CLASS CONFLICT IN 'FIVE RUN AWAY TOGETHER'

Much of the opprobrium levelled against Enid Blyton for classism, snobbery etc is, in my view, unfair. In the Famous Five series there are as many middle-class – corrupt tutors, mad scientists, greedy capitalists and so on – as there are working-class villains. And there is heroism, intelligence and initiative among the lower orders: Nobby the circus boy, Jo the gypsy girl (traveller in modern editions), Yan of Cornwall, Sniffer of Mystery Moor or the fairground folk at Faynights are all – within the parameters of the genre – treated with insight and sympathy. True, there is not much reference to other races; but one only need look at when the books were written – the first was published in 1941 – to see why. It is equally unfair to blame Shakespeare for not writing about aeroplanes and television.

The exception, for me, is the third book in the series. It made me uncomfortable when I read it as a child, and it made me uncomfortable again when I read it recently as an adult. And it seems to me there is a mean spirit in it that is absent from the other books. I want to explore why.

For those unacquainted with the story, a brief summary. (I am assuming a nodding familiarity with the series and characters as a whole). When the cousins visit George, they find Aunt Fanny unwell. Joanna, the cook, is away, and a temporary – Mrs Stick – has been engaged instead. Mrs Stick has an obtrusive son, Edgar, and a miserable small dog, Tinker, which we, as readers, are presumably intended to find as unpleasant as its owners.

Aunt Fanny is taken suddenly into hospital, and the children are left with the Stick family: Mr Stick, a sailor on leave, having moved in as well with the apparent agreement of Uncle Quentin. Conditions deteriorate – failure to provide meals etc –and after a series of confrontations the children, pretending to go the station, take off for Kirrin Island.

The Sticks, not realising the children are on the Island, move there too, having kidnapped a millionaire's little daughter. The children rescue the girl from the dungeons, lock Edgar in there instead, alert the police, and trap the Stick parents in the act of rescuing their son. The adult Sticks are imprisoned, and Edgar is faced with the prospect of reform school. The children continue their sojourn on the Island in a cave they have discovered, with the millionaire's daughter.

The novel was first published in 1944. You would not know it. The setting is one of unclouded summer days: there is no sense of a country still in, or just emerging from, the ravages of a devastating war. And yet there is a sense in which the book is clearly of its time, and a war of another sort does hang in the background: implied although never made overt.

George Orwell mentioned the unmentionable: "the working classes smell". But this work is almost as explicit. The physical dirtiness of the male Sticks is the most tangible thing about them. Mr Stick's hands and fingernails are black. Edgar '"hardly ever has a bath and he's jolly smelly'". The children nickname him ‘Spotty-Face^’: justifiably, when he mocks George for being upset about her mother, but continued even when Edgar is doing something innocuous like bringing in the tea at breakfast. Julian, using the hose to stop the dogs fighting, then turns it on Edgar. The reason given is childhood mischief. The underlying point – conscious or otherwise –is that Edgar needs washing. Tinker, wanting cleansing as much as the Sticks do, becomes 'Stinker'.

'"Goodbye, Stinker, do get a bath as soon as possible.'" Thus the last page. But how is Tinker to do it, unless the owners oblige? And in prison, they could not, even if they wanted to. The fate of the dog is ambiguous, Julian simply asking the police to take him away. Presumably the hope is for new owners who will wash him: it is a matter of opportunity.

And this raises the big issue that hovers, realised but unresolved, at the back of the work: there is all the difference in the world between being dirty through choice, and being dirty because washing yourself is difficult. Presumably the facilities exist for the Sticks at Kirrin Cottage. But what about elsewhere? How easy is it for people like the Sticks to have a bath?

