Posted on by TracyC

There’s a Body in the Brontosaurus Room!

Our Secret Gang

There’s a Body in the Brontosaurus Room! by Shannon Gilligan, 1992.

This is the last book in the Our Secret Gang series. This story takes place in a museum, and at the beginning of the book, there are maps of the interior of the museum, which help in keeping track of the action. Members of the detective gang in the story take turns narrating different books, and this one is narrated by Davey.

The fifth and sixth grade classes at the kids’ elementary school are having a camp-in at the Museum of Science in Boston. When the kids are getting on the school bus, Tim notices that a teacher is reading a copy of a newspaper with an article that says the police have received a tip that there will be a jewel robbery at the museum they’re visiting because there is a visiting exhibition of valuable gems. The kids think that they may have found the next case for their detective gang, and they’re glad that they brought some of their equipment with, like their walkie-talkies.

When they stop for dinner at a pizza place, they learn that students from Longmeadow Middle School will be joining them for the camp-in at the museum. By coincidence, Jeanine knows one of the boys from Longmeadow, Jeremy, because she takes horseback riding lessons from his mother. Jeremy ends up joining the others for dinner. Even though Davey rolls his eyes at his little sister’s jokes that Jeanine is his girlfriend, he feel unexpectedly jealous at the way Jeanine blushes around Jeremy.

While they’re having dinner, Tim notices a boy who is all by himself and crying. Jeremy says that he’s a new boy at his school named Matthew. Kids have been trying to make friends with Matthew, but Matthew never seems interested.

As they’re getting ready to leave, Jeanine makes plans to meet up with Jeremy and hang out at the museum. Davey gets angry because he wants the whole gang to investigate their possible mystery, and he doesn’t want Jeremy being forced on the group. Davey and Jeanine have an argument about his jealousy, and Jeanine separates from the group at the museum to hang out with Jeremy. Davey worries that this will split up Our Secret Gang or at least that they’ll lose Jeanine.

To make matters worse, Davey sees Mr. Berrar, the headmaster of the special school for science and mathematics that his parents and school principal wanted him to attend, at the museum because he is one of the museum trustees. Davey’s secret is that he is a genius at mathematics, and his parents and school principal wanted to send him to a special high school, skipping multiple grades, even though he didn’t feel ready to do that. Davey managed to persuade his parents that he would be happier remaining in a normal school with his friends, but he dreads other kids finding out and teasing him for being a nerd.

While Davey and the other kids are looking at the gem exhibit and talking about the security features they’ve noticed, still considering whether someone could be planning to rob the museum, Davey spots Jeremy in an area that’s marked “Private-Museum Staff Only.” What is he doing, sneaking around an off-limits area?

The rest of the detective gang, minus Jeanine, solves a small mystery for a girl from another school who lost her retainer, Lorraine. It only earns them $3 in detective fees, but Davey decides to hang out with Lorraine for a while and see if Jeanine gets jealous of them like he was of Jeanine and Jeremy, which she does. Davey thinks it’s only fair that Jeanine feel some of what he’s been feeling, and since she’s been giving him the cold shoulder and not helping with the detective activities of the group or joining her friends in looking at the exhibits, she deserves it.

Just as all the students are getting ready for bed, a girl starts screaming that there’s a body in the brontosaurus room! She says that it was lying right underneath the dinosaur, but when everyone rushes to look, it’s gone. Then, Matthew apparently has an attack of appendicitis and is taken away in an ambulance. Something about the ambulance strikes the kids have peculiar, but they have trouble thinking what it is at first. By the time they realize what was wrong, things have already started happening in the museum. The guards are missing, and security devices have been turned off. It seems that the robbery rumors were true. What can the kids do to stop it?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I first read this book as a kid, and one of the things I liked about it most was the title. I still think about when I’m at a museum with dinosaur exhibits. I never went on one of those camp-ins at a museum when I was a kid, but it’s something that I would have liked, especially if there was a mystery involved!

The romantic bickering in the story is juvenile, but I remember similar incidents from when I was about the age of the kids in the story. Some adults still do things like the kids in the book do, like seeming to flirt with someone else to make a partner jealous and get their attention. It’s never a good idea. It just adds another person to an already-complicated and highly emotional situation without resolving whatever was behind the initial problem.

As an adult, I thought that Jeanine was a little thoughtless and rude for ditching her friends to hang out with a guy she seems to have a crush on. When you already have plans with a group of people, suddenly tossing them aside to make plans with someone else and ignore them is rude. However, Davey’s jealousy and possessiveness is also inappropriate, and his behavior is part of the reason why Jeanine broke off from her usual group instead of just having her other friend join them. If Davey had either allowed Jeanine’s friend to join their activities or simply told Jeanine that he was hurt that she seemed to be abandoning the group and their latest project to pay attention to this other guy, his behavior would have been more reasonable. Part of the problem with simply inviting a new member on short notice is the secret nature of the group. To invite Jeremy to join them, the whole group would really have to agree on it, and that’s difficult in the public setting of the story. I think Jeanine should be a little more aware of the awkwardness of the situation because she knows why their group and its activities are secret, but it still doesn’t excuse Davey’s behavior. A large part of the problem is that Davey hasn’t given much thought to his real feelings about Jeanine, and he’s having trouble coping with the realization that he feels more strongly about her than he’s been willing to admit. The two of them sort things out when they have an honest talk with each other about their feelings.

One of the things that I particularly remembered about this book was the controversy over whether the brontosaurus is really an apatosaurus. Some of the thinking about the brontosaurus has changed in recent years.

Posted on by TracyC

The Haunted Swamp

Our Secret Gang

The Haunted Swamp by Shannon Gilligan, 1991.

This is the second book in the Our Secret Gang series. Members of the detective gang in the story take turns narrating different books, and this one is narrated by Nancy. After having solved their first mystery in the previous book, the kids are organizing their detective club and discussing how to advertise their services. Then, Jason’s younger brothers and their friend, Kenny, bring them their next case.

Kenny tells them that he saw a ghost near the old, abandoned train yard. He says that he saw something white dart into the swamp near the train yard. He was riding the school bus at the time, and other kids on the bus saw it, too. Jason thinks that the kids probably just saw some swamp gas, but the rest of the gang decides to check it out anyway.

When they explore the area around the train yard, Nancy and Jason find someone’s camp site. Their first thought is that the “ghost” is just someone who’s been camping out in the area. However, when they bring their friends back to the camp site the next day, there is weirdly no sign of the camp fire they saw and no sign that anyone has been camping there recently. It seems weird that an entire camp site could vanish so completely in just a day. However, there is definitely someone hanging around the old train yard because someone lets the air out of the kids’ bike tires, and Nancy later realizes that the shades in the old station house where down, when they weren’t before.

Then, there an announcement at school that an elderly local man suffering from Alzheimer’s has disappeared, apparently wandered off. The fifth and sixth graders are recruited to help with the search for him. He is eventually found near the train yard, leading the kids to think that maybe the “ghost” was the old man, wandering around.

They soon realize that it wasn’t the old man when some of the kids see the ghost again after the old man is found and returned home. Is there someone else hiding out around the old train yard, or could it really be a ghost?

Meanwhile, Nancy has noticed that her parents are behaving oddly. They invite a woman Nancy has never met before to dinner, and they seem to be keeping secrets. Secrets are no stranger to Our Secret Gang because everyone in the club has a secret. Nancy’s is that she was adopted and very few people know. Could this mysterious stranger and her parents’ secrets have something to do with her adoption?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. In the back of the book, there are instructions for making plaster casts of footprints and how to analyze footprints, which the characters didn’t do themselves in the book. It’s more that books in this series include instructions for detective skill activities.

My Reaction

This mystery is the kind that I like to call Pseudo-Ghost Stories, mysteries of the Scooby-Doo variety, where there seem to be ghosts, but there are actually logical explanations for everything.

I first read this book when I was a kid, and I remember being intrigued by the secrets of the club members and Nancy’s sudden discovery that she was adopted. I think it’s common for kids to imagine what would happen if they suddenly made a discovery like that. Nancy’s discovery of her adoption happened when she and her parents first moved to the town of Millerton from Boston, so she’s know about it for a little while but not very long. When Nancy’s parents begin acting oddly and have a guest to their house who identifies herself as a nun and also seems to be a social worker, Nancy worries about what they’re keeping from her. I thought the answer was pretty obvious, and I don’t think that it stumped me for very long when I was kid, either, because Nancy even says at the beginning of the story that she’s always wanted a younger sibling.

I don’t think that her parents should have been so mysterious with her because their secret-keeping before about her adoption caused her some hard feelings, and I don’t think that there’s a good reason to keep her in the dark when they’re thinking of making a major change in their family. They say that it’s because they didn’t want her to get her hopes up because adoptions take a long time to arrange. It sounds like a realistic explanation; I just don’t think it’s the best idea. Nancy’s parents could have used the long process of the adoption of a younger sibling for Nancy to show Nancy what they went through when they adopted her and how much they wanted her because they were willing to go through the long process to get her, which could help her better understand her own past and what she means to her parents. In the end, Nancy does come to those realizations, and she also realizes that is a large part of the reason that her parents have been overprotective of her. She also realizes that the adoption of a new child will mean that her secret about her adoption will probably be revealed, but she decides that it’s okay. Her mother admits that her reluctance to reveal Nancy’s adoption had to do with her own unresolved feelings about her own adoption as a child, but she has been working through them.

As another small point that I found interesting in the story, when Nancy makes the flyers for their detective club, she uses press-type letters. I used to have some myself that I used for labeling things with my name. They’re also called dry transfers or rub-ons. They’re decals with pressure-sensitive adhesive on a piece of backing material. To apply them, you lay them face down on the object where you want them to be and rub the backing with something. The pressure activates the adhesive, and they stick.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

Jessamy

Jessamy by Barbara Sleigh, 1967.

I couldn’t find a copy with its dust jacket intact.

Jessamy is a British orphan who is being raised by her two aunts, Millicent and Maggie. The two aunts aren’t really raising her together, though. Jessamy lives with Aunt Millicent during the school year, and she goes to stay with Aunt Maggie during school holidays. Truth be told, Aunt Millicent (her mother’s sister) and Aunt Maggie (her father’s sister) don’t really like each other, and they have different priorities and goals for Jessamy’s future. Aunt Millicent is doing her best to help Jessamy be pretty and popular, making sure that she wears a retainer to straighten her teeth and only allowing her to associate with “nice” children (apparently meaning ones from “good” families in the sense of social connections, who mostly don’t like Jessamy – Jessamy is usually not allowed to play with the children she actually likes and who like her). On the other hand, Aunt Maggie doesn’t care about beauty or popularity and just wants Jessamy to be well-behaved. Jessamy is confident that she is disappointing both of her aunts in all of these qualities. Her aunts are fond of her, but they are also occupied with their own lives. Aunt Millicent has her work, and Aunt Maggie has two children of her own, so Jessamy really has only half of their attention at any particular time.

