While in real-time we are on to Five on a Secret Trail, in blog-time it’s time for what Brodie said about books 6 & 7.

---

Five on Kirrin Island Again

We went straight onto this book the night after finishing Five Go Off in a Caravan. Gone are the days of reading anything else in between Famous Five books (which we only did once, actually, after the first one.)

My copy has the reprint dust jacket shown on the left, so unfortunately I couldn’t play ‘spot the error on the jacket’ with Brodie. Maybe someday I’ll show him a picture of it online and see what he says.

We were looking at the end papers before we started reading, and he said that the two other people must be “The Sticks, they must have escaped from prison!” The Sticks really must have made quite an impression on him!

When the Five can’t find Uncle Quentin on the island Brodie was certain that they would find him at the top of the tower. But he imagined the tower to be made of planks of wood painted green. It’s so cute how he keeps explaining to me that “I picture it when you’re reading it to me, so I see it in my head.”

The weeds around the dungeon stone took him a minute to understand, but he did get it in the end particularly that Uncle Quentin couldn’t get back out if it was shut.

His new theories became that that a) Uncle Quentin was wandering around the island the whole time and they just kept missing each other and b) that Uncle Quentin went down the well into the dungeon, and used a crane from a fishing boat to lower down his supplies.

For some reason this led us on to talking about escape rooms, which I had to explain to him. His response was “I’d get out easy. I’d just press on all the panels until I found a secret passage.” When telling this to Stef we had the brainwave that we should open an Enid Blyton themed escape room – in 2037, of course, when her copyrights expire.

Impressively he guessed that the man parachuted from a plane onto the island, and even more so he caught the mistake about the room being whole/fallen in/whole again. I feel SO vindicated in having listed my nitpicks in reviews, knowing that even a six year old (so well under the cut of of 12 that Blyton had for disregarding criticism) could spot some of them!

To balance things out he also believed that George would easily let Timmy stay with Quentin, and then that Quentin would let her stay with him. So he’s about 50/50 with his responses.

The next night he asked “When is the adventure going to begin?” Clearly this one’s more of a slow burner.

The night after that he was home late after a birthday party, and in bed late, so we skipped story time. But he woke up after half an hour having had a bad dream. So we talked about what nice dream he could have – and we settled on the Famous Five looking for treasure.

Either he just imagined a story before he fell asleep, or he really did have a Famous Five dream as he told me it all he next morning on the way to school. I did my best to accurately type it up when I got home half an hour later:

Anne and George were at the train station when Julian and Dick arrived “HI JULIAN, HI DICK!” they shouted, (and then my brain repeated that bit). They took the pony cart to Kirrin Cottage and one of them said “Maybe there’s treasure under our beds!” Aunt Fanny laughed and said “Maybe there is!”… (then there was something about going on a pirate ship to the island, but they came back), and Timmy sniffed around under the stairs and then the stairs lifted up and there was a deep, deep hole under there! Julian went down first, and there were iron staples for his feet, but then there were beams (that’s another word for staples, Mummy), and he kept going down, but then the beams ran out and he had to come up and get a rope. So we went down again but when he got near the bottom there wasn’t enough air. So they went to a scuba shop and bought… (I said “tanks of air”) Yes, tanks of air, but they sold all the swimming stuff, it was a trick you see. Then they went back to the cottage but I lost the dream and decided to dream about dragons…

The next time we read he was still annoyed by the mistake of the room with a roof. He got cross and wanted me to change what I read to a fallen-in room so it was right.

When George got into the undersea tunnel he got a bit scared and needed me to put my arm around him. And at the end of the chapter he really really begged for more because he needed to know what happened, but we’d already done four chapters so that was it.

He thought that Uncle Quentin should give the men the book to stop them from blowing up the island.

When “something” gets in through the window and comes upstairs to jump on Julian’s bed he shouted “It’s Timmy!” (Correct, one point). “He must have got in the boat and come back.” (Ummm no… no points there )

As Stef said: Timmy is good, but he’s not that good.

I later mentioned this to Ewan and his response was that maybe a dog could lean over the side and paddle with his paws – so what hope has Brodie got?

Anyway, sticking with Timmy, Brodie had to think about it for a minute but he figured Timmy was taking them to the quarry and quickly from that figured the undersea tunnel connected up to there.

He did think that two bad men were the same as from the first book though (they are pretty generic bad guys to be fair), and that the reason they didn’t come out at the quarry is that they were still trying to blow up the island.

