Regular readers of the blog will know that Caroline Crampton’s
is a favourite podcast, and one I have been a guest on.
One of the regular features is the Green Penguin Bookclub
–Caroline is working through all the Penguin green-and-white crime books, *** in order of publication. This year she had the brilliant Idea of asking all the
contributors to this trope to talk about their first Green Penguin – then she
combined all these extra bits into a special epi which has come out now
I was a guest of the Book Club in February
2025,
so had naturally completely forgotten that I had done this – what a nice
surprise to find it!
And I broke the rules – I suggested to Caroline that I
could talk about my early interest in Puffins (the Penguin children’s imprint)
and she agreed. I am a proud founder member of something called The Puffin
Club, and I explain all about it in detail on the podcast…. Such great
memories.
Then there are the other choices to enjoy, from blogfriends
such as Sergio and Kate: varied stories, and how nice to think of us with such
different back stories converging on this one spot.
A lovely gentle epi to enjoy over Christmas – though Shedunnit
is always worth listening to.
*** in this post I discussed the phrase 'became a green-and-white Penguin'
How wonderful, Moira! You're the perfect guest for that podcast, and I'm looking forward to your stories!
ReplyDeleteThank you Margot - it was so nice to share the memories
DeleteI joined The Puffin Club in 1972, after I saw the advertisement in the back of Silly Verse for Kids by Spike Milligan. I kept the magazines too - and my pink and gold plastic card wallet. It was wonderful.
ReplyDeleteGreat - so glad to hear from another fan.
DeleteI loved the Puffin Club! I had that little, pink membership book too. I very much regret letting all the magazines be given away when I left home - years later I saw a collection in a second hand bookshop and wished I could buy them all back. I used to enter many of the competitions, and occasionally won prizes - I still have at least one of my prize books somewhere (The King Of The Barbareens) - and my favourite poem got chosen for the I Like This Poem book, which was organised through the Puffin Club. Happy memories. It was briefly revived some years ago, and I gave my daughter a membership, but it wasn't the same thing at all.
ReplyDeleteYes - I don't know how my Puffin Posts survived, when so much childhood stuff naturally disappears.
DeleteI must have been particularly untalented as I never, ever won anything!
King of the Barbareens I did on the blog a few years ago.
What was your poem for the book? I have just stood up from where I am sitting, reached out my hand and taken down I Like This Poem. My copy is in about 10 pieces, I kept it for my own children. I'm going to look through it and see if I can find you before you come back to me!
My surname has changed since those days! The poem was If I Were Lord Of Tartary.
DeleteFound it! Good for you. The Walter de la Mare poems was one one of my treasured Puffins in fact.
DeleteAnother nostalgic Puffin Club member here - I reluctantly parted with my Puffin Posts many years ago but still have two enamel badges and the welcome letter I received when I joined.
ReplyDeleteSovay
I had 2x red plastic folders, supplied by the club: my Puffin Posts and all the other bits and pieces fitted neatly into them, and somehow they survived, filed under P on my bookshelves.
DeleteI enjoyed the podcast, but was shocked on heading to Wikipedia to check the Puffin Club foundation date that the club has no entry there.
DeleteI too entered many, many Puffin Post competitions (and once won a Book Token for a modest amount, which I spent on a copy of “Kidnapped”). I’d forgotten about the holiday competitions! The slightly chaotic Health-and-Safety-free Swallows and Amazons holiday would have been very much in the spirit of the books.
Interesting that Margaret Irwin’s “Still She Wished for Company” was a Peacock – my aged (1937) copy is an orange-and-white Penguin, but then I guess there was no equivalent of Young Adult at the time. I found it very scary as a child, and still quite creepy now.
Sovay
The Wiki post on Puffin Books says the Puffin Club was founded by Kaye Webb in 1967, as a way to "address class inequality" among young readers.
DeleteOh that's very interesting - that there's no entry (shocking!) and the idea of class inequality. Would never have guessed that. Kaye Webb was quite the character, eccentric and wonderful. I met her when they had the reunion - which I think must have been 1991 - and I could've just listened to her talking all day, she was so funny, and had such a great memory for details of her life in Puffins.
DeleteI remember being SO fascinated by the Puffin Club ads in the back of books and I also remember there being a version of the club for much younger kids with a puffin chick called Smudge, but I'm not sure why i wasn't a member. Maybe the clubs weren't so much a thing in the 80s? I did do something in 1987-88 where you had to read 100 books from your local library and answer questions about the books to prove you'd read them, picking up badges along the way, I think I've still got the list with all the books somewhere. Booktrail or something like that, with a pirate map theme. I remember being deeply irked whenever I'd see other kids getting their pic in the local paper for conpleting their Booktrails cos it was like "where was my fanfare?", that carried on for a few years into the 1990s
ReplyDeleteI do remember being given about 30 old 1970s Cricket magazines around the same time which I think were the USA equivalent of Puffin Club and I really wanted to be part of Cricket Club but again that didn't happen.
I recognize what you're saying - that element when we were children that we didn't understand really what was going on or how things worked, would you agree? And we couldn't look things up, we just accepted how they worked or didn't work.
DeleteYou should definitely have been acclaimed for your book trail!
I was in the Brownies, which I absolutely loved, but our local group was really chaotic and non-achieving. My prime proof of that is that I never got my Book-Lovers Badge - which involved reading six books and describing them to Brown Owl, or something simple like that. I was a child who went to the library and got out four new books every week, as well as reading in school and reading the books in my house. I wouldn't even have had to prepare or work for it. Amazing the way we can hold a grudge....
