FIVE LIVE FOREVER: AGAIN - THE FAMOUS FIVE...

Copyright Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Let me set the scene.  It's a medium-sized bedroom with two single beds, each sitting alongside a wall running parallel to the other.  A wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a wooden chair, a tartan single 'bed settee' and an old Singer treadle sewing machine (and perhaps a small bamboo table) are the only items of furniture in the room.  The sewing machine sits under a wide window, between the two beds, and is occasionally topped with books, comics, and an assembled model kit or toy.

It was in this room, which I shared with my brother between 1965 and '72, that I first became acquainted with Enid Blyton's Famous Five.  As recounted in a previous post, I no longer recall precisely how many of the Five's adventures I read back then, perhaps three or four at the very most.  I recently bought the first ten books in the series (in paperback) and showed you the cover artwork to them in a cover gallery, but since then I've purchased the remaining eleven tales (21 in all) and can now present them as well.

I've already read more of the Five's books in the here-and-now than I did back in the late '60s, and when I eventually work through the remaining stories, my encounters with them as an adult will far outweigh my childhood experience of them by an even wider margin.  I find this realisation quite strange as I still tend to associate them with my former home in which, as I said, I first 'met' the 'quintet', more than I do my current one.  In my mind's eye, I seem to recall these covers gracing the top of that old sewing machine in my former bedroom.

I suppose some associations are difficult to shed (not that I'm trying to), but perhaps, with the passing of the years, I'll eventually come to view the Five in the context of my present abode as well as my former one.  Time, as they say, will tell - assuming I'm blessed with the luxury of the continued presence of ol' Mr. Fugit for a good bit longer.

Anyway, once again conjuring up a vanished age, here are the remaining covers in this entertaining series of books.

Posted in: Cartoons