I vividly remember my school and Mum being very anti Enid Blyton and not being allowed to read her books. If I remember rightly many UK libraries also did not stock Enid Blyton books during this time.
The reason my Mum did not want me to read Enid Blyton books was because of the limited vocabulary within the books which did not 'stretch' a child nor add to a childs 'wordcount' so to speak. The 'ban' within public libraries was due to apparent 'political correctness'.
I adored Enid Blyton books, they may not have taught me long words but Enid Blyton taught me more about imagination than anyone other than C.S.Lewis and his 'Narnia' tales and of course Roald Dahl. In truth, I'm not entirely certain that Roald Dahls children books extended my vocabulary all that much (other than glorious gobblygook) yet Roald Dahl was, is and should be championed as a childrens author.
I've always felt very strongly that adults sell children short in terms of intelligence and awareness and most certainly entirely underestimate a childs ability to understand whether something is likely to be true or not. On that note, adults also sell short a childs ability to play with a toy/read a book without growing up to be sexist/racist/homophobic/violent etc as some of the most wild accusations suggest.
I most definately knew that although the Famous Five were allowed to go off on a caravan holiday, or onto Mystery Moor (the scariest Famous five ever) without adult supervison was not remotely similar to the realities of my life!! I tried Ginger Beer and it was awful, though the thought of all of those Midnight Feasts did and still do create huge excitement! Try as we might, my siblings and I never once managed a midnight feast at midnight. The best we could manage was a feast at bedtime when we would amass our carefully hoarded goodies and feel rather short-changed and disappointed as it was
a) 8.00pm on a Summers evening and so still light and thus no need for torches to see
b) We had no torches anyway as Dad wouldn't let us borrow them in case we broke them/ran down the battery or both
c) No ginger beer (we were secretly glad about this as awful)
d) A Kit Kat, Wagon Wheel, a couple of melted chocolate fingers and a jam sandwich was never quite the 'feast' we had read so eagerly about and hoped for
e) We had parents who did think that going to bed and sleep at a certain time was important (unlike Uncle Quentin and Aunt Fanny!).
f) We actually were tired and suddenly a midnight feast that didn't consist of lashings of ginger beer, hunks of bread and milk straight from a cow following a days adventuring with Timmy on the island owned by George (of course) wasn't all that appealing.
The disappointment of the failed midnight feasts didn't dampen our enthusiam though and the Malory Towers books triggered a fresh desire for midnight feasts once my sister and I moved onto those from The Famous Five. We tried many, many times to have a successful midnight feast. We also tried camping in the garden in a tent my dad got after collecting tokens from numerous Weetabix packets, but it was too scary and going all the way up the garden and into the house to go to the loo soon dampened any sense of adventure that existed within us. The nearest we ever got to the true Famous Five spirit of adventure was running around the garden causing utter confusion for our beautiful but fat (aren't they all) Labrador who couldn't understand why we were calling her 'Timmy' when for as long as she had ever known she had always been called Pansy!
Despite the Enid Blyton ban I was able to obtain 'contraban' copies of her books. I used to spend a great deal of time with one my my sets of Grandparents. My Granny and Grandad were the best Grandparents in the world, full of unconditional love, kind, generous and fun. I used to stay every weekend and most of the school holidays at my Granny and Grandads and would cry when I had to go back home.
I had my own room at my Granny and Grandads house with my own things in it. Enid Blyton needless to say wasn't banned and we used to go to the local charity shops (I especially remember an Oxfam) and buy up as many Enid Blyton books as we could find!
I cherish my copies to this day and happily dig them out every so often for a read. I still love the mini-stories best of all and can't read The Famous Five without food to hand as the constant and vivid references to food are impossible to ignore. (You can still keep the ginger beer though!)
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