However, Jessamy’s usual bouncing between her aunts is interrupted one summer when Aunt Maggie’s children, Jessamy’s older cousins Muriel and Edgar, catch whooping cough. Jessamy hasn’t had whooping cough herself, so she wouldn’t have any immunity. Rather than bring Jessamy into the household and have her end up sick, too, Aunt Maggie realizes that she has to find another place for her to stay until the other children are better. Jessamy can’t go back to Aunt Millicent because Aunt Millicent is leaving on a business trip, so Aunt Maggie arranges for Jessamy to stay with Miss Brindle, who is the caretaker of a large old house known to locals as Posset Place.

Miss Brindle is an older woman and is not used to spending time with children. Although Jessamy doesn’t really get along with her cousins, she isn’t sure if she’s going to like staying with Miss Brindle. However, Miss Brindle isn’t bad. She isn’t fond of Muriel or Edgar, either, and she says right up front that she’s glad that Jessamy seems different from her cousins. She also says that she’s going to treat Jessamy like an adult because she doesn’t know much about children, which suits Jessamy fine.

Miss Brindle tells Jessamy a little about the history of the old house. Posset Place was built in 1885 by a man named Nathaniel Parkinson, who made his money from producing a cough syrup called Parkinson’s Expectorant Posset. The house is largely empty now, except for the housekeeper’s quarters, where Miss Brindle now lives. Miss Brindle spends her time making sure the rooms are kept clean and well-aired.

Miss Brindle lets Jessamy explore the house a little before supper, and in particular, Jessamy is fascinated by the empty nursery. She finds herself imagining the children who used to live there and the toys and books the nursery once held. Then, she notices markings on the wall where the children’s heights were recorded, and she sees that one of the children was also named Jessamy. She tries to ask Miss Brindle about it, but Miss Brindle isn’t aware that there were any names written on the nursery wall.

During the night, Jessamy wakes up, still thinking about seeing her own name written on the wall of the nursery. She could have been mistaken, but it bothers her to the point where she feels like she has to go look at it again. Taking her flashlight, she goes upstairs again to look at the names. However, this time, the nursery is not empty, like it was before. There are clothes hanging on the wooden pegs on the wall and a line of shoes on the floor. When she checks the old measuring marks, she sees that there are fewer marks than she remembered before, but one of the names is definitely Jessamy, and the year next to that name is 1914. Jessamy lives in 1966 (contemporary with when the book was written), but the day in 1914 is the same day that she came to stay with Miss Brindle – July 23rd.

Then, to Jessamy’s surprise, she suddenly realizes that she is holding a lit candle instead of her flashlight. At first, Jessamy thinks that she must be dreaming, but then, an angry young woman comes and tells her that she should be in bed because she’s ill, not running around with a candle. The woman threatens to tell her aunt about this. When the woman lights her lamp, Jessamy sees that the nursery is now fully furnished.

It seems that Jessamy has gone back in time to 1914 and has been mistaken for the Jessamy who lived in the house in the past. The woman, who is Miss Matchett, the parlor maid, says that the other children named in the height markings – Marcus, Fanny, and Kitto – are all asleep and that it’s nearly midnight. The Jessamy of the past is the niece of the cook-housekeeper, which is why she is allowed to be with the children of the house. Jessamy’s head hurts, and she realizes that there is suddenly a bandage around it. Miss Matchett says that she fell out of a mulberry tree.

Jessamy realizes that the housemaid is only awake at this late hour and fully dressed because she had just returned from slipping out of the house secretly. When she points it out, Miss Matchett admits that she sneaked out to see her gentleman friend, and she says that if Jessamy doesn’t tell on her for doing that, she won’t tell her aunt that she was out of bed. Jessamy agrees, and Miss Matchett leads her back to her bed in the housekeeper’s quarters.

When Jessamy wakes up in the morning, she expects to find that everything that happened in the nursery during the night was a dream, but it isn’t. The room is the same one Miss Brindle gave her in the housekeeper’s quarters, but the bed and furnishings of the room are different. Jessamy is woken by a woman she’s never met before, not Miss Brindle.

This woman is the past Jessamy’s aunt, who tells her that she has had approval to stay on as the cook-housekeeper for the Parkinson family with Jessamy living with her. Not every household would accept a housekeeper with a young niece to raise, but as Nathaniel Parkinson himself says, the Parkinsons are not an ordinary family. Nathaniel Parkinson is a self-made man, from a humble background in spite of his current fortune, so he doesn’t put on airs, like other men of his current class. His granddaughter, Miss Cecily, at first disapproves of Jessamy, thinking that she might be too “common” (like the friends Jessamy’s Aunt Millicent disapproves of) and that she might not be a good influence on the children of the house, her younger siblings, who she is helping to raise. However, past Jessamy’s aunt defends her, and Nathaniel Parkinson says that she might actually be good for other children. He thinks Fanny has been acting too fine, and Kit could use the company of another child his age.

Jessamy is happy when she learns that past Jessamy has made friends with the Parkinson children and has really become part of the household. She is told that Fanny still thinks of her as being just the niece of a servant, but Kit (aka Kitto) is her special friend. Jessamy also likes this 1914 aunt better than her 1966 aunts because she seems nicer and more her kind of person. The realization that this is not a dream but that she has really traveled back in time is worrying, but Jessamy tells herself that she will somehow find her way back to her own time and that she should enjoy 1914 as much as she can while she can.

From the housemaid, Sarah, Jessamy learns that the Parkinson children live with their grandfather because their parents were killed in a carriage accident. Miss Cecily, the oldest girl in the family, takes care of her younger siblings and tries to manage the household while her oldest brother is away at Oxford. Miss Cecily is still learning about the running of a household, so past Jessamy’s aunt, Mrs. Rumbold, has to help her.

Jessamy also learns that she fell out of a tree house that she and Kit built together and that Fanny, who was also in the tree house at the time, was particularly upset by her accident. Fanny confesses to Jessamy that the reason she fell was because she pushed her. She hadn’t meant to push her out of the tree house or for her to fall, but the two of them were having an argument at the time. Fanny felt guilty about her getting hurt, but she’s still angry that Jessamy will be staying on at the house. She thinks that her grandfather and older sister decided to let her and her aunt stay partly because they felt badly about her getting hurt. Although Fanny is grateful that Jessamy didn’t tell on her for causing her accident, she still isn’t happy that Jessamy will be living with them. Fanny does put on airs, but she openly admits that she does it because everyone seems to be against her. Girls at school teasingly cough around her all the time because her grandfather made his money with his cough syrup, and since Jesssamy came, she feels like her brothers always side with Jessamy instead of her. Fanny has been in trouble before for bad behavior, and her brothers know that their grandfather has said if she does it again, he’ll send her to boarding school. Jessamy thinks that the idea of boarding school sounds exciting, but her brothers say that Fanny would hate it.

In spite of the drama with Fanny, Jessamy enjoys her time in 1914 and the other people there. She has the feeling that something important happened in 1914, and she remembers what it was when Nathaniel Parkinson and Kit talk about the possibility of war with Germany. Jessamy realizes that the coming war is going to be World War I and that it is going to start soon. Harry, the oldest boy in the Parkinson family, is back from Oxford, and he talks about how exciting it would be to be a soldier if there is a war, but Nathaniel Parkinson isn’t excited, understanding more about the nature of war than his grandchildren. Harry’s grandfather wants him to finish college, but Harry is in debt and wants to take his future into his own hands. Harry runs away, and at the same time, a valuable antique book belonging to his grandfather disappears. Jessamy doesn’t like to think that the pleasant young man stole his grandfather’s book, but what other explanation is there?

Just when Jessamy is getting caught up in the events in the Parkinson household and is concerned about the future of the past Jessamy and her aunt, Jessamy finds herself once again in 1966. Is it still possible for her to return to 1914 or learn what happened to the people she’s grown so fond of? Jessamy also begins to wonder who is the current owner of this old house and Mrs. Brindle’s employer? Learning the answers to those questions also explains a few things about Jessamy’s own family and past and gives her the one thing she really wants most.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction and Spoilers

This story is a combination of fantasy and mystery, a combination that I always like. In some ways, this story reminds me of Charlotte Sometimes because the time switching takes place between similar eras, but there are some notable differences between the two books. Charlotte Sometimes took place at a boarding school, and Charlotte went back in time to the end of WWI, not the beginning. There was also no mystery plot in Charlotte Sometimes beyond Charlotte trying to figure out how and why she is switching places with a girl in the past. Also, in Charlotte Sometimes, it isn’t clear whether Charlotte influenced or changed anything in the past, but Jessamy definitely does. The modern Jessamy had to be the one to solve the mystery because she has access to information that the past Jessamy didn’t have.

In the past, Jessamy begins investigating the mysterious theft of the valuable book. Although she knows that Harry isn’t the type to steal from his grandfather, it takes a second visit back in time for her to discover who the real thief is and to clear Harry’s name. Unfortunately, she is unable to actually find the stolen book in the past to return it to its first owner. It is through a new friend that she makes in 1966 that she learns what really happened to the book and is able to return it to the current owner of the house … an old friend of hers from 1914.

Along the way, Jessamy also learns a few things about the history of her own family. She realizes at the beginning of the story that Jessamy is an unusual name, which is why she is surprised that the girl in the past is also called Jessamy. It turns out that Jessamy is a name that is passed down through her family. She is not a direct descendant of the past Jessamy, as I first suspected, but the past Jessamy is a relative of hers. She also comes to understand that her family used to be more grand, but during the past, they fell on hard times. This is also important to the story because class differences figure into the plot.

Everyone in 1914 is concerned about class differences, but in different ways. Nathaniel Parkinson is actually the least concerned with class because he has actually shifted to a higher class during his lifetime, making him aware that people from different classes are really just people, only in different circumstances. His granddaughters are more class conscious, although both of them also soften on that after getting to know Jessamy better. Even the servants are also class conscious, with some of the servants putting on airs because they’re above other types of servants.

Something that surprised me in the story is the realization, toward the end of the book, that class differences are partly the reason why Aunt Millicent and Aunt Maggie don’t get along. Aunt Millicent’s efforts to make Jessamy more pretty and popular and have her be friends with certain people are social-climbing efforts, partly because Aunt Millicent is aware of their family’s past and wants the family to climb up from their humbled circumstances. Aunt Maggie’s disapproval of Aunt Millicent seems to come somewhat from her disapproval of Millicent’s efforts at social-climbing or trying to act like she’s more grand than she actually is. It isn’t stated explicitly, but it is heavily implied. We don’t meet Millicent in the book, but from her description, I suspect that she disapproves of Aunt Maggie because she thinks of her as being too “common.” From the characters’ descriptions of Maggie’s children, it seems like people who don’t like them think of them as being “common” or uncreative, indicating that this branch of Jessamy’s family is rather prosaic, being typical in a rather dull way.