This became his favourite book in the series (so far the most recent one has always been his favourite) and we talked about how this one was meant to be the last one but the fans begged for more. I explained that 21 was last as Blyton wasn’t so well and had trouble remembering things then.

“Like the room with a roof or no roof?”

He just couldn’t let that drop! That led to me explaining her whole “cinema screen” process for writing which he found pretty interesting.

He then said “We’ll start the next one tomorrow night… but what will we read after we’ve finished them all?” 

Around the time we were reading this we visited St Andrews and we spotted these iron staples in the wall. He pretended to be one of the Famous Five, having an adventure.

“If we lived in that house I’d pretend to be the Famous Five all the time and I’d go up and down those staples every day.”

He’d be Julian of course and he made me George (having already accused me yesterday of having a temper like George because I’d told him off for jumping on our bed) and Ewan gets to be Dick. He wasn’t bothered about not having an Anne, but he was bothered about Timmy who we decided would have to be played by a toy from home.

---

Five Go Off to Camp

Again we were straight on to the next book the next night. He was very excited when he realised they were going camping.

At the end of chapter two when they all fall asleep he said “I bet when they wake up in the morning they won’t remember they’re on holiday.” I love how he’s picked up on that little detail – one of them does it in practically every book!

And indeed Julian did not disappoint us:

He sat up and wondered where he was and who was calling. Of course! He was in his tent with Dick—they were camping on the moors.

While he said didn’t know what it was, he didn’t think that Anne was sitting on a volcano. After it turned out to be a train he admitted that he thought it might have been a geyser.

One evening he was absolutely begging and begging for more chapters because he wanted, had, to know if the boys went and if they saw a spook train. But, he added “someone must be driving it because ghosts. Aren’t. Real.”

I ran into a real Scottish problem here, as Jock had to have a Scottish accent. A) he’s called Jock and B) he has a Scottish accent on the cassette tape I had as a child. You may wonder what the problem was, as being Scottish, you’d think I could do a Scottish accent nae bathir.

That literally is the problem. I have a Scottish accent. So the Five, despite me trying to be a little less broad and a little more neutral of voice, still sound pretty Scottish. So how could I make Jock stand out as actually Scottish? By doing an extra-Scottish accent. A real och aye the noo one. Which then I had to replicate in softer tones for Mrs Andrews and harsher ones for Mr Andrews.

At one point Anne goes to check their tents are “untouched” when they get back. “I bet they’re been touched,” said Brodie. And also “I think the spook trains going to take them away and when they get off they’ll be in ghost land.” He was a bit scared when the shepherd was talking about the spook trains.

Funnily he (for a while at least) he was saying “jumping jiminies” when anything was surprising.

He suggested that the spook train had broken down the wall between the tunnels and gone in there – which is really not that far off the solution.

I had to explain how they could walk over the tunnel because he was picturing a curved tunnel above ground level – I blame the toy train sets with tunnels like that (especially because I have a hard time not picturing the same thing!)

Stef asked me if I had to explain why they could walk on the rails, to which the answer was no, he didn’t ask me about that. I did have to explain about the niches in the side for workers, though.

Other Famous Five things he said that evening:

“Mummy, do you love books or do you hate books?”

Obviously I said I love them.

“But you haven’t read all the ones on your shelves have you!?”

Before I could defend myself he started talking again.

“Do you know my favourite books?… CHAPTER BOOKS. Because I love the Famous Five… why are they called the Famous Five? Are they famous… why Five though?”

I asked how many of them were there and he ran off to get a book to count the characters. He brought through Caravan.

“Have we read this one before? Oh good, I didn’t want to spoil it for myself.” He did count the Five as being five but argued that Timmy shouldn’t count as he’s a dog…

His next story idea was that someone had “programmed the spook train with coordinates to run to the yard and back with no-one driving it.” 

He asked why Anne didn’t fall down the vent on her way back across the tunnel top – well, she stayed on the path when George had left it to investigate the lump, but it’s a good question, as George ripped up a load of heather so you’d think Anne might have at least noticed it on her way back.

Camp was then his favourite book, but very closely followed by “The one with the tower where he smashes the windows at the end.”

His favourite part was that the men were playing a trick making everyone think it was a spook train when it was just an ordinary train.

Again he asked “When we’ve finished the Famous Five what are we going to read next???”