The social threat posed by the Great Unwashed seems to me to be the crux of the book. As soon as Uncle Quentin is off the scene, Edgar moves into the sitting room, borrows Julian's book, and investigates the study forbidden to the children. It is an embryo Russian Revolution. Having left the house, the children speculate how Stinker will be free to wander, and Spotty-Face will be free to '"loll in the sitting room'". 'Loll': redolent with the sense of leisure; the privilege of those who do not need to work. But even in the children's new refuge of the Island, the Sticks follow them; and Edgar breaks in, albeit inadvertently, to their refuge of the cave. The class represented by the Sticks is invading everywhere. And once the children have abdicated, the Sticks steal some of the most prized possessions of Kirrin Cottage...

The clash about food is interesting too. Mrs Stick proposes dry bread and cheese for the children's supper. Julian, with Timmy as back-up, visits the kitchen, raids the larder, removes the supper prepared for the Sticks, and invites them to dine on bread and cheese. The social order has re-asserted itself. True, as Julian points out, it is Aunt Fanny who has paid for the food, not the Sticks: so the children are entitled to it.

But who should eat what? Are the Sticks being presumptuous in eating as well as their employers? It is only fair to add that when Edgar is taken prisoner in the cave by the children, he has the same food as they do: tacitly, Blyton suggests, he shares their common humanity.

And so I do not think the class sympathies even in this book are nearly as clear-cut as they may appear on the surface. The sub-text is at war with the text: the dialogue with the narrative. Our intended sympathies, for example, are with the kidnapped girl; but mine are unreservedly with the dog: the real victim in the story.

That it is '"mangy and moth-eaten'" – we are invited to ridicule it from the start – is not its fault. The dog has not chosen to come to Kirrin Cottage: the owners have brought it there.  It is legitimate – although this is not conceded by the text – that a dog would want to go into the garden: especially to relieve itself.

Tinker on the Island has a thoroughly wretched time. True, he has invaded Timmy's space, but again this is not his fault: he has again been brought there and has no choice in the matter. When the two dogs fight, there is a gross mismatch of size, and Tinker is left torn and bleeding. Presumably we are meant to identify with Timmy. But Tinker is so obviously the underdog: and given that most of us are underdogs for most of our own lives, the sympathy is liable to swing the other way.

Tinker is terrified in the dungeons when the children make noises, howling dismally when left there on his own; yelping up above ground when being the direct recipient of a clod of earth thrown by Dick: the original illustrations by Eileen Soper capture the pathos of the moment, and of the unequal fight with Timmy, very well.

Edgar, for me, also becomes a figure of pathos. He is seen as contemptible because he is afraid of being locked up in the dungeons: but anyone with an imagination, or a dread of the dark or of being underground will readily empathise. In such a situation, '"Ma! Yes I'm here! ... I'm scared. Let me out!'" is as likely to evoke sympathy as ridicule.

"Goodbye, Spotty-Face, try and be a better boy!" is the fatuous and patronising final advice of the dialogue. But the narrative tells another story: "Edgar sobbing away to himself. He imagined his mother and father in prison, and he himself sent to a hard and difficult school, not allowed to see his mother for years." A dreadful and understated future is packed into those few words.

The Stick parents kidnap a child and initiate their own son into a criminal outlook. And yet they are a family unit. They are concerned by the fate of their dog. '"Poor lamb,'" says Mrs Stick, hearing the creature howl. Mr Stick kicks the dog, true, but is also upset to find him bleeding: '"Well, he got his teeth into poor Tinker good and proper..." They want their son to eat well, trap themselves by rescuing him, and are indignant at his suffering: although, as the police point out, his fate is no worse than what they have themselves inflicted on the kidnap victim.

 

I have said that I find this an uncomfortable book, and my guess is that Enid Blyton found it uncomfortable too. My impression –1 am speculating – is that she exorcised something in herself in the process of the writing.

In Volume 11 - Five Have a Wonderful Time - Julian condemns us-folk and you-folk attitudes: '"We're all the same under the skin.'" And perhaps Blyton needed to write about the Sticks, with all the attendant conflicts and tensions and contradictions – stick people who become human despite herself – to work through to that conclusion.