The objective reality is probably that Jessamy’s two aunts are not very far apart in their social status, but they have different attitudes toward their social status. Aunt Maggie doesn’t care much about it. She fits in well where she is, she doesn’t care about moving up in society, and she just focuses on the children behaving well within their social status. Aunt Millicent, however, has a high opinion of who she is and where the family ought to be in society, and she is focused on moving up. Jessamy doesn’t really fit with either of her aunts’ philosophies of life. What she really wants is the chance to make real friends and fit in somewhere with people who like her and who like the sort of things she likes. She gets the opportunity at the end of the story when the current owner of the old house becomes her benefactor and arranges for her to attend boarding school, which she has said is something that she’s always wanted to do. At boarding school, Jessamy will be out from under the direct supervision of both of her aunts and will have the opportunity to develop independently and make new friends who suit her, rather than her aunts.

Even Fanny finds boarding school beneficial. We don’t know exactly how her life ended up in the 1960s, but when Fanny realizes that she’s caused problems for the past Jessamy in more ways than one and that she needs to admit the truth to her grandfather and older sister, her character develops for the better. She begins to develop empathy and compassion for the past Jessamy, looking beyond feeling sorry for herself to feeling something for another person she has directly harmed, and she reforms her character. She accepts the consequences for her actions, even though she was afraid to do so before, and it leads her to better things because the consequences are not as bad as she thought and actually help her. Although she was initially afraid of being sent away from her family, when her grandfather decides that she needs the discipline and sends her to boarding school, she discovers that she actually likes it. Going to boarding school allows her to get away from the girls who were bullying her at her local school and make new friends, and she develops some self-confidence from the experience, turning into a young lady who helps her older sister in her volunteer work for the war effort.

One final thought I had is that every time I’ve ever read a book with a sickness like whooping cough in it, I feel like it really dates the book. I know this book does have a specific date by design, and I know people still catch whooping cough in the 21st century if they haven’t been vaccinated (get your tetanus shot – in the US, the tetanus shot includes the whooping cough vaccine), but to me, this type of illness feels like a time travel back to my parents’ youths by itself. My parents and their siblings had whooping cough when they were young, but I’m almost 40 years old and have never seen a case of it myself.

Posted on by TracyC

Stepping on the Cracks

Stepping on the Cracks by Mary Downing Hahn, 1991.

This is the first book in the Gordy Smith series, although the book really focuses on a girl named Margaret. Gordy Smith is the neighborhood bully and her nemesis. The series shifts to focus more on Gordy after the full story behind his awful behavior is revealed. This story begins in August 1944 because, although they don’t mention the year, the characters talk about seeing the story about the Liberation of Paris in Life Magazine.

Eleven-year-old Margaret and her best friend, Elizabeth, both have brothers who are fighting in World War II. Margaret’s brother is in the army in Europe, and Elizabeth’s brother is in the navy in the Pacific. The two girls have their own special ritual of stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk to “break Hitler’s back”, in a twist on the old stepping on a crack childhood superstition. Margaret knows that the war is Hitler’s fault, and she blames him personally for her brother, Jimmy, having to go away and fight and for the changes in her household since then. Since the war started and her brother went away, Margaret’s father has been very grim, and she knows that her mother sometimes cries when she thinks that Margaret can’t hear her. Her parents are happiest when they imagine what life will be like when the war finally ends. Margaret keeps a scrapbook of letters Jimmy has written to her and war-related news clippings and cartoons that she’s saved that remind her of things her brother has told her about his time in the army. Margaret hates Hitler and the Nazis with a vengeance.

At the same time, Margaret thinks about how odd it is that the war doesn’t seem entirely real. She knows that people in her community have already been killed in the war overseas, and her parents are worried about Jimmy. However, apart from the missing people in the community, like Jimmy, and the stars in people’s windows to signify people who are in the armed forces or who have been killed in battle, there are few outward signs that there is a war happening. They hear about battles, but their own town of College Hill, Maryland, is peaceful. There are some shortages of things because of war rationing, but otherwise, Margaret’s life has been continuing very much as before. She’s seen pictures of starving children in war zones, and she sometimes wonders why they suffer so much, and she doesn’t.

A neighborhood bully, Gordy Smith, gives the girls trouble, and Margaret thinks of him has being like a Nazi because he’s so mean. He calls Margaret and Elizabeth “Baby Magpie” and “Lizard”, pulls their hair, and gets his friends to gang up on them. At one point, he tries to force Elizabeth to kiss him. (One of those weirdos who are clearly interested in girls but have no idea how to be charming to girls.) Gordy brags about his brother in the army, saying that his brother has killed more Nazis than the girls’ brothers and that he’s going to join the army and kill Hitler when he’s older.

Margaret tells her mother about Gordy and says that she hates his guts. However, her mother tells her that young ladies shouldn’t say words like “guts” and that she should have some sympathy for Gordy because of the kind of family he lives in and what his father is like. (Personally, I don’t think sympathy alone is what’s called for to fix Gordy’s problems, but more about that later.) Elizabeth’s father is a policeman and has arrested Gordy’s father more than once for being drunk and disorderly. People in the community think of the Smith family as being “poor white trash” and wish they would move away. The other kids in the family are as nasty and troublesome as Gordy. Margaret doesn’t think Gordy’s family circumstances should excuse his awful behavior and still hates him.

One day in late summer, before school starts, Gordy and his two friends chase the girls out of the treehouse they built. They steal the comic books they like from the girls and rip up the ones they don’t like, tossing them from the top on the tree on top of the girls. Then, they start ripping up the boards from the platform in the tree so they can use them themselves, saying that girls can’t build anything well. It takes much less time and effort for them to destroy what the girls built than it did for the girls to build it. (This is always true of any kind of destruction, so that doesn’t mean anything complimentary about the destroyers, especially if they aren’t smart enough to realize that and think they’ve got some kind of special talent that’s better than building abilities – just saying because it’s true. All this stuff from the boys is just bluster and gaslighting to intimidate the girls into letting them have what they want by implying that they never deserved the things they actually owned and built themselves.) Margaret yells for help from her mother, but her mother doesn’t hear her. Elizabeth tells the boys that their act of sabotage makes them traitors and worse than Nazis, but they laugh it off.

Elizabeth tells Margaret that they’ll get even with Gordy and the other boys for this, but Margaret can’t imagine what they could do. She would rather stay away from Gordy. That’s easier said than done because Gordy steals the next set of boards the girls try to use to rebuild their tree house, too. One day, the girls see the boys going into the woods. They know that the boys have built a hut to use as a clubhouse with the boards they’ve stolen from the girls, and Elizabeth suggests that they follow the boys to find out where their hut is. Elizabeth thinks that it would be great revenge to find their hut, take it apart, and reclaim the stolen boards. After all, they have a right to their own boards. Margaret is more hesitant because they’re not supposed to cross the train tracks into the woods, and the woods are lonely. The boys have air rifles, and if the boys caught the girls trying to take back the boards, they could do all sorts of horrible things to them with no one around to save them. However, Elizabeth impulsively dashes off into the woods, and Margaret feels like she has no choice but to go with her.

The boys catch the girls spying on them at their hideout when Margaret accidentally sneezes. At first, Margaret is sure that the boys are going to kill them when they catch them. Instead, Gordy tries to scare the girls with a story about how he and his friends have actually saved the girls from the crazy man who lives in the woods. There’s an experimental farm near the woods used by the agricultural department at the local university, and Gordy spins a story about how the army was using the farm for an experiment on soldiers, using chemicals to try to make them stronger and braver. Gordy insists that the man they used in the experiment went crazy and broke out of the farm and has been hiding in the woods ever since, ready to attack anybody who finds him. Elizabeth says the story is a fake because she never heard anyone else say that, but Gordy insists that he saw the crazy man standing behind the girls with a knife. Gordy tells the girls that they better stay out of the woods or the crazy man might get them next time.

Elizabeth knows that Gordy must be lying, but Margaret is sure that the story must be true when she sees a wild-looking man with shaggy hair behind the boys in the woods. Margaret screams and runs for home with Elizabeth behind her. Unfortunately, Elizabeth didn’t see the wild-looking man herself. She thinks that Margaret was just being a chicken, falling for Gordy’s story and imagining that she saw something, and she teases Margaret about it. Margaret asks her mother about the experimental farm and Gordy’s story, without admitting that she was in the woods, and her mother says that it’s nonsense, that the farm is only used for agriculture. Her mother thinks that, if there is a strange man in the woods, it’s probably just some old tramp.

It does seem like a logical explanation, that maybe there was just some old tramp hanging around the woods who didn’t know that Gordy was going to tell some wild story about a murderous crazy man and just happened to wander by at the right moment to look scary. However, Margaret just can’t convince herself that’s all there is to it.

When the girls finally get up the nerve to go back to the boys’ hut, there are unmistakable signs that someone has been living there. There is also a knife, like the one Gordy said the crazy man had. Who is staying in the boys’ hut, and what are the boys really hiding?

My Reaction and Spoilers

I mostly think of Mary Downing Hahn for her ghost stories, like Wait Till Helen Comes and The Doll in the Garden, but this was actually the first book that I ever read by this author. I think I read it when I was in elementary or middle school. Because of some of the serious subjects of the book and some of the language used, this isn’t a book for young kids. It’s probably best for middle school.

America in the 1940s

This book is a realistic portrayal of life on the American home front during the war. I enjoyed the mentions of little things that were common in 1940s America, like the popular radio programs that people liked to listen to (like the Lone Ranger, the mystery horror show Inner Sanctum, and the children’s program Let’s Pretend), comic books and newspaper cartoons, magazines like Life and The Saturday Evening Post, and “Kilroy was here” graffiti. Sometimes, characters mention 1940s celebrities. After Gordy tries to make Elizabeth kiss him, she tells Margaret that a star like Joan Crawford would slap any guy who got “fresh” with her. Later, the girls overhear the boys talking about which pin-up girls they think are the most sexy, mentioning Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth.

Note: The boys’ “sexy” talk is at a realistically juvenile level, laughing over pictures of pin-up girls with big breasts and using the word “hubba-hubba.” An adult hearing a conversation like this knows that the boys probably feel grown-up for secretly smoking cigarettes at their hideout while talking about sexy women, but at the same time, they plainly sound like little boys who use words like “hubba-hubba” because that’s as sophisticated as they know how to be. They have nothing else to say on this subject. As Elizabeth and Margaret could attest, these boys have never successfully kissed a girl at this point in their lives because they’ve been making themselves unappealing to the girls in their vicinity by the mean and obnoxious ways they act. When the girls later go inside the boys’ hut, they see that the boys have defaced their pin-up pictures by giving all the girls beards and blackened teeth. They are definitely not young Casanovas.

