‘But why are you so foreign?’: Blyton and Blighty

Abstract

The word ‘chum’ is, according to the OED, frequently linked with ‘chamber’; that is, a chum is someone with whom one might share sleeping quarters. Certainly, for many adventurous Blyton heroes, this is the case: the Famous Five, the four Adventure series children, the Adventurous four, the Secret Island four and other Blytoneers all share caves, cellars and other locked rooms, let alone trees and camp-fires. However, one also finds, included in these spaces, those who, superficially, would not seem to qualify. Thus, in The Secret Mountain (set in Africa), we find Mafumu, a ‘black boy,’ ‘snuggled down beside Jack, who did not even wake when the black boy lay almost on top of him’ (92); or Ragamuffin Jo, a gypsy waif, sharing the Famous Five’s sleeping quarters. In this chapter, these unlikely bedfellows will be considered alongside other foreigners in Blyton’s work; for, more than most writers, she has been accused of xenophobia and outright racism — accusations that, I will suggest, are based on rather uninformed and selective readings of her work.