A return to Blytonville

This week we're going to the most celebrated little boy (of sorts) with the original form of audio book, the story record.

1953 was a very different era, many children lived in highly polluted cities where smog was a killer, grown ups ruled your life quite firmly and even those of us who lived in areas with our own accents and spoke in dialect informally such as here in twin conurbations of Staffordshire were expected to learn received pronunciation which was the language of radio and television back then.

Regional voices such as ours were kept down, we were the uncouthed, so to listen to these recordings does take you back  but the star is Noddy and the magical world of Toyland  and that was where I returned to this week.

In 1953, very much at her height as leading children's authoress, Enid Blyton went to EMI Records with the idea of making a sound recording of her reading a series of the Noddy stories for record.

She was open to the use of sound effects and songs to add dramatizing, realizing this all helped hold your attention and they were issued on ten inch (22 cm) 78 rpm records during that period where we were moving from shellac 78 discs to unbreakable microgroove 45 and 33 rpm ones.

They were recorded on tape which made re-issuing on 7 inch 45 rpm extended play discs with two sides of the originals to a single side easier and the quality is of the highest of the era.

Of course these are not the secretly rewritten versions where gollies no longer exist, everybody is presumed English of the dominant cultural norms and we lived in world we were just a step a way from the threat of a spanking.

Times change and will no doubt continue to but that world was closer to that of my childhood than that of today's and really one needs to explain to children about these differences so they understand different times have their own norms.

I recently re-read Those Dreadful Children.

The story begins with the three Carlton children - John, Margery and Annette - being excited when a new family move into the house at the bottom of the garden. However, the older Taggertys - Pat, Maureen and Biddy are loud, rough, dirty and not at all the sort of children the prim, tidy Carltons want to associate with. 

Due to an old friendship of their fathers they are forced together - two sets of Dreadful Children - who have to take a hard look at their own behaviours as they learn to get along, learning from the best of each other, understanding each others faults.

This is very much product of its era in terms of values but in showing the good in each family rather than pushing any one, I feel she was on the right lines.

You can kill iniatitive and imagination with kindness, preoccupations with cleanliness and respectability but there are standards too about respect for others, please and thank-you's and turn taking.