This was the first book that introduced me to the concept of putting banners with stars in the window as a sign that someone in the family is in the armed forces. A blue star indicated (and still indicates) a living service member or veteran. A gold star means that the service member died in action. That’s important to the story because, even at the beginning of the book, Margaret knows what the blue stars and gold stars mean, and she already knows people in her community who were killed in the war. One of the people in the community who has died in the war was a young man called Butch who was killed only months after he got married. His widow, Barbara, gave birth to their son after his death, so Butch never saw him. Margaret is sad when she thinks about Butch and his family because she can remember when Butch was a local hero as quarterback on the high school football team. Later, Margaret’s brother, Jimmy, is also killed in the war, and the family replaces his blue star with a gold one, while Elizabeth’s family still has a blue star because Elizabeth’s brother, Joe, is still alive.

Danger and Safety

There are a lot of themes about safety and danger in the story, both real and perceived. When Margaret thinks about the crazy man Gordy says is living in the woods, she thinks that she would feel safer if Jimmy was home because Jimmy would protect her. Yet, when she thinks about Butch getting killed, Margaret realizes that, when big, strong, young men can be suddenly killed, nobody is ever really safe. Even the strongest men she knows are not completely invulnerable, and there are big, frightening, unpredictable things happening in the world.

At one point in the story, the girls talk about what they would do if girls were sent away to war like their brothers. Elizabeth brags about how brave she would be, but Margaret freely admits that she’s a coward and everyone knows it. Margaret imagines that, if she were out on a battlefield, she would probably drop to the ground and play dead until it was all over.

Later, when the girls learn the truth about Gordy, it brings the full realities of the war home to them and challenges everything that Elizabeth thinks about bravery and cowardice. The truth is that Gordy built the hut to hide his brother, Stuart. While one of Gordy’s brothers really did become a soldier and Gordy brags about him, Stuart became an army deserter. When Elizabeth finds out, she’s furious because her brother and Margaret’s are risking their lives, and she thinks that Stuart is a coward, letting others die for him and their country because he’s too afraid to fight. However, when the girls confront Stuart, Gordy, and the other boys about the situation, they learn that it’s more complicated than that. It takes Elizabeth longer to see how complicated the situation really is, but Margaret understands when Stuart describes his feelings.

Stuart is a pacifist. He’s not a coward or a Nazi sympathizer, as Elizabeth first accuses him. His logic is that two wrongs don’t make a right. While Hitler might want to take over the world and send people out to kill others, Stuart knows that the men who get sent away to be soldiers mostly don’t want to be soldiers at all and have no real desire to kill anyone else. If they had their choice, they would just be living their own lives and minding their own business at home. His speech makes Margaret really think for the first time about the war from the point of view of the soldiers on the ground. When her brother was drafted, Margaret never asked him how he felt about going away to war, just assuming that he’d want to defend his country and beat the Nazis. Now, she regrets not asking him about his feelings and wonders if he was scared or if he went reluctantly. For the first time, she also has to confront the reality that her brother has been actively killing or helping to kill other people. Stuart deserted because he simply couldn’t face the prospect of killing someone. He shows the girls a letter he got from their other brother, Donald, the one who became a soldier, telling him how horrible the war is and how they’ve sometimes killed civilians and even allies because of mistakes they’ve made. Stuart also introduces the girls to the poem The Man He Killed by Thomas Hardy. Margaret wonders how Jimmy felt about the idea of killing other people and if it’s really sane to be okay with the idea of killing. Margaret has always looked up to her older brother, seeing him as a protector, never thinking of him as a killer, but yet, he is actively engaging in killing. He doesn’t tell Margaret that part of things in his letters to her, but she realizes that’s what actually happening in Europe.

Finding out about Stuart creates a real problem for the girls. Because army desertion is illegal, the girls know they should tell someone about Stuart, but Gordy tells them that the hard reality is that deserters either get arrested or shot. If they report Stuart, they could be sending him to his death. Elizabeth, being the more brash and hard-hearted one, says that she doesn’t care because it would be no more than what he deserves (although she later takes that back). Instead, she settles for blackmailing Gordy and his friends into stopping their bullying of the girls and helping them rebuild their tree house.

However, the kids soon realize that Stuart can’t stay their secret forever. Stuart has gotten sick, and if he doesn’t get help, he could just die in the woods. Stuart was hoping that the war might just end, and people would stop caring about whether he’d joined the army or deserted, but nobody in 1944 knows when that’s going to happen. From their perspective, it could be months (close to the reality) or years. The war has been going on for years already. Stuart won’t survive in the woods for that long.

The kids also confront the reality that, while two wrongs don’t make a right when it comes to fighting, just standing back and doing nothing while other people are doing wrong is also wrong. Elizabeth is the first of the children to point out that the entire reason why desertion is illegal is that, if everyone just decided to opt out of fighting, people like Hitler would run overrun everyone because no one would put up a resistance. Leaving aside what the characters decide to do about Stuart for the moment, that brings me to the problems with Gordy and the people who should be responsible for him and aren’t.

Gordy’s Problems

I’m frequently the first to say, as Margaret does in the story, that just coming from a bad background shouldn’t allow a person to get a free pass on being a bully themselves. Two wrongs really don’t make a right, and to my way of thinking, people who bully others because they’ve been bullied themselves are bad because they’re doing to completely innocent people what they already know they hate being done to themselves. However, unlike what Margaret’s mother said earlier about how she wishes Margaret would have more sympathy for Gordy, I quickly realized that, first, sympathy is insufficient in situations like this, and second, Margaret’s mother is not really motivated by sympathy for Gordy. She has other, less admirable reasons for looking the other way, even when she knows exactly what’s going on in Gordy’s family and that he is actively abusing her own daughter.

Gordy frequently gets away with his bullying because people are afraid of both him and his father. On the way to school, when Gordy rips up Elizabeth’s homework and stomps on her school supplies to break them, and the crossing guards see it happen. However, even though it’s part of their duty to report things like this, they don’t want to do it. When Elizabeth asks them if they’re going to report it to their teacher, they make excuses about how that might be tattling and make their teacher mad and how it would be just their word against Gordy’s (ignoring the evidence of the ripped papers and broken school supplies). The reality is that they’re afraid of Gordy doing something to them in revenge. Elizabeth asks them if that means that she’s just going to have to suffer what Gordy does to her while Gordy gets away with it because they’re too afraid to said anything. The crossing guards are further afraid to give her a straight answer because everyone involved knows that the answer is, yes, that’s exactly what’s going to happen, and that’s exactly the reason why it’s going to happen. The crossing guards know that Gordy is going to continue being an abusive bully, and they know they’re going to let him do it without saying a word, and they know the reason why they’re going to do that is because they are scared. They’re not willing to put themselves on the line to protect Elizabeth even though that is a part of their job. Elizabeth, knowing all of this, tells them they’re cowards, and it’s the truth. Unfortunately, there are times when apparent cowardice can also be necessary self-preservation from a greater insanity, and much as I hate to admit it, this might be one of those situations.

There is the underlying problem in this community, and that’s the behavior of the adults. Part of the reason why the young crossing guards are so cowardly about the class bully is that they know darn well that no adult in their community is likely to act on anything they tell them about Gordy. Even if their teacher punishes Gordy temporarily by suspending him from school, Gordy will come back, mean and horrible as ever, with revenge on his mind. No adult is going to get to the real root of Gordy’s problems and solve them, so Gordy will continue to be a problem. It appears to be common knowledge in the community that Gordy’s father is an abusive drunk. Elizabeth and Margaret know it, and I think his teacher probably knows it, too. Gordy comes to school with a black eye. Barbara talks about it with the girls, saying that Stuart used to help protect Gordy from the worst of his father’s abuse and that Gordy needs someone to take care of him. Nobody can avoid knowing that the Smiths are an extremely troubled family. After Margaret and Elizabeth go to Gordy’s house to find him and witness Gordy’s father’s behavior for themselves, Margaret tries to talk to her mother about it, and her mother just says that what people do in their own houses is their business and they can’t interfere. That, right there, is part of the root of Gordy’s problems. The first root is his father’s drunken abuse, the second root is knowing that the adults in his community are aware of the situation and are deliberately looking the other way, and the third root are his own choices that prevent other people from getting close enough to help.

For the moment, I’d like to focus on Margaret’s mother and her non-interference policy when it comes to child abuse. A major part of the reason why Gordy continues to be abused by his father and why Gordy is able continue bullying and abusing other kids is exactly this policy of looking the other way. I think all of the adults in this community feel similarly, and I think a major part of the reason they do it is because the adults are scared of Gordy’s father and what he might do to them. Letting him beat his wife and children probably doesn’t feel great, but these adults excuse themselves for allowing that to repeatedly happen with their full knowledge by saying out loud that it’s none of their business while quietly thinking that letting a kid be beaten is better than being beaten or killed by this crazy man themselves. Apart from occasionally arresting Mr. Smith for getting publicly drunk and disorderly, after which he is released when he sobers up, nobody in the community, not even Elizabeth’s police officer father, does anything. The kids are the most active characters in the story, and the adults, like Margaret’s mother, want to shut them down from talking about it so they won’t have to feel like they should be doing something when they’re not. It doesn’t make the problem go away, but it does allow the adults to lie to themselves and pretend like it’s not a problem that they will have to deal with eventually, which is almost the same in the adults’ minds.

It is fitting that this is a World War II story because the situation with Gordy has parallels within the war itself. The United States initially didn’t want to become involved with the war because they saw what Hitler was doing as a European matter. People in the US didn’t want to become involved in the war because they knew it would mean risking their lives, and it wasn’t something they wanted to do if it wasn’t their problem and if it could be resolved without them. Self-preservation is a sign of sanity, but the problem with that mindset is that it doesn’t take into account the larger picture and the full, hard realities of the situations. Sometimes, even when you don’t go looking for trouble, trouble can come looking for you. The US wasn’t officially involved in the war effort except as a supplier until Pearl Harbor. That attack on the US naval fleet brought it home to the American public that it didn’t matter whether they wanted to be involved or not if another country decided to actively involve them.

It’s a similar situation with Gordy. Nobody wants Gordy to bully them, but he does it anyway. It doesn’t matter if the girls are in their own tree house in Margaret’s front yard, minding their own business; Gordy comes after them to destroy the tree house and steal the boards. Margaret’s parents know what happened, but they do nothing. All through the book, Margaret has times when she feels unsafe, but her parents don’t protect her from the closest and most obvious dangers, even when she tells her mother about them. Margaret’s parents don’t protect her because they are scared themselves and don’t want to get involved, even though they are already involved because it’s their daughter being abused … not unlike a deserter who flees the army to avoid fighting when his country is attacked.

