An adventure involving trains
Well I have just finished the seventh Famous Five book but that means that there is another fourteen to go. Fortunately they generally do not take me all that long to read, though it really also depends on whether I put a lot of effort into actually reading it because even though it doesn't take me all that long, I generally find myself spending most of my time reading it simply to get it finished within a 24 hour period. However I have set a goal to attempt to get through all of them (plus the other Blyton books that I have) so that I can be fair when reviewing them.
Okay, I would hardly rank these books at the top of my must read list, and I am not really trying to relive my childhood by reading them (though from what I have heard a lot of people are doing so, though I suspect that a lot of these people are collecting them not for themselves but rather for their children so as to give them a taste of what they read when they were a child).
This one has the five go off on a camp with one of the school science teachers and they take them to the moorlands where it turns out that there are a lot of old railway tunnels underneath. Once again we have the five descend into the depths of the earth to explore some caves, and we also have them stumbling on some rather nefarious people who are up to no good (and once again they are smugglers). I do notice that not all of the Enid Blyton mystery stories involve going into a cave network, but they all do seem to involve some children uncovering some criminal conspiracy and then bringing the police into the action. I do wonder whether this will encourage children to do the same in real life, and as such get themselves into a lot of trouble, namely because these types of people are not really nice people. However, the catch is that since there are children involved, these days this will act to seriously aggravate the event.
It appears that Blyton is starting to settle into a standard style in these stories: they are on holidays; and they do not seem to age. It is funny that so far they have not had an adventure at their school, but considering that they go to different schools, this is not surprising, particularly since in those days, as I suspect, there were not really any co-ed schools. This is changing now, especially since a number of the boys and girls schools are becoming co-ed. I personally cannot say whether single-sex or co-ed is better or worse since I only ever went to co-ed schools. Some suggest that by removing the opposite sex removes a distraction, but once again, I only ever went to co-ed schools so I cannot say.
One difference here is that an adult is thrown into the mix, being Mr Luffy, whom I suspect is a science teacher since he is going out to collect insects. To be honest this is rather odd because none of my teachers ever wanted to know us outside of school hours. In fact I have known some teachers who actively avoid the children when they are out of school and are incredibly rude to them. We see this type of attitude in The Hangover where one of the main characters, who is a teacher, after taking the kids' money for an excursion off to Las Vegas with him, telling a kid to bugger off when the kid approaches him after school. As mentioned, I have heard teachers brag about acting in similar matters.
To be honest, with attitudes like this, no wonder the kids hate their teachers. I didn't necessarily hate mine, though I did notice that they generally did not want to go out of their way to assist you if you needed help. Okay, the only time I ever asked for non-curriculum help was when I missed my bus and asked the teacher if he could help me catch the bus to which the reply was 'that is not going to happen'. While I may think otherwise, when I think about it more, the time it would take to get to the car, start the car, and then drive off after the bus the bus would be long gone, so I suspect that, in the end, he was right.
