Previous letters pages can be found here.

NB – a warning again for the use of 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 6.
April 11th – 24th, 1956.

OUR

LETTER PAGE

A letter from Group Leader Gillian Stacey, Wimbledon, S.W.19.
Dear Enid Blyton,
I have just become a Group Leader, and my group and I are writing to thank you for the lovely badges, and also for the Leader’s Handbook, which I am finding very useful. Most of all we want to thank you for the lovely book called “Pictorial Treasury,” which you sent us to start our library. Last Saturday our Group held a Jumble Sale and raised £1 14s. od. We would like this money to be divided between the “Busy Bees,” the “Sunbeams,” the “Famous Five” homes, and the “Spastic Centre,” so please will you send 8/6 to each? The sale went very well and our stalls included a Lucky Dip, Bring and Buy, Toys and Stationery, Plaster Moulds and Raffles.
Love from
Gillian Stacey and the Group.

(Thank you, Group Leader Gillian, for a very interesting and generous letter! I don’t often have so many postal orders at once. I am sending you a book prize to add to your group library.)

A letter from Christine? (no surname sent), Inverness.
Dear Enid Blyton,
We have a cat called Cheeky. One morning he was watching the birds feeding. Suddenly a sea-gull flew down to see what he could get to eat. Cheeky caught the sea-gull’s tail-but unluckily for Cheeky the sea-gull flew up into the air. Cheeky still held on! When the sea-gull was about ten feet in the air (with the cat still hanging on), his tail gave way and the cat came sailing down and landed on his feet! Has anyone else’s cat had such an experience?
Lots of love from
Christine.

(A very amusing letter, Christine and what a shock for poor Cheeky.)

A letter from Susan Bull, Derby.
Dear Enid Blyton,
I want to tell you something. Daddy has a water-barrel to catch rain-water. When it was frozen over, the birds came and pecked a very small hole in the ice, and were drinking through the hole in turns.
Love, from
Susan Bull.

(What a clever thing to do, Susan I wish I had seen them.)

A fund-raising letter in top-place this time. I wondered if Gillian had written in before about her group and been sent a book, but on-rereading I assume it came along with the badges and leader’s handbook. I don’t think I realised there were official group handbooks and so on!

Christine’s letter sounded very familiar so I checked. Smokey the cat bites a seagull’s tail and gets lifted well off the ground in the short story Smokey and the Seagull. Why does Blyton not mention this? Well, it’s because she hadn’t written it yet! It appears in volume 4 issue 15 of this very magazine. I hope that Christine is credited with the idea.

And lastly, another common letter-type, the observations on wild birds. I hope that Susan or her father broke some more of the ice for the birds later so they could drink more easily.