that stupid and unaware!.’
Now you’ve mentioned it, I do wonder how children see the books. I imagine in simpler times when the books were written they would have found a bumbling foolish granddad-type very funny, but I’m not sure modern readers would find it at all funny.
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