Malcolm Saville

I was a late reader, only really mastering the basics as I approached 8, by that time having been designated a dullard by most of my teachers (reasonably enough given that I also couldn’t tie my shoelaces or put on my clothes, and spent a lot of time staring aimlessly into space). So I missed most of Enid Blyton’s books for little kids (you know, the racist ones (but also scroll down this page)). But I read almost every single one of her books for older kids (you know, the sexist and class-ridden ones) – the Famous Five, the Secret Seven, the Adventurous Four, the Adventure Books, the Mystery books, the R books, even, oddly, Mallory Towers (for some reason I spurned the St. Clare’s books, even though they must have been almost exactly the same as the Mallory Towers books).

And I never once, in my whole childhood, read a word by Malcolm Saville.

Enid Blyton, for our American readers, is still the most widely read and widely translated children’s author the British Isles has produced, and stunningly prolific – at her height producing a book a week. And you can tell. While in one sense hardworking, as a writer she was lazy – there are endless repetitions of plot devices, adverbs, and events, and even her best characters are, well, wooden. If out-loud-readability is a test of good writing (and I think it is) she fails miserably – you’re constantly tripping over the sentences, your attention drifts, and you find yourself repeating whole phrases several times in the course of a passage, and then realizing that you have not got lost, its just there on the page. But I can completely see why kids love the books. They have all the key ingredients of a good yarn, anr more. The adults are almost absent, and when present are frequently dolts (with the one, strange, exception of Uncle Quentin, who may be psychotic; a “scientist” without a job or a lab, who is often visited by rather sinister characters and seems to despise children violently). The protagonists enjoy an implausible degree of freedom, sibling relationships are described as being fond but rivalrous, there’s always a boy and a girl for the reader to identify with (except, obviously, in the girls school stories, but presumably she assumed that only rather effeminate boys would read those). Crucially, there is a lot of food, and frequent breaks for picnics and midnight feasts, indulged without adults present, and described in more detail than the motivations off the characters. The kids are forever coming out on top, engaging in great feats of daring, and defeating wicked criminals that the stupid police are unable to catch.

I didn’t only read Enid Blyton. I read all the greats, too – Geoffrey Trease, Henry Treece, Ronald Welch, The Family from One End Street, Penelope Lively, Nina Bawden, John Rowe Townsend (when I was old enough), Peter Dickinson, you name them, I read them. And, of course, Jennings and William. I had a lot of catching up to do. I used to make my mother spurn friends who came to ask if I could play so that I could get on to the next book.

But nothing by Malcolm Saville. What a waste! I just finished reading my first ever to my eldest. All Summer Through is not a mystery story (unlike the others) but the story of, well, a summer holiday. The publication date is given as 1950. The story focuses on Sally, a girl on the cusp of puberty, who leads her younger brother and his best mate, and her own friend home from boarding school, in a series of minor adventures. Her city-dwelling snobbish cousin, Tony, is foisted on them for the whole summer, and, in the first contrast with the Blyton books, his snobbery is a clear moral defect (from which, of course, they wean him) in contrast with their completely democratic outlook. (His mother, Sally’s aunt, is also despised for her snobbery, though she redeems herself partially by the end of the book) The class structure of a market town and the rural society that surrounds it is depicted clearly (and I think accurately) and not exactly indicted; but any sense of superiority those with higher status might have is frowned upon. Even Sally’s father (Wilfred, gosh I wish I’d thought of that for the baby) comes to acknowledge that he has not shown due consideration for his spinster employee, when she is taken ill.

The second startling contrast is that adults are pretty much ever-present, and interact more-or-less realistically with the children, if giving them, perhaps, a little more freedom than is appropriate. The narrator (not the kids, you’ll be glad to know) even refers to Sally’s parents by their first names, inviting the reader to see them as real people central to the story, something that must have been very rare in that era I’d have thought.

Third, one of the central dramas actually focuses on an adult. During a family vacation to the Cornish coast there are dark hints that Sally’s mother is seriously ill; and just after they return she is rushed to hospital with an undisclosed, but apparently life-threatening, condition. Both my daughter and I are accustomed enough to recent children’s literature that we really expected her to die (which, I’d guess, the 1950’s reader might not have expected). In fact she has an appendectomy (a familiar Blyton plot device, if I remember correctly – didn’t one of the Mallory Towers girls have one?), and the anxiety about the operation forces both Sally and her father to re-assess their relationship with her. The final contrast, then, is a degree of emotional complexity unfound in any of the pre-John Rowe Townsend books I remember – they don’t just experience joy, jealousy and fear (Mallory Towers was big on jealousy, I remember), but anxiety about impending adulthood, fear and concern for others, confusion about their relationships with each other and the adults.

It’s not as if there is nothing childish about the story; a little girls gets lost, the snobbish cousin discovers, and alerts the locals, to a huge barn fire; the older kids save the life of a little boy and his dog (endangering their own lives in the process) during a massive storm, they organise part of a fete, and there are plenty of cream cakes, buns and the like (no ginger beer, unfortunately). My daughter (10) was gripped, and it clips along at a good pace. I’ve no idea how typical it is of his work, but I’m looking forward to reading more. A glance at amazon.co.uk suggests that most of his work is out of print (I picked up my handful of Savilles at various charity shops during my last visit to the UK) but also, if you look at the used prices, several seem to be in demand from collectors. I regret having missed out, and recommend them if you’re looking for something different to read to your kid and can get hold of them.