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 9.

OUR

LETTER PAGE

A letter from Sherin Ratnagar, Bombay, India.
Dear Enid Blyton,
I am a member of the “Famous Five” Club. Six other friends of mine are members too. We meet every Saturday, in a shed, on which we have painted “F.F.” We have a smashing password you wouldn’t dream of. We do wish we had adventures but we never do. I like “Five Have Plenty of Fun,” best of all your “Fives ” books. I live in India, and we have to wait a long time for new books. I must end my letter now or you will get too many sheets to read!
Love, from
Sherin Ratnagar.

(I have printed your letter, Sherin, because I am sure that all F.F. members here will like to hear of your F.F. Club in faraway India. You have won our Letter-Page prize, so look out for a new book!)

A letter from Susan Cradock, Aston, Bucks.
Dear Enid Blyton,
We have started a Club called “The Put-Em-Right Club” after a name in one of your books. We have called it this because one important thing we want to do is help to put the little spastic children right. This week all our six members have arranged a Rummage
Sale, and although we had a lot of things left over we are able to send you £1 for the spastics.
With best wishes, from
Susan Cradock
(Leader) and the other five members.

(I have many letters about clubs, Susan, but yours has a most unusual name and you live up to it too. Thank you – and all your members as well!)

A letter from Marian and Isobel Spence.
Dear Enid Blyton,
My friend and I have a Nature Club, and we made our badges in the way you said in your magazine some while ago. We have our meetings every Tuesday and Wednesday in the Park, and gather lots of notes for our Nature books. We also collect nature pictures to stick in our books – we get them from the Nature page in your magazine, called “Some things to look for,” and we get them from your nature stories too.
Yours sincerely,
Marian Spence and Isobel Spence.

(I can see that you and Isobel enjoy your little Nature Club, Marian, and I am very pleased to hear about it.)

A club-theme this time around. I initially thought that Blyton must save up letters on a theme then use them together, and then I thought that she probably got so many hundreds of letters a week that it would not have posed a problem to find three or four on any given topic!

I wonder if Sherin and her six friends ever thought to call their club the Secret Seven? Not only does it have seven members but they also have their initials on the door and use a password! Mind you, I’ve played at being the Famous Five as a child with only two people, so perhaps numbers aren’t that important!

I thought it interesting that Susan and her friends chose to name themselves after a group who were as unsuccessful as the Put-Em-Rights. Isn’t the whole message of that story that you should be careful about judging and trying to fix other people’s lives especially when your own behaviours may be less than perfect? The word choice of “putting the [children with CP] right” is unpleasant though I’m sure they Susan and her friends meant well, and would only be using language that they had heard at the time.

I don’t know why but Marian and Isobel’s letter suddenly reminded me of a short-lived club I was in as a child. A small group of us formed the Winnie-the-Pooh club, and we met every week. I don’t actually think that any of us even loved Winnie-the-Pooh that much but it was the only thing we all liked enough to agree on. We basically got together and would draw pictures of the characters, or use stickers, but would soon get bored and play hide and seek etc. It didn’t last long as we always had to hold it in the garden of the youngest member as she wasn’t allowed to play at anyone else’s house, and if it rained we had to cram into the porch as we weren’t allowed anywhere else in her house, and her parents didn’t like the noise of us either…

Like I say, not sure why the far more interesting and organised nature club reminded me of that – but it did!