Another thing you need to remember about History

The next thing that happened is that my reading got good enough for me start reading proper children’s books. How that happened is very simple: I hoovered up a lot of books by people like Enid Blyton, Eleanor M Brent Dyer, Captain W E Johns. They weren’t respectable but my parents were wise enough to keep buying them for me. Then they took me to the library to slake my thirst less expensively.

Now make no mistake, most of these writers wouldn’t get into print nowadays. For a start many of them were racist, sexist, anti-semitic… I soon spotted that the villain in the Enid Blyton adventure stories was generally a swarthy gypsy or, even worse, someone swarthy with a hooked nose who was a Jew. This annoyed me because it made it too easy to work out the plot so I stopped reading them.

The sexism of the Chalet School books by Elinor M Brent-Dyer wasn’t quite as bad as some of the other girls’ school stories and there were occasions when girls (or should I say “gels”?) would sometimes intend to follow a profession. However after adventures at school with princesses and spies and so on, most of them got married and had big families and were very happy. Sex however was never mentioned, nobody had breasts or periods and certainly nobody ever kissed a boy or even a girl.