More Blyton Adventures: Ring Rub Rag & Riding

 

 

Please see introductory post here, which explains my interest in this series of books.

There are various publication dates floating around, so I have gone for those given by the excellent Enid Blyton Society on their webpage. The Society refers to this series as the Barney Mysteries, though I think of them as the R Mysteries.

 

The Ring O’Bells Mystery   1951

 

This is the series entry that I most clearly remember reading and enjoying as a child.

The protagonist children have been ill, and the parents are very put out that they didn’t go back to school on time. So they can’t wait to get them as far away as possible, to a rando cottage with Miss Pepper from earlier book.

This is in a rather sinister village, like a fairytale in the worrying sense. There is an old man who doesn’t remember his first name.

I learned about going riding from Enid Blyton, and specifically this book – the activity wasn’t part of my life growing up, and this is the sentence I most remembered:

The children had put on jodhpurs, yellow jerseys and riding coats.

--lived on in my mind forever, I thought it was essential uniform. This is from a long-ago blogpost:

I’m sure they have never lived in the same sentence before, but Enid Blyton, like Vita Sackville-West, always puts people into yellow jerseys if they are going riding – was there a secret dress code?

(The boy in the pic plainly wasn’t au fait with it)

As well as holiday activities, there is of course crime to uncover. A Word Cloud for the book might include:

witches, ivy-covered windows, sinister houses, secret passages and rooms, panelled walls, bells that shouldn’t ring but do (see title) and old women from fairytales – Red Riding Hood and Mother Hubbard (but not in a comforting way) – a very deep well and a secret chamber

‘Enough to give anyone the creeps’ as one of the characters says.

The children  have brunch at the end – I don’t think this was in common use in the UK then, though I found it in a 1957 book last year.

An atmospheric entry in the series.

 

The Rubadub Mystery 1952

 

Big surprise: Roger and Diana’s parents can’t wait to get away from them. The grown-ups are off to America, and there is no thought of taking the children, or delaying the trip to avoid the school hols.

So the children are off to the seaside, another sinister place: the Word Cloud for this one would include:

Blowhole, strange pool, submarines, whirlpool, Pierrot show, Magician, children’s talent show, lost father.

There is an unexpected connection with one of Elly Griffiths excellent Mephisto Mysteries – in the first one, The Zig Zag Girl, several of the main characters were part of a highly secret group, The Magic Men, during World War 2, on a project to make plans to use conjuring tricks to fool the enemy.

In this book we see again that Blyton is very careful to stress that the children will be kind to people whom we would now call Special Needs. (see this blogpost for another example)

I loved this picture of children in a boat, they shouted Blyton to me, and I do believe you could attempt 100 guesses without knowing who is featured. One of the boys in the boat will grow up to be…. The Lone Ranger! It is Clayton Moore’s family – no-one knows quite which one is he. The picture, from Flickr, dates from 1925, and he would’ve been 10 or 11 if you care to try to work it out.

 

The Ragamuffin Mystery 1959

The Lynton children are off on holiday – with their mother, unusually, and in a caravan. Exciting.

One of them says ‘I wish Daddy was coming. He’s such fun on a holiday’, which raises the question - How would they know? He always wants to be as far away from the children as possible, and tbh doesn’t sound like fun at all when he is present: bad-tempered and impatient.

This is the description from the Enid Blyton Society

Three weeks at the beautiful Merlin's Cove in Wales sounds like great fun to four friends, but someone else has got much more sinister plans for the beach—at night. Could it be the strange man Snubby meets on the first day, or is it to do with the ragamuffin he mistakes Snubby for?

 

The book features that favourite trope from fiction and films – the SOS message given out over the radio. The family listens to the news, and hears this:

 “Here is a message, please, for a Mrs. Lynton, who, with her children, is on a caravan tour. Will she please telephone Hillsley 68251 at once, as her sister is dangerously ill? I will repeat that. Here is a message for...”

It seems very unlikely but this was a real thing: messages on the BBC Radio (would now be Radio 4) after the 6 o’clock news. I can remember it featuring in a Biggles book – but am also old enough to remember them in real life. In a world of much less communication, it was usually a call, exactly, for someone who was on holiday and needed because of an emergency at home.

In this case Mrs Lynton leaves the children, and Miss Pepper, and the caravan. Quite an extreme way of getting rid of her. And then Snubby and that blooming dog and Barney and the monkey all turn up too.

There is a lot of emphasis on the Welsh background – normally Blyton is quite vague about where the adventures are set. But this is explained at the beginning: ‘This book is dedicated to all the many Welsh children who begged me to write a mystery set in Wales. Here it is, children—written for you!’

When I finished this one I realized that I had no idea what the crime, or the plot, was about. So I reread the final chapters, but it was still neither interesting nor memorable, so I am going to ignore this aspect.

There is one more mystery to go – 1956’s The Rat-a-Tat Mystery, (which is the 5^th – Ragamuffin is 6^th, I’ve done them out of order for a reason), and a post on that will appear in due course.

Caravan picture from the State Library of Queensland, 1952