Margaret would be the first to admit that she’s not the bravest person around, but yet, she is braver than many others around her because she can and will take action even when she’s scared. For most of the book, Margaret only gets into scrapes when she’s goaded into them by Elizabeth, but even Elizabeth observes that Margaret follows through once she starts something or sees that something needs to be done. The adults in the community can’t say the same. The abuse going on in the Smith household hasn’t stayed privately in the Smith household at all. It’s gone out into the community through Gordy and the other Smith children. It’s a public matter because Mr. Smith is repeatedly drunk and disorderly and intimidating to every adult in the community. It’s everyone’s business because everyone is suffering the results. However, the adults find it easier to keep telling themselves that they don’t need to do anything about it because they can’t deal with the discomfort that would come from a professional community intervention (or tell themselves they can’t deal with it, which isn’t quite the same thing), which is the one and only thing that could probably save the Smith family at this point, and by extension, everyone who’s been suffering from the second-hand bullying and abuse delivered by Gordy. While one person alone would genuinely be in danger from standing up to Gordy’s father, a concerted community effort including the police, local medical professionals, and the principal and teachers from the school showing a united front would be a safer and saner option. There is safety in numbers, provided that the “numbers” can get up the nerve to join the numbers.

I think Gordy should be held accountable for the things he’s done, and I think some reasonable adult should also point out to him that he’s been a fool to cultivate enemies instead of allies. Although Margaret and Elizabeth eventually become his allies for this adventure, sympathetic to the abuse that Gordy has suffered and to Stuart’s situation, if he had been nicer to them from the beginning, he would have gotten help for himself and his brother much sooner. Gordy is bitter toward other people in the community because he’s fully aware that they all refer to him and his family as “white trash”, although I think he should also be aware that it’s their behavior that causes people to look at them that way. Gordy himself has partly caused and perpetuated that image because of everything he does on a daily basis. While Gordy can’t help that his father is an abusive drunk, he can help being a bully himself, and as long as he acts like that, people will treat him as the bully he is and try to avoid him rather than give him the help he really needs. His father is his worst enemy, the adults in this town are largely useless, and Gordy is not only hurting others but sabotaging himself. Even when the girls try to help Gordy, they find it hard because he’s still mean to them and fights them every step of the way.

One final note I have is to point out that, while I’ve heard many kinds of insults and racial slurs in my life, the term “white trash” is possibly the only term I know that’s both an insulting slur to the people it’s used against and to an entire group of people who aren’t explicitly mention in the slur at the exact same time. That didn’t occur to me when I was a kid, but as an adult, I realize now the reason why the modifier “white” is added to the insult. The modifier implies a comparison. The implication is that the person using the term thinks that non-white people are “trash”, and they’re telling another white person that they’re also a kind of “trash” like that, as bad or maybe worse because, as a white person, they should be able to help their situation but aren’t helping themselves because they’re somehow inferior. It’s true that Gordy and others in his family haven’t been helping matters because they make it difficult for other people to help them, but it’s still a very weird dual insult.

Posted on by TracyC

Crispin and the Cross of Lead

Crispin: The Cross of Lead by Avi, 2002.

The story begins in 1377 in England. It begins with the death of the boy’s mother, Asta. The boy is only known as “Asta’s son” at this point. Nobody has ever called him anything else for as long as he can remember. Even his mother only called him “Son.” He is 13 years old and has no knowledge of who his father was, although his mother told him that he died of the Plague before he was born. As a fatherless child, he was often taunted by others in their little village, and he noticed that no one really seemed to like his mother, although he never really understood why. The only real friend they’ve had is the village priest. With his mother gone and John Aycliffe, the steward of the manor of Lord Furnival that controls the area where they live, demanding his only ox as the death tax for his mother, the boy fears starvation.

As a bleak future lies before the boy, something happens which makes his situation even more dire. He witnesses a secret meeting between John Aycliffe and a mysterious stranger. The boy doesn’t understand the significance of the meeting, but Aycliffe catches him watching and tries to kill him. The boy escapes, but it soon becomes clear that he can’t go home again. Aycliffe has people hunting for him, and he overhears a couple of them talking, saying that the steward has accuse him of stealing from him. No one actually likes Aycliffe and they don’t really believe that the boy is a thief, but they have no choice but to follow the steward’s orders because he’s a relative of Lord Furnival’s wife, and that’s how he gained his position.

Not knowing why Aycliffe has framed him for theft and not having anywhere else to go, the boy turns to the village priest for help. He discusses the meeting he witnessed between Aycliffe and the mysterious stranger, and the priest reveals that Lord Furnival, who has been away, fighting, has returned home but is now dying. The stranger, Sir Richard du Brey, brought the news of Lord Furnival’s impending death, but the boy knows that Aycliffe and du Brey seemed concerned about another matter, something they said posed a threat to them.

The priest tells the boy that Aycliffe means to have him killed and that his only choice is to run away. The boy doesn’t see how he can do that or where he’s supposed to go because he has lived all of his life as a serf, bound to the land. The priest tells him that he needs to go to a big town and stay there for a year and a day to gain his freedom from serfdom (this was a true historical way for people to escape serfdom in the Middle Ages). The priest also tells the boy that his real name is Crispin, but his mother didn’t want anyone else to know, for reasons that he doesn’t explain. He asks Crispin if his mother ever told him anything about his father, but the boy just says that all he knows is that his father is dead. Crispin asks the priest if there’s something that he’s not telling him about his mother, but the priest doesn’t explain. Instead, he tells Crispin that the most important thing is for him to get away. He tells Crispin to hide in the woods while he gathers some things to help him on his journey, and he promises to tell him more about his father when they see each other again. He says that it would be safer for Crispin to know more right before he leaves. (You just know that when someone has something important to say but would prefer to say it later, that person is probably doomed.)

When Crispin waits for the priest to come for him later, a boy from the village shows up instead, saying that the priest sent him. The boy, Cerdic, guides him to Goodwife Peregrine’s house, and she advises him to go to the south because the steward’s men are searching the road to the north. She gives him some food and a cross made of lead in a leather pouch. Before Crispin leaves the village, however, Cerdic says that maybe he should head north after all because the steward might have been lying about searching the north, just to make Crispin think that he should go south. Cerdic says that the priest told him that the best way for Crispin to go would be west because that’s what everyone would least expect. It would be the last thing anyone would expect because the Lord Furnival’s manor house lies in that direction. However, Crispin soon discovers that he has been led into a trap and that the steward is waiting for him. He manages to escape, but he discovers that the priest has been murdered, preventing him from telling him whatever he knew.

Crispin wanders by himself until he finds an empty village where everyone was apparently killed by the Plague. However, there is one other person in the village, a traveling entertainer. The entertainer gives Crispin some food, but he also forces him to tell him his story. Realizing that the boy is a runaway, he forces Crispin to become his servant on the principle that a runaway serf can be taken by anyone. Crispin doesn’t want him for a master, but he has no choice because, if he refuses, the entertainer could easily turn him over to the steward at his former manor, where he would be killed.

The entertainer explains that his name is Orson Hrothgar, but his nickname is Bear because he is a large man. He shows Crispin his juggling and explains that’s how he makes his living. He asks Crispin what he can do, but all Crispin knows is the farming he did as a serf. Bear says that there is no way he could make a living on those skills in any city he went to and he’s going to have to acquire some new ones. Bear is a strange master, giving orders like a tyrant but at the same time claiming to hate tyranny and keeping Crispin firmly in his service while refusing to be called “sir” because he thinks that it makes Crispin sound too servile. As Bear and Crispin get to know each other, it starts becoming obvious that Bear is actually trying to help Crispin when he’s hard on him and even forcing him to serve him is actually in Crispin’s favor because Crispin doesn’t know how to survive by himself in the wider world and hesitates to make decisions for himself without guidance or orders from someone. The threat against Crispin’s life is real, and he’s gong to need help and guidance to survive.

Bear teaches Crispin how to sing and juggle so he can perform with him, but he also teaches the boy how to have some respect for himself and how to take charge of his own life. He can tell that Crispin has been badly neglected in his early life, taught only to obey orders and not ask questions. Because, for a long time, Crispin didn’t even know he own name, he thinks of himself as basically a nobody who doesn’t have a place in the world and isn’t worth anything to anyone. Bear takes Crispin in hand and shows him that his life and his own self are what he decides to make of them.

Bear’s own history is a strange story, and he tells Crispin how his father originally enrolled him in a Benedictine abbey at a young age to be a monk. While he was there, he learned to read and actually became a scholar, but before he took his final vows, he happened to meet a group of mummers, and he was charmed by the life of a traveling entertainer. He abandoned the abbey and traveled with the mummers for a time. He has also been a soldier, and during his time as a soldier, he met Lord Furnival. Crispin asks him what Lord Furnival is like because, even though he has always served on his land, he’s never actually met him. Bear describes Lord Furnival as a cruel man who used other men for his own gain and killed them when he had no use for them.

When they arrive at a new town, Bear assumes that Crispin will be safe to perform in public, having left his enemies behind because few people would pursue a poor boy of no important family or position over the theft that he was accused of doing back in his village. However, Crispin is alarmed to see Aycliffe as they enter the town. Bear realizes that there must be more to Crispin and his situation than even he knows. The murder of the priest back in the village is a shocking crime and must have been intended to silence him from telling whatever he knew. If Aycliffe poses a threat to Crispin, it seems that Crispin must also somehow pose a threat to him, a threat that he thinks must be eliminated. Discovering the reason for targeting Crispin also means unraveling the secrets of Crispin’s past and parentage, and along the way, Crispin also comes to a new vision of the future that he may build for himself.

There is a section in the back of the book which explains the history of this time period and some of the wider events that are a part of this story. The copy I read also had the text of an interview with the author.

This book is a Newbery Medal winner. It is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). There is also a sequel to this book called Crispin at the Edge of the World.

My Reaction and Spoilers

I read this book partly because I liked Midnight Magic by the same author, and I was pleased to see another mystery story by Avi set in Medieval times. However, the two books have a very different tone from each other. Midnight Magic featured palace intrigue and possible murder, but it was a spooky mystery adventure. Although there were dark themes, it had a sense of whimsy and fun adventure to it, playing with superstitions and a kind of spooky prank, even though it had high stakes. Crispin begins immediately with a mystery orphan who has people who are actively trying to kill him for reasons he doesn’t understand and who is forced to flee for his life. It’s much darker and more serious in tone, and there are parts where dead bodies are actually described in detail. This is definitely not a book for young kids!

The mystery in the story centers around the boy’s true identity and parentage. I thought it was obvious even from the beginning that the boy’s father would turn out to be someone important, whose identity might become known through the deaths of his mother and Lord Furnival and who might pose a threat to the villains in the story through whatever position and inheritance he might have.

It isn’t that much of a surprise that Lord Furnival is Crispin’s father. When he was alive (he dies during the story), he used women for his purposes as well as men. Crispin is not the only child he had by women other than his wife, who apparently, was unable to bear children. The story doesn’t explain who Crispin’s other half-siblings might be or where they are, but the other characters quickly realize that the reason why Lady Furnival and her kinsman, Aycliffe, want Crispin dead is that he might make a claim on his estate, or worse yet, other people might use Crispin to undermine their power. This is a dangerous time, and many people are competing for power and influence. Crispin’s mother was also no ordinary peasant girl. She has kin who are still alive and may be in a position to use Crispin and whatever inheritance or title he could claim to solidify their own positions. Even Crispin’s grandfather, if he became aware of the boy’s existence, might look at Crispin less as a beloved but previously unknown grandson, but more as an unexpected windfall that he could control and use to his advantage. Bear is really the only person who cares about Crispin’s welfare for his own sake, not for what he might be able to gain or achieve through him.

