Previous letters pages can be found here.

Letters page from Volume 4, issue 13.
July 18th – July 31st, 1956.

OUR

LETTER PAGE

All about Birds today!

A letter from Anne Lacey, Cardiff.
Dear Miss Blyton,
One day, over a year ago, a little blue cock budgerigar perched on my brother’s bedroom window-sill, and came in quickly when my brother spoke to it. We could not find his owner, so we bought him a cage. We kept him and called him Joey. Last February my brother was on a country walk, and he saw another blue budgy in a tree, and it was very frightened of the sparrows. My brother quickly ran home and collected the cage with Joey in it and then stood on a gate and held up the cage. The little hen bird (as she turned out to be) quickly swooped down to the cage and was happily put inside it. My father built an aviary and a nesting-box inside our shed, and after a fortnight the first egg appeared. Julie, the hen bird, laid seven eggs altogether, and she hatched out two blue boy budgies.
Love from Anne Lacey.

(I have delayed printing your letter, Anne, until I had two other short letters to go with it, because it is such a long one-but so interesting. I have sent you my letter-prize, and hope you like it.)

A letter from Barbara Groom, Chesterfield.
Dear Miss Blyton,
I am writing to tell you of a house-martins’ nest under the eaves of our house. Last year I was looking out of the window when I saw three martins flying about. Then I noticed them building the nest.
I told Mummy and Daddy, but no one else, in case they were frightened away. This year they have come again to the nest and have three babies.
Love from
Busy Bee Barbara Groom.

(I liked your letter very much, Barbara-very well written.)

A letter from Carol Frost, Rochester.
Dear Enid Blyton,
The other day I found a young sparrow that could not fly. I put it out on our lawn – and soon a lot of other sparrows found it. After a while these sparrows put the baby on to one of their backs, and bit by bit it reached its nest. Has anyone seen a thing like this before?
Yours sincerely, Carol Frost.

(Well, readers-have you seen such an interesting thing before? Let me know so that I can tell Carol.)

A little insight into how the letters page works this week – with a letter being held until it could be fitted in with two shorter ones. Did Blyton deliberately look for two short letters about birds or was it just a handy coincidence that there were two such letters? That’s assuming that Blyton read all the letters herself and didn’t have someone who picked a selection for her to choose from.

Finding one homeless budgie is interesting (we found a runaway – or should that be flyaway? – cockatoo not that long ago) but to find and adopt two? That’s surely rare.

Sparrows are common but I don’t know how many people have seen sparrows rescuing another.

House martins are also fairly common – we had a nest several years running in the eaves of our house when I was a child. I had assumed they were swallows at first, as I’d heard of swallows from stories like Thumbelina, but not house martins.