Going by the Wikipedia Puffin Books entry, the Puffin Club seems to have been Kaye Webb's particular baby and to have started to decline when she retired in 1982. I remember looking it up in the early 2000s when I had nieces of reading age, in the hope of gifting them a membership, but it had turned into something different at that point.
DeleteI didn't like the Brownies, but mainly because due to the small number of girls of appropriate age in our village, those who wanted to get involved in the Scouting movement were allowed to join the Cubs, which involved making campfires and huts and tracking wildlife and so forth. Then suddenly the juvenile female population reached the cut-off point (I think it might have been 12) and we were booted out of the Cubs and made to form a Brownie troup, which involved wearing fairy badges and skipping round a 3 inch tall plastic mushroom in the village hall. We were not happy ...
Sovay
Old, old story--the boys have all the fun! I think that over here there might have been some pushback about females intruding on a sacred male domain. (I guess Den Mothers didn't count.) I was in the Brownies too, but wasn't adventurous enough to want to go camping and other such activities. The Girl Scouts did have "outdoor life" in their G For Generosity song. While looking up those lyrics I found this interesting post: https://www.thefedoralounge.com/threads/what-a-girl-scout-knew-in-1923.55541/
DeleteSovay - I don't think it should have been Brownies if you were 12? The cut-off age was 11, I think, you would have had to be Girl Guides.
DeleteI think - as with so many things - your experience depended very much on who was running the pack. They were all volunteers, so we should be grateful for what they did, but it was very variable. My mother was a girl guide and did many of the items mentioned in that article Marty, they had quite adventurous camping trips. We had very little outdoor activity in my Brownies. My daughter was in the Girl Scouts in America, and it was great fun and activity-packed, but did NOT involve any kind of hardy camping or outdoor expeditions! Other than selling Girl Scout cookies of course. And they didn't learn anything except a few craft projects. We were always having to learn things like compass directions and semaphore and knots.
The switch from Cubs to Brownies wasn't a age matter, but to do with numbers - I don't know whether there were any official guidelines, but once the Scouting authorities considered there were enough girls to form a viable separate Brownie troup, that's what we had to do. I'm sure they were doing their best for us, but it didn't help that the boy Cubs used to gather in the porch of the village hall and snigger as we skipped round our mushroom.
DeleteSovay
Not doubting your experience, but that was not official policy. Definitely the proper thing was that you stopped being a Brownie at 10, and you got your wings and 'flew up' to join the Guides then. This is seared on my mind because I was younger than everyone else in my class at school, and they all joined the Guides and I wasn't allowed to, I had to wait for what seemed like forever. It sounds to me like you had a rebel section where you were! Not sticking to the rules.
DeleteAlso, it would have been a toadstool, not a mushroom 😀😀😀
Looking back from the adult perspective, they clearly broke the rules - we girls shouldn’t have been joining in with the Cubs - and they put things right when they instigated the proper Brownie troop.
DeleteThey were doing the best they could I expect! I always have to remember that they wre volunteers trying to provide something useful for young people. I helped run a youth club for some years, and there are stories from those days....
DeleteThey were certainly doing their best - we were keen to get involved but there was nothing for us at the time. And there were things I liked about the Brownies - there was plenty of knitting, sewing and cooking which I enjoyed, and a couple of friends joined who had had no desire to be auxiliary Cubs. But when the switch happened it felt like demotion and diminishment to be excluded from other activities I enjoyed, and was good at, and shunted into a very traditionally female space. I now take a rather different view of the pernicious tendency to trivialise traditionally female crafts and activities, but I wasn’t much of a feminist at 8!
DeleteSovay
Interestig - I think of today's children as having much more on offer than we had. I would have gone to any kind of organized activity because there was so little available. Are today's children able to be more picky?
DeleteThey probably are - though one problem with organised activities is that they tend to cost money so some children can afford to be more picky than others! One factor in my giving the Brownies a chance was that my parents bought me the uniform, which was not hugely expensive but cost more than they could afford to waste, so I felt some obligation to stick to it (but didn’t go on to Guides). The only other organised activity in my village was a church youth club which was mainly for the older kids.
DeleteSovay
Yes very true. I loved my uniform - a real leather belt and a brown beret as well as the uniform dress. Now there would probably be more organized activity at school - that didn't happen much at primary level in my day.
DeleteThe podcast was lovely. I never joined the Puffin Club, but had lots and lots of Puffins. The Little Princess (of course!), The Secret Garden, White Boots, Ballet Shoes, The Railway Children and all those other wonderful Edith Nesbit books, A Puffin Quartet of Poems, The Borrowers, The Family from One End Street, The Little Grey Men by BB (about the last Gnomes in England)… the list goes on and on. Sadly I was forced to jettison most of them when I moved to a small flat last year
ReplyDeleteThank you! Yes, isn't it amazing how we can remember so clearly the books we loved as children. Paddington Bear, too.
DeleteI recently listened to this episode on Shedunnit (I am also a member of their book club) and thoroughly enjoyed it. It brought back school day memories of the Puffin Club. I am so pleased to have found your blog!
ReplyDeleteThank you! So glad you enjoyed it - I loved sharing my memories, and it really took me back to the happy reading days of my youth.
DeleteI was interested to hear you mention A Little Princess as I've always loved that book. I came to it via the early 1970s TV series and then later read the book. I even wrote a piece on it for Wordsworth Editions which is on my blog. I also loved Noel Streatfeild, particularly Thursday's Child. Ah, nostalgia!
DeleteOh we obviously have similar tastes! The Secret Garden was fine, but I always loved Little Princess more. And for Streatfeild it was Ballet Shoes and Wintle's wonders.
Delete