The plot is further complicated because it turns out that Bear is no ordinary entertainer. He turns out to be involved with a real historical character, John Ball, the priest who helped lead the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The pieces of philosophy that Bear discusses with Crispin throughout the story are not just academic, and for all of Bear’s apparent lightness as an entertainer, he is actually a deeply serious man who is participating in a clandestine organization that plans to put his principles into action in the form of a rebellion. In his travels, Bear acts as a kind of spy, carrying information to different leaders of his group. There are indications in the story of social unrest and the coming violence. Sadly, in real life, most of the leaders of this revolt were caught and put to death, including John Ball. This endeavor isn’t going to work out well for Bear’s associates and maybe not even for Bear himself, and that probably figures into the sequel to this book.

I particularly liked this book for the inclusion of many small historical details. Throughout the story, Bear and Crispin discuss aspects of Medieval law, social structure, and religion in England, and there are also some details about daily life and the Plague. The only Christian religion in the book is Catholic because the story takes place prior to the Reformation, so all of the religious talk in the book is from that perspective, although Bear and Crispin debate with each other about the role of God in determining a person’s position in life and human decisions (like when a person should wait to act on divine guidance vs making decisions for themselves) and the use of religious objects (like whether Crispin’s lead cross serves a purpose in prayer or if prayer should simply be private and mental, with no outside sign), which leaves room for readers to consider what they believe and their own views of the situation.

A small detail that I liked was Bear’s explanation of what the different colors of the robes of different types of monks mean. The different orders of monks and priests – Dominican (white robes), Franciscan (brown), and Benedictine (black) – still exist in modern times and still have a somewhat different focus from each other in their activities. As a Catholic, I know that Dominicans are usually (but not always) the priests who celebrate public masses in local churches (Bear describes them saying, “They preach well” because that’s a major focus of what that order of clergy does), and Jesuits (who don’t exist yet at the time of this story) are typically (but not exclusively) the ones who teach in Catholic schools (which I’ve never attended – I came up exclusively through public schools) and universities (Loyola Marymount University is an example). These are the two groups I’ve seen the most in my life in the modern southwestern US, but they are not the only orders of Catholic clergy. For example, the book didn’t mention the Cistercians, who also existed at the time of this story and are basically more strict, austere versions of the Benedictines. I like this particular detail because it shows how there is depth to every subject. A non-Catholic might not know that these different orders of clergy exist, and it matters because each of these groups does have a different focus in their views, methods, and lifestyles while still falling within the sphere of being Catholic. In Medieval England, because each of these groups would have performed somewhat different functions in society because of their different focus and people of the time would have been aware of the differences between them. If you’re a fan of Dungeons and Dragons, the concept of different subclasses of clerics have real-life parallels, not just in historical polytheistic religions but even in modern monotheistic religions.

It was common for Medieval monastic orders to support themselves through agriculture (when society was largely based on agriculture, abbeys kept their own lands and animals for support), but monks, priests, and nuns could also fulfill a variety of professions and services in society, some as charity and others as paid roles to support themselves and their orders. Aside from their basic religious functions, they could act as scribes, copying, writing, and illustrating religious and historical books and manuscripts on commission (essentially, the book publishers of their day, before printing presses were available). When Bear was young, his father enrolled him in a Benedictine abbey. He explains that he learned to read in different languages there, so this was probably the work they were preparing him to do if he had continued with his training there, rather than the public preaching he would have been taught to do if he had joined the Dominican order. It was one of the functions that Benedictines were known for, and it would have been a good order for someone to join if they wanted to lead an intellectual or academic life in the Middle Ages. Bear gets much of his philosophical attitude and reflection from his early Benedictine education, although he values the independent form of free thought that he developed through his years of travel to the more strict form of traditional scholarship the abbey would provide. Religious orders that emphasized reading, writing, and learning could also provide tutors to wealthy families to teach their children these skills and clerks (derived from the word “clergyman” or “cleric”), who would keep important financial, legal, and political records for influential people in society. Abbeys and monasteries might also provide lodging for travelers in places where there were no inns, hospitals for the sick and injured, and various forms of charity for those who needed it (the social services of their time). Although joining one of these orders involved strict rules and vows of chastity and poverty (any wealth they acquired was supposed to be used to support the group and their functions rather than mere personal gain), there were opportunities for intellectual as well as spiritual development and a chance to lead a more varied life than other parts of society might provide at the time.

In their travels, Bear and Crispin see many different types of people who would all have been part of Medieval English society. Not all of their jobs and positions are described in detail, but if someone was using this book with students working on a Medieval lesson unit, they could make notes about all of the different types of people Bear and Crispin meet and look up the details of their roles in society to get a more detailed picture of the world these characters are moving through.

Posted on by TracyC

The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat

Five Find-Outers

The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat by Enid Blyton, 1944, 1966.

Bets is happy that her brother, Pip, is coming home from boarding school, and he’s bringing his friends to visit. Now that the children are reunited, Bets and the others hope that they will find another mystery to solve! The others ask Bets if anything interesting has happened since they were home last, and she says not very much, although someone has moved into the empty house next door. The new neighbor is Lady Candling, who keeps Siamese cats.

The boy who helps the gardener, Luke, is nice and allows the children to visit and see the cats. Lady Candling says that the Siamese cats are valuable prize-winning cats. She keeps them in a large cage most of the time for safety, but Miss Harmer, the housekeeper, takes one out to show the children. Unfortunately, one boy, Fatty, owns a Scottie dog named Buster, and Buster comes into the garden looking for him. Buster frightens the cat and chases her! The cat claws Buster after he chases her into the bushes, and they manage to get Buster under control, but they have trouble finding the cat. Miss Harmer is upset that her cat is lost, and Bets goes to search for the cat.

While Bets is looking for the cat, the gardener, Mr. Tupping comes to find out what the fuss is about. Mr. Tupping is a violent and short-tempered man. (They also emphasize that he has a hooked nose, which I think is probably a stereotype. Enid Blyton’s books often contain derogatory racial stereotypes, although later printings have been revised to remove them.) Mr. Tupping hates children and animals, and he grabs Buster and locks him up, threatening to beat him later. The children try to help Buster, but he chases them out of the garden. Bets is left behind, but she locates the missing cat, and Luke helps to free Buster and get Bets out of the garden without Mr. Tupping seeing her. However, Mr. Tupping threatens Luke with dire consequences if he ever lets the children into the garden again.

This is just the beginning of their troubles with Mr. Tupping. When Mr. Tupping finds out that Bets has visited Luke again, he storms into Bets’s own little garden, rips her strawberry plants out of the ground, burns them, and yells at her. Bets is afraid to report him to the adults because she’s afraid that Luke will get in more trouble with Mr. Tupping. Luke is a poor orphan who lives with his stepfather, and he desperately needs the job, which is the only reason why he continues to work with the nasty Mr. Tupping. Mr. Tupping is also friends with the local policeman, and the children know that the local policeman resents them for solving a mystery before he did, so they’re sure that he will side with Mr. Tupping, no matter what they say about him.

Then, Lady Candling’s prize cat, Dark Queen, disappears, and Luke is blamed for stealing her! The children are sure that Luke is being framed for the cat-napping, but the evidence is against him. Pip and Bets’s own mother saw the cat in its cage when she went to tea with Lady Candling, and Luke was working in a garden bed nearby. Even Luke says that no one else went near the cage between then and the time when the cat disappeared. When a wooden whistle Luke made is found in the cats’ cage, the children are sure that it was planted to frame Luke, but how can they prove it? Then, the cat reappears, and later disappears again! What is going on?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction and Spoilers

I found this story frustrating because all of the adults in the story are so oblivious to Mr. Tupping’s violence and aggression. He is actively abusive to the children and animals, but nobody seems to notice or even inquire about signs of trouble. Bets’s mother never seems to notice that all of her daughter’s strawberry plants have suddenly disappeared from her garden and never asks her daughter what happened. Mr. Tupping is able to just march onto the family’s property and abuse an 8-year-old girl with complete impunity, and her mother never notices a thing. (Of course, if I were the girl in question, I would have done what I used to do when I was picked on as a kid – take a deep breath, throw back my head, and scream continuously until help arrives. I figured out at a young age that if you scream from your diaphragm, you can get extra volume and keep the scream going for longer without straining your throat, and it’s difficult for the adults to ignore. You can’t scream like that at every inconvenience or people will start to ignore it, but it’s definitely an attention-getter if you use it when it really counts! Just let Mr. Tupping explain his presence and actions when the adults come to find out why their daughter is screaming like she’s being murdered!)

Mr. Tupping is a very obvious villain. He’s also the first person on the scene each time the cat disappears, the one who strategically assigns Luke to work near the cats’ cages just before the prize cat disappears each time, and the keeper of the key to the cats’ cages when Miss Harmer is away, which she is each time the prize cat disappears. Yet, even though he has means (the key), motive (he hates the kids and animals and wants to get rid of Luke), and opportunity (always the first person in the cats’ cages whenever the cat disappears and the one person who controls where Luke is working), all of the adults immediately look at Luke as the thief, never even questioning Mr. Tupping. An adult would be more likely than a kid to know where to sell a prize-winning cat (heck, as a an adult, I wouldn’t even know where to deal in black market animals), but nope, all of the adults first think a kid did it, like kids have those kinds of criminal connections to the prize cat black market. It drove me completely crazy!

It’s worse because Mr. Tupping is friends with the local policeman and gets favoritism because of it. When the kids consult their friend who is a police inspector, he finds out that Mr. Tupping has a police record for being involved in a dog-napping case (surprise, surprise), which establishes his criminal history and connections to people who deal in stolen animals. I was disgusted that the local policeman never looked into his background himself, but I felt a little better when the inspector reprimands him for making friends with a criminal and overlooking evidence that implicated him and trying to prevent the children from bringing evidence and concerns to light. The local policeman is embarrassed, but at that point, I felt like he deserved to be.

The villain was obvious, but what saved this mystery was that he actually used a clever trick to confuse the time when he actually took the cat. I knew from the beginning who the cat thief was, so the real mystery for me was how he got the cat out of its cage without people seeing him. It turns out that Mr. Tupping takes the cat earlier in the day than everyone thought the cat was stolen. The Siamese cats look very much alike, but the one that was stolen had a marking that was different from the others. With a bit of paint, Mr. Tupping makes a different cat look like the missing one for most of the afternoon, quickly using a bit of turpentine to remove the paint at a strategic moment to make it seem like the cat disappeared at a time when Luke was near the cats’ cages.

Posted on by TracyC

Five Go to Demon’s Rocks

Famous Five

Five Go to Demon’s Rocks by Enid Blyton, 1961.

