Previous letters pages can be found here.

NB this is another letters page to use wording that is considered derogatory and offensive in the UK (and potentially elsewhere) today. As I am transcribing these letters exactly as written by the child authors I will therefore be using it, though I wouldn’t be using it in any other circumstances.

Letters page from Volume 4, issue 5.
February 19th – March 13th, 1956.

OUR

LETTER PAGE

A letter from Kevin Ryan Clapham, London, S.W.4.
Dear Miss Enid Blyton,
I live in a block of flats where there are not many birds, but every Saturday I go to my Grandmother’s at Wimbledon, and I sleep there for the night. On Sunday, after I have been to church I call for my friend Keith, and we watch the birds in the garden. We see chaffinches, blue-tits, blackbirds, sparrows, hedge-sparrows, jackdaws, herring-gulls and starlings. There is a bird-table at the bottom of the garden. I hang up fat and nuts for the tits and scatter crumbs for the robins. I am nine years old.
From a lover of birds,
Kevin Ryan.

(I am another lover of birds, as you know, Kevin, and enjoyed your letter so much that I have awarded it my letter-prize this week.)

A letter from one of our Club Leaders, Gillianne Thomson, Bearsden, Glasgow.
Dear Enid Blyton,
I am sending this donation of £7 10s. od. for the Spastic Children. Our Club had a Cake and Candy Sale on Saturday, and also gave a puppet show. It was a great success and we enjoyed it very much. Yours sincerely,
Gillianne Thomson.
(Leader of a Magazine Club.)

(A very kind and generous letter, Gillianne. What a fine Leader you must be!)

A letter from Julia Hudson, Didsbury, Manchester 20. 
Dear Enid Blyton,
Some time ago I wrote to you about a Golden Labrador that I used to take for walks. When his hair came out I put it on my bird-table, and it was very amusing to watch the birds come and get it. They would pick some up in their beaks, drop it and try to get a bigger piece, and they looked just as if they had little beards! I also put millet seed into a saucer and you should see the sparrows and greenfinches that line up for it! The law is two on a saucer, and when two have finished, the next two fly on and so on.
With best wishes from
Julia Hudson.

(I like your letter, Julia, and I am printing it hoping that other children will put their dog’s hairs on the bird-table!)

The letters page has been attacked with blue ink this week (at least, in my copy anyway), but we can still read it.

Sticking to familiar themes we have two letters about garden birds and one about fundraising. Surprisingly, the fund-raising letter is not the winner this time.

I always wonder why we have cake and candy stalls in the UK when we don’t use the word candy at other times – with the exception specific items like candy canes and candy sticks.

I now know what 20 refers to in Julia’s address – thanks to an explanation from a regular reader on a previous post.

It is a kind of post code, but from before the precise post code system that we have now. So, in cities which were large enough, they were divided into districts. Later these became the basis of modern post codes, so Sheffield 4 is now S4 and someone’s post code might be S4 xyz

I don’t know when it started in Sheffield, but in Manchester it was in the 1860s.

You still occasionally hear the old district designations used as a shorthand for areas of a city. Liverpool 8 to denote Toxteth is probably the best-known example.