The books from the shelves of my childhood which I wrote about in the last several months were a small fraction of the books that still survived from the decade of the sixties. And since I have read so much, it made sense, since that is now the principal activity of my life, to talk about those books in this series, at least for a few weeks.
Not entirely surprisingly, I begin with Enid Blyton. I was a devotee of hers in childhood and, as with Wordsworth and his rainbow, my heart leaps up even now when I come across her works. I was about to write that this is in line with his assertion of his joy ‘now I am a man’ but I think I am past that, and his wish that this joy would last when he grew old has been fulfilled in my case.
So I was delighted to rediscover, a few weeks before my 70th birthday, a book I had first read well over 60 years ago. This was The Mystery that Never Was, a stand alone story first published in 1961. Reading it, I thought I had first come across it in a collection of three short novels by her, which included The Treasure Hunters and Shadow the Sheepdog. Now however, having tried to trace this collection, and failing, I feel that the third story was one called The Boy Next Door since like the other two it was published in the forties.
The Mystery that Never Was I have in a volume by itself, and I started it in the days when I had to spend much time, with little sleep in the nights, with my new puppies. It was ideal for that time, a very easy read, with an ebullient hero called Nicky, and a supporting cast of his neighbour Ken, and Ken’s sister and a cousin the boys find irritating, though the girls end up playing a major part in the tale. The sister is called Penelope, and there is a fascinating diversion when Ken says she no longer wants to be called Penny, since she had read about a Greek heroine called Penelope.
The plot springs from Nicky creating a mystery to entertain his uncle Bob, a private detective who has come to his home for a rest, but seems bored with nothing to occupy him. But the information in the letter in code he and Ken prepare turns out to be accurate, with flashing lights at night from the tower of a ruined house. The code is so simple that Bob suspects the children have written the letter, and refuses to believe them when they wake him up just too late to see the flashes.
So the children decide to investigate themselves, and the very next day go into the cellars of the ruined house, which had belonged to a foreign prince. And in the cellars, which had also been mentioned in the note, they find men digging out the treasure which the prince had left behind when the house was burnt down.