Uncle Quentin and Aunt Fanny are expecting their daughter George and her three cousins and dog to come for a visit because their parents are going away on a cruise when Uncle Quentin hears from a friend of his, a professor, who also wants to come for a visit to discuss his latest invention.  Aunt Fanny says that they won’t be able to accommodate the children and the professor at the same time, and Uncle Quentin had better tell the professor not to come. However, Professor Haling is already on his way, and he’s bringing his son with him.  The children have also already left home, so there’s nothing for them to do but try to accommodate their guests as well as they can.

It’s not going to be an easy visit.  Uncle Quentin and Professor Haling both want quiet to discuss their work, but the professor’s nine-year-old son, Tinker, is obsessed with cars and keeps making noises to imitate them.  Tinker has also brought his pet monkey, Mischief, with him.  At first, Mischief and George’s dog, Timmy, don’t get along with each other.  The animals eventually make peace with each other, but Uncle Quentin and Professor Haling decide that they can’t put up with the children’s noise.  Uncle Quentin insists that Aunt Fanny send the children away somewhere so they can continue their important work. 

Aunt Fanny doesn’t like it that such important men, who are admittedly working on things that will help people, don’t seem as interested in making their families happy, and George points out the hypocrisy that Uncle Quentin can’t stand their noise when he often slams doors that interrupt her studies and that he wants to push her out of the home where she lives, too.  Aunt Fanny says that part of the problem is that George and her father are too much alike, but the noise issue and overcrowding in the house are still problems that have to be solved.

The children ask if they can go camping, but Aunt Fanny says that it’s too cold for that.  Tinker suggests that they could all go to his lighthouse. They ask him what he means by “his” lighthouse, and Tinker happily explains that he owns a lighthouse. Actually, his father bought it when he was working on an important project and wanted a quiet place to stay where he wouldn’t be interrupted by phone calls or visitors or other distractions. When his project was finished, he no longer cared about the lighthouse, but Tinker love it, so his father gave him the key and told him that it could be his lighthouse now. The other children are amazed at the idea of a private lighthouse, and they agree to go there. Aunt Fanny agrees to let them go, and they begin planning for the trip. It’s at a place called Demon’s Rocks.

On the way to the lighthouse, their taxi driver, who was born at Demon’s Rocks tells them a little about the history and legends of the place. He says that it’s called Demon’s Rocks because there are formidable rocks there that people say could only have been placed by demons. The old lighthouse was meant to steer ships away from the rocks, but one time, some wreckers captured the lighthouse keeper and turned off the light to intentionally wreck a ship so they could raid the wreck for its cargo. The driver says that his great-grandfather still lives in the area, and if they ask him, he can tell them more stories about the place and maybe show them the cave where the wreckers used to hide out.

When the children meet the taxi driver’s great-grandfather, Jeremiah, he is an eccentric old man, but he likes children and even knows how to get along with Mischief the monkey. The children ask him about the wreckers, and he tells them the story about how One-Ear Bill and his wreckers put out the light in the lighthouse and used a lamp to misdirect a ship to make it crash. Jeremiah says he witnessed what they did and reported them, sending One-Ear Bill to prison. But, he says that One-Ear Bill didn’t care that much about going to prison because he hid the treasure that he took from the wrecked ship and expected to be rich when he got out. However, he died in prison, and nobody ever found the hidden treasure. The relatives of the other wreckers have tried to find it, but nobody has ever succeeded. The children are fascinated by the story and ask Jeremiah if he will show them the wreckers’ cave, and he agrees to show them sometime.

A local shopkeeper says that there is a kind of rivalry between Jeremiah and the descendants of the wreckers because the wreckers’ descendants make a marginal living by giving paid tours of the wreckers’ cave. The children don’t really expect that there’s still a treasure hidden in or around the cave. They think that, probably, someone found the treasure years ago and didn’t tell anyone or that the treasure might have been in some insecure spot and got washed out to sea.

However, strange things soon start happening. Someone steals the key to the lighthouse when Tinker leaves it in the lock and some other things from the lighthouse. The local police discover one of the wreckers’ descendants, Jacob, stole the things from the lighthouse, and the children get them back, but they can’t find the key on Jacob.

Then, when Jeremiah gives the children a tour of the cave, Mischief gets lost and finds a gold coin. The children aren’t sure where Mischief found the coin or if there are any others, but they begin to think that maybe the treasure is still in the cave after all. They also begin to consider that there may be a tunnel that leads from the lighthouse to the cave. However, someone else seems to have the same idea, and they’re trying to stop the children from finding the treasure before they do!

My Reaction

Part of the concept of the Famous Five series is that the children are very independent and have adventures that are unsupervised by adults. Children like stories about independent kids, but as an adult, I’m still struck by the family relationships the children have. I’ve noticed that the adults in Enid Blyton’s stories often have personal issues or dysfunctional relationships.

The reason why the children are having their independent adventure in this story is that the children’s fathers are too absorbed in their work and bothered by the presence of the children, so they just want them out of the house. Although George likes having adventures with her cousins, she does feel a little resentful that her father is basically pushing her and the others out of the house. I particularly noticed the part where Aunt Fanny reflects that important men who are working on things that will help people, don’t seem as interested in making their families happy. Uncle Quentin seems oblivious about the effect he has on his family, and when the children are getting ready to go to the lighthouse, he seems confused about where they are going, apparently having even forgotten that they were going anywhere. I keep getting the feeling that part of the reason why the children are so independent is that the adults in their family aren’t particularly nurturing and don’t make their home lives very pleasant.

Tinker’s home life isn’t terribly happy, either. His father is very permissive, letting him have a pet monkey and even giving him the lighthouse, but he also seems pretty oblivious to the things Tinker does. The other children find out that Tinker’s mother died giving birth to him, and with his father so utterly absorbed in his work, Tinker hasn’t had much supervision or guidance in how to behave, which is why he’s so wild. Tinker’s father takes him places and lets him have things or do things that other children can’t, but he doesn’t seem to get much personal attention or affection from his father. At one point, the other children are sending post cards home, and Tinker says there’s no point in sending one to his father because he won’t read it. That says a lot, and the other children feel sorry for him.

What I’m saying is, while I like the adventure and would have loved that sense of freedom as a kid, as an adult, I recognize that behind the children’s independence in many of the stories are some unresolved family issues and self-absorbed adults. The adults don’t worry as much about the children as most parents would, not only because they trust them on their own, but because they seem too absorbed in their own issues to think that much about what the children are doing and what could happen to them. The children go to boarding school much of the time, but their parents don’t seem too eager to spend time with them and bond as a family during their breaks, content to let them go off by themselves so they can get back to what they were doing. This also seems to be the case in other series by Blyton, like the Adventure series, which starts off with a pair of siblings going to stay with an aunt and uncle who seem to have a dysfunctional marriage and a pair of orphans who live with a strict uncle who seems to see them as a nuisance. Since the kids are fictional and the children’s circumstances are only there to set up their adventures, it’s not that big of an issue to enjoying the adventure, but yet, as an adult, these things do jump out at me.

Posted on by TracyC · 4 Comments

Five Go to Mystery Moor

The Famous Five

Five Go to Mystery Moor by Enid Blyton, 1954, 1974.

The girls, George and Anne are attending a riding school, and the boys, Julian and Dick, are camping when George receives a letter that her father is ill, and her mother wants the girls to stay on at the riding school for a while longer. The girls are disappointed and think that the boys will probably stay on at their camp, but they soon get a letter that the boys will be coming to the riding school to join the girls. The children are hoping that they will find another adventure when they’re all together again.

At the riding school, George has developed a rivalry with another girl called Henry. Henry’s real name is Henrietta, like George’s real name is Georgina, and like George, Henry likes to dress and act like a boy. However, rather than bonding over their shared interests and styles, George and Henry resent each other. (George makes a big deal of not liking to be a girl and wanting other people to look at her and refer to her as a boy. I’ve wondered whether the implication is that she’s actually transgender, without using that word to describe her, or if she’s merely a tomboy who things girl things are sissy stuff. Enid Blyton’s books are often full of the implication that boys are tougher and braver than girls, and it seems to be a mark of praise for a girl to be like a boy. In this particular book, it seems like both George and Henry are trying hard to be “not like other girls“, and the reason why they resent each other is that they’re both disgruntled to realize that at least one other girl is like them, making each of them seem less exceptional. They each seem to feel like the other is horning in on their shtick.) In spite of the rivalry between George and Henry, the other children like Henry. Eventually, George and Henry settle their differences. Henry joins the other children on some of their rides and explorations.

While the children are still at the riding school, a gypsy boy comes to the stables with an injured horse, asking for help. (They’re referred to as “gypsies” all throughout the book, although that’s considered a kind of insult. The proper name is really Romani, and they’re also sometimes called “Travelers.” The name “Gypsy” comes from an earlier misunderstanding that their ancestors were originally from Egypt, kind of like how Native Americans were mistakenly referred to as “Indians”, and the name stuck. I only use the word “gypsy” here because the author does, and I want to make sure that fans of the original book understand what I’m talking about. This note is here to clarify the difference. Gypsies are stock characters in Enid Blyton books, and they’re all pretty stereotypical.) The boy is told that it will take a few days before the horse is able to walk, let alone pull a caravan wagon. The boy is very upset because his father has a nasty temper, and he’s not willing to wait. The other children soon see how abusive the boy’s father is, and they’re sympathetic to him. Julian and Dick catch the father trying to steal a horse or reclaim his in spite of its injury during the night. When they ask him why he needs a horse so badly and can’t wait until his is properly healed, and he tells them that his group needs to go to Mystery Moor. Seeing that he’s not going to get another horse, the father decides to move on with other members of their party, leaving his son behind to tend to their horse and catch up to them when he can.

Julian, Dick, George, and Anne are intrigued by Mystery Moor, although they can’t imagine what could be there that would make someone so desperate to go there. The name of the place intrigues them, and they are told that it used to be called Misty Moor until some strange things happened there years ago. A wealthy family established a sand quarry there and built a small railroad line that crossed the moor, but they had a dispute with the gypsies who lived on the moor. The gypsies sabotaged the railroad, and when the sons of the family went to deal with the situation, they all vanished and were never seen again. The local rumor is that the gypsies probably murdered the sons, but nothing was ever proven, and to be honest, nobody really misses the sons because they weren’t nice to anybody else, either.

The children think that this is the adventure that they’ve been looking for, and when the riding school becomes crowded because of the arrival of new students, they decide that they want to go camping on Mystery Moor. They look forward to heading out onto the moor to see if they can find any traces of what happened to the missing family. However, there’s a modern mystery on the moor as well. The children spot a plane that flies low and circles the area, seemingly guided by a mysterious light. The children discover that the plane dropped a package, and that package is stuffed with packets of US money! Who would drop that much money from an airplane, and who was supposed to come pick it up?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). There is also an audiobook on YouTube. As the cover of the book notes, the Famous Five series was made into a television series, and you can sometimes find clips or episodes on YouTube.

