Previous letters pages can be found here.

Letters page from Volume 3, issue 18.
August 31st – September 13th, 1955.

OUR

LETTER PAGE

A letter from Elizabeth Marshall, Colpetty, Colombo 7, Ceylon.
Dear Miss Blyton,
This morning just after 8 o’clock there was a total eclipse of the sun, and I thought you might like to hear about it. My brother and I got up early and went into the garden. As the time drew near for the eclipse, it became slowly darker and darker. The crows flew off in flocks to their nests, the bats and flying foxes flew about. For four whole minutes it was night again. We heard the frogs and crickets set up their night-time chirping, and a few dogs barking, but all the birds were fast asleep. It really was a very weird feeling and I shall never forget the 20th June, 1955, in Colombo!
Love from
Elizabeth Marshall.

(This is one of the most interesting letters I have had, Elizabeth, and you deserve the prize I have sent you. An excellent account of a rare event.)

A letter from one of our Magazine Club Group Leaders, Pamela Stopp, Hanworth, Middlesex.
Dear Enid Blyton,
Thank you very much for my lovely Leader’s badge. I wore it to school and, as everyone admired it, I felt very proud. I also had a pleasant surprise when I arrived home to lunch and found a lovely book awaiting me, it will be most useful to all members of my group. Daddy has promised to buy me a tent in which to hold my group meetings.
Yours with love,
Pamela Stopp.

A letter from Jeffrey Hodge, St. Helens, Lancs.
Dear Enid Blyton,
I have a big old tortoise called Crawler – and he has laid an egg! Mummy has put it into our airing-cupboard to hatch and every day I look to see if a baby tortoise has come out of it. I wonder if any of your other readers has ever had a tortoise egg that hatched?
Much love from
Jeffrey Hodge.

(Well, readers, have any of you had a tortoise egg that hatched? Do tell me!)

There was a letter from Ceylon a few issues back, too. I must have looked up what Ceylon had become, as I wrote Sri Lanka on that post, but I had to look it up again this week as I had forgotten!

This time I also looked up why the name had changed, and where the names had come from. This is probably common knowledge to many, but as it has been Sri Lanka my whole life it’s not something that I needed to know. Ceylon was an anglicised version of Ceilão (the Portuguese colonists’ name for it from 1505, as it had been called Sailan, Saylan, Silan, Seilan etc for hundreds of years previously) used from 1815 when the country became a crown colony. It became the Dominion of Ceylon when it achieved independence in 1948, then in 1972 it became the Republic of Sri Lanka, though that changed to Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka in 1978. Interestingly Sri Lanka had been in use from 1935, while Lanka dates back to the 10-12th centuries, and was used in the 16th century by locals opposing the Portuguese colonists.

History lesson over!

I assume that Elizabeth is 7, though her age is put in the wrong place, in the middle of her address. I thought at first that it was the online image-to-text converter I use, but no, that’s how it appears on the printed page.

Anyway, it was a nice letter about an unusual event!

It’s probably explained somewhere in the magazines what a Magazine Group Club is, as it must be something more formal than than the usual groups and clubs children write in about if it has an official badge! Strange Blyton didn’t respond to this letter, as she has responded to every other one I’m sure.

Having checked very carefully, Jeffrey does indeed say that he has laid an egg. This led me to my strangest Google search of recent weeks – do male tortoises lay eggs? The answer, as I expected is no, they do not. So this is quite possibly an error that has crept in when transcribing the letter or putting the plates together for printing. Saying that, my search has led me to many owners of male tortoises saying their pet has laid an egg – apparently vets are notoriously bad at identifying male and female tortoises correctly, so perhaps Jeffrey did believe Crawler was male! Would love to know if the airing cupboard egg ever hatched.