My Reaction and Spoilers

Old and New Versions

I find that many of Enid Blyton’s mystery/adventure stories, no matter which series, are very much on par with Stratemeyer Syndicate books (Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, etc.), especially the earlier ones. On the one hand, they contain many of the elements that children love in stories – mystery and adventure, independence from parents and other adults, spooky and mysterious happenings, kids who save the day, and a lovable dog. On the other, both Enid Blyton’s books and the Stratemeyer Syndicate books were revised in later reprintings to update the language and to remove or alter racially-insensitive and offensive terms.

I didn’t know how much some of the Stratemeyer books I read as a kid had changed from their original versions because I was born in the late 20th century, after many of these revisions had already taken place and didn’t read some of the original editions until I was an adult. I was surprised. Since I grew up in the US, I didn’t read any Enid Blyton books as a child at all. They’re available here, but not nearly as popular as the various Stratemeyer Syndicate series, and many American children don’t know about them at all. I’d heard of Enid Blyton books because they were referred in other books and movies I saw, but I didn’t read any until I was an adult. By that time, I wasn’t too shocked at some of the more problematic parts of the books.

“Gypsy” isn’t really a shocking word for me because there’s less emotional baggage attached to that word from the time and place where I grew up than there is attached to certain other racial words that I’d rather not mention. When I was a kid, I thought it was a more neutral, generic word than it really is, although someone did explain to me at some point what the name comes from and that it’s not really the proper name. However, when you find out that something really bothers people or that they don’t want to be called certain things, it’s better to just call them whatever they like to call themselves. I think the later reprintings of this book use the word Traveller (British spelling) instead, like this audiobook on YouTube.

As with Stratemeyer Syndicate books, I think the revised reprintings are fine for modern children, and the earlier versions are best kept for adults with an interest in vintage and nostalgic children’s literature. I find these books interesting particularly because they have the classic setup of a mystery-solving group of children and their dog, just like the Scooby-Doo mysteries, which is something that I grew up loving! The Scooby-Doo mysteries have a similar format to the Famous Five, and the working title for the original concept of the cartoon series was Mysteries Five, which might be an indication that the writers had Enid Blyton’s books in mind.

Interesting Information

One interesting piece of trivia is that the book discusses patrins, signs that the Travellers leave for each other to indicate which way they’re going. During the course of the story, the Traveller boy leaves patrins to help the other children.

The Mystery and spoilers

Like many vintage children’s mysteries, the story leans a little more toward adventure than mystery. The Travellers are definitely the ones who are there to get the dropped packets of money, and that’s why they were so worried about getting out on the moor in time. The real mystery is why they’re doing this and where the money comes from.

Toward the end of the book, the police reveal that the money is counterfeit, and that’s why it had to be smuggled into the country. Henry is helpful to the others at a point when they’re in danger, and that helps George to reconcile with her. Because the Traveller boy’s father is abusive and is about to be arrested for smuggling counterfeit money, he is likely to be sent to a foster home, which is actually good news for him because he was unhappy with his father and afraid of him. He says he would like to live a settled life in a house where he can ride his bike to school, and George promises to give him a bicycle as a reward for helping them when they needed it.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

Five Go Off in a Caravan

The Famous Five

Five Go Off in a Caravan by Enid Blyton, 1946.

The children (Julian, Dick, Ann, George) and their dog, Timmy, are all looking forward to the summer holidays.  They’re not sure what they want to do, but they think that it would be more fun to go somewhere without the adults instead of going home, but they can’t think of anywhere they can go without adults.  They doze off in the sun while talking about it, but Timmy wakes them when a circus procession passes by.

The children are fascinated by the circus and call to a boy traveling with them, Nobby, asking him where they’re going to be performing.  Nobby says that the circus is on a break, and they’re going to be spending some time at a lake that allows them to camp there with their animals.

As the children watch the caravans of the circus going by, they think that it would be great if they could hire a caravan (horse-drawn travel trailer) and travel in it themselves.  They have a horse, Dobby, who could pull one.  The children ask their mother if they can hire a caravan, and she says that she’ll have to talk to their father about it.  It turns out that their father needs to go up north for part of the summer and wants their mother to come with them, so he thinks that it’s alright if the children want to take a caravan and camp out while they’re away.  The parents decide that the children will need to hire two caravans and borrow an extra horse because they don’t think one caravan will be enough for the four children and their dog, and they insist that the children sent them a message every day to tell them where they are and how they’re doing.

As the children discuss their plans in more detail, they decide that it will be fun to go to the lake where the circus is and get to know Nobby better.  Nobby lives with his uncle, who is the chief clown of the circus, and the children didn’t like what they saw of him before because he didn’t seem jolly at all, but they think it would be fun to be friends with Nobby and get another look at the circus animals. 

The children are eager to get started, but their parents make them pack and plan properly.  When the caravans arrive, the girls choose the red one, and the boys get the green one.  The girls take the new horse, Trotter, and the boys take Dobby for their caravan.  The adults give the children a map of places where they’re allowed to camp.  On their way to the lake, the children camp on farms that allow caravans.

When the children arrive at the lake, Nobby is glad to see them, and he introduces them to his chimpanzee, Pongo, and his terriers, Barker and Growler.  Nobby is friendly, but his Uncle Dan (called Tiger Dan) and Lou the acrobat are rough and unfriendly and don’t want the kids around.  When the children camp near the circus that night, Tiger Dan and Lou try to run them out of the campgrounds, but the children send their dog after them.  The campgrounds are public property, and there isn’t any reason why the children can’t be there.  The children think that Tiger Dan and Lou stumbled on their campsite by accident when they were trying to have some kind of secret meeting.

The next day, the children decide to go camp in the hills, as they had already planned because they know it will be cooler in the hills.  Lou takes an interest in where the children are going, but they don’t want to tell him much because they don’t want Lou and Tiger Dan coming after them to harass them again.  They find a nice place to camp up in the hills on some land belonging to a pleasant farmer and his wife, who also provide the children with food.

However, it isn’t long before Tiger Dan and Lou locate the children’s campsite and try to talk them out of camping at that spot also.  Nobby doesn’t know why Tiger Dan and Lou are up in the hills anyway.  The circus people have been buying some of their food from the farmer, but Nobby says that it’s always the women who go to the farm to buy things, not the men.  It seems like Tiger Dan and Lou are up to something suspicious, but the children don’t know what.

Then, suddenly, the men seem to change their views of the children, encouraging Nobby to be friends with them and to bring the children to visit the circus camp.  The children are suspicious and leave Timmy to guard their caravans while they visit the circus camp, just in case the men try to mess with their camp while they’re gone.  When they return to their own camp, the children discover that the men have tried to poison Timmy with tainted meat!  Fortunately, Timmy didn’t eat the meat, but unfortunately, one of Nobby’s dogs eats some and is violently ill.  The children aren’t sure whether the little dog will survive or not, and they don’t know why the bad men want to get rid of them so badly that they would try to kill their dog.  Whatever’s going on is serious, and they need to get to the bottom of it!

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

Traveling without parental supervision is the stuff of vintage children’s books and the dreams of children from every era! The kids in the Famous Five series have far more independence that modern children have, and in fact, the authorities might be concerned about children their age traveling without their parents. Actually, I would think that few adults even at the time of the writing of this book would even consider letting their children travel alone like that. That’s part of the appeal of this type of story, children being able to do things that real children never do.

I didn’t like the part about the dog being poisoned because I always hate it when bad things happen to animals in stories, but don’t worry! Nobby’s dog is fine in the end!

Posted on by TracyC

The Castle of Adventure

Enid Blyton’s Adventure Series

The Castle of Adventure by Enid Blyton, 1946.

Since the children’s last adventures, Philip and Dinah’s mother has used the children’s reward money to buy a home for them, so the children won’t have to continue staying with their aunt and uncle on school holidays.  They’ve also invited their friends, Jack and Lucy-Ann, to live with them, so they don’t have to return to their uncle’s house.  Now, the girls go to the same boarding school, and the boys go to their boarding school, and they’re all together on holidays.

When the children are out of school for the summer again, they and their mother go to stay in a cottage near an old castle on a hill.  The children are fascinated by the castle, but their mother doesn’t want them going near it because local people tell sinister stories about it.  She doesn’t explain about their stories, but she seems to think that it might be dangerous.  However, she does agree that the children can go have a look at an eagle’s nest near the castle, knowing how Jack feels about birds.  The children realize that they can use that to get a look at the castle anyway.

They make friends with a local girl named Tassie.  They call Tassie a “wild girl” because she’s a gypsy, has a pet fox, and runs around in old, dirty clothes and without shoes (she carries shoes with her but doesn’t wear them) and seems uneducated.  She doesn’t seem to know what an eagle is or what a bath is (although the children’s mother insists that she get one).  (No, I don’t believe that she’s ignorant for being a gypsy. I think it’s both a stereotype and a plot device.)  However, Tassie knows the area very well and helps the children find their way around.  Tassie is also afraid of the castle.  When the children ask her what stories people tell about the castle, she says that an evil man used to live there, and people would come to see him and never be seen again.  Still, the children want to explore the castle.

When they explore the castle, they find a water pump with a puddle beneath it, indicating that someone has been there recently to prime and use the pump.  Jack also realizes that the eagles in the next have a young eaglet who looks like it’s about ready to fly.  He persuades the children’s mother to let him build a hide (camouflaged shelter) so he can camp out and watch the birds.

While camping out, he realizes that there’s someone else in the castle besides himself.  At night, he hears someone moving around and using the pump, and he thinks he sees a flashing light, like someone signaling to someone else.  In the morning, he thinks maybe he dreamed it, but Lucy-Ann mentions seeing the flashing light.  Lucy-Ann thought that Jack was signaling to her, but Jack realizes that it was someone else and that he wasn’t dreaming.

Exploring the castle further, he finds a hidden room with old furniture and armor and realizes that someone has been hiding there.  Later, he sees some strange men in the castle and hears them speaking a language that he doesn’t recognize.  Who are they and what are they doing there?  Could they have something to do with the assignment that their friend Bill, an undercover investigator, is doing in a town nearby?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). It was also made into a tv movie serial. You can see it on YouTube.

My Reaction

Like other Enid Blyton books, there are racial issues in this book that were changed in reprintings. Enid Blyton books often feature stereotypical gypsies (more politely called Romany or Travelers these days) as characters and plot devices. Tassie is a pleasant and helpful character but still stereotypical.

I like the setting for the story. A supposedly abandoned castle makes an exciting place for our young heroes to explore. Even with the references to spooky stories about the place, the kids never really believe that the castle might be haunted. They very quickly realize that there are living people who have been hanging around the place. The sort of sinister characters using the place as a hideout are the same sort of villain characters as in the first book, which brings the kids’ friend Bill back into the story.

I enjoyed the movie serialization of the book, and I thought that it followed the story of the book well.