Five Go to Smuggler's Top

The Five go to Kirrin Cottage for their Easter holidays. Unfortunately, all that gold they found in their first adventure has not been used for home repairs, because during a big storm a tree falls on the house and would have killed the girls if the family hadn't escaped from the building just in time.

With Kirrin Cottage having to undergo extensive repairs, it seems the children will have to be sent back to school, since Julian, Dick and Anne's parents are away (they seem to have a relaxed attitude about seeing their children when they are on school holidays).

Fortunately, Mr Lenoir, a scientist who has invited Uncle Quentin to collaborate, invites them to their house, Smuggler's Top, with George's parents to follow soon. Mr Lenoir's show more stepson, Sooty, is Dick's classmate at school. Both Dick and Julian like him. Not so fortunately, Mr Lenoir warns them that he hates dogs, so do not even think about bringing one.

Of course George rebels and brings Timmy anyway, and the attempts to keep him hidden from the adults, with Sooty's and his sister Marybelle's help, takes a lot of the children's efforts and ingenuity during the book. Thankfully Smuggler's Top turn out to be an atmospheric mansion full of secret passages, which comes handy when it comes to hiding a dog. The mansion is on the top of an hill surrounded by a small town and dangerous and foggy marshes near the sea.

While the Lenoir children are likable, Mr Lenoir and his deaf manservant Block seem sinister and threatening, and soon it becomes evident that something strange is going on. There are mysterious signals through the window towards the marshes at night, and equally spooky lights from the marshes. Busy as they are hiding Tim, taking him for walks and everything, there is not much time to enjoy the location before the adventure begins.

Some thoughts:

What's up with scientists in Enid Blyton's world? Instead of working at universities where they can have adequate facilities, libraries and the presence of qualified colleagues, they tend to be crazy scientists types who work at their old, eerie and isolated mansions full of hidden trapdoors and secret passages, and who can barely tolerate the presence of children. And what kind of scientist is Uncle Quentin anyway? We had him in the past working on a very secret formula that would help the country, and now he is coming up with a clever plan to drain the marshes. Isn't that a matter for engineers rather than for scientists?

I loved how Mr. Lenoir's nose turned white when he got angry, and how fascinating Anne found that.

I really liked Sooty: irrepressible, friendly and ready for any scrape. His sister was incredibly shy. You almost never noticed she was in the story. Anne is a green beret compared to her.

It was great how threatening and sinister Block was, and the fact that he was not deaf at all, but just pretending. That idea captured my imagination reading this as a kid and I remembered that detail very well. As a child, I did not see it coming, but I did guess early that he was not really in bed but was using a dummy to pretend so.

Also, as a kid I was disappointed that Mr. Lenoir turned out to be innocent. If he had been guilty like he seemed then Sooty would be rid of the stepfather who beat him when he brought a stray dog home. Of course, that impressed me more than it would have readers when this was originally published (1945). Corporal punishment for disobedient children would seem perfectly ordinary then. But in any case, Mr. Lenoir seems even fiercer than Uncle Quentin. It was good that EB misdirected us a bit, though, making him seem guilty when he wasn't. The villains so far in this series had been rather evident.

And let's talk about Mr Barling. He seems a really interesting character, the half mad smuggler who is in it more for the joy than for the money, a romantic of the smuggling business. It's a pity we saw little of him. But his evil plan was more than half mad. It was completely absurd. He kidnapped Uncle Quentin to tell him he was a smuggler who didn't want the marshes drained and try to force him to sell him his plans instead of selling them to Mr. Lenoir. How does that even work once Quentin returns and tells the police? It doesn't make much sense. But maybe he was really getting crazy.

This is the first adventure that takes place away from Kirrin Island or Kirrin Cottage. Much as I love those places, I was ready for this. One of my favorite things about these books is the discovery of new atmospheric locations, and the first three books were on the same place. When I read the books as a boy I was not following the publication order, so never noticed that. Smuggler's Top is a great location, although the house and the tunnels below are used much more than the town and the marshes.

Tim was magnificent in this book (yeah, he usually is). He moped the floor with the bad guys, and much of the plot before that revolved around keeping him hidden. That means George was on the spotlight a lot too, even though we have the first example of Julian protecting her from a dangerous activity because she is a girl, taking only Dick to check on Mr Barling's house. At least he admitted that she is as good as any boy and convinced her to stay saying that someone had to look after Anne and Marybelle! :p

Aunt Fanny did not go to Smuggler's Top because she had to go look after a sick relative. EB sure loved using illnesses to get unnecessary adults out of the way!

All in all, a quite satisfactory entry in the Famous Five series.

Next up: Five Go Off in a Caravan (1946) show less

This is the first of the Famous Five (Funf Freunde in German) books that takes place away from Kirrin Cottage and the surrounding area. Once again it is holidays (and it is Easter, which sort of throws the books out of order since book two was during the Christmas break, and the third book was during another unnamed break, however, despite my lack of knowledge about 1940s English School terms, it seems as if the five have skipped some holidays to arrive here) and they all get together again to go to Kirrin Cottage to stay with their aunty and uncle. However, we also begin to notice that the children's parents are now becoming more distant and it seems as if Quentin and Fanny are taking the role of parents, since during the school term, show more the children are off at boarding school.
Anyway, a tree falls onto Kirrin Cottage and the house becomes unliveable, but as it happens, Quentin has been communicating with another scientist at a town called Smuggler's Top and they decide to send the children there for the holidays. Smuggler's Top is an old town built on top of a hill that is surrounded by marshland. It used to be (and still is) a haven for smugglers, as they would use the secret paths meandering through the swamp, and the catacombs under the hill, to bring their illegal imports into England. We are not told what they are smuggling, only that it is happening, and of course the Five, with a couple of new friends, Sooty and his sister Maryanne, decide to get to the bottom of this mystery.
It is funny how it is all down to the children to solve these mysteries since the adults seem to blindly trust all the other adults and automatically distrust the children's overactive imagination. However, this can be a little dangerous as I know that when I was a kid I would have loved to have gone on the adventures that the Five went on, and as I grew up to teenagehood, I would continue to go out on these adventures, though I must admit that it was not to bust bad guys but rather to have some excitement in a rather boring life.
However, the catch is that in real life crooks tend not to be that easy to catch, or that easy to scare. Okay, granted, it is a children's book, and we are not necessarily looking for realism, however we are talking about a world much closer to ours. While Blyton's fairy tales are set mostly in the magical world of Fairyland, the Famous Five, and similar stories, are all set in the real world of merry England, even if the towns that they travel to only exist in Blyton's imagination.
Once again we also have a large house riddled with secret doors and passages, ones that the bad guys know about but the other adults put to the back of their mind. As a kid I would have loved to have lived in a house full of such passages, and I suspect that in England there are a lot of old houses and castles with such passages. Unfortunately, one cannot wonder around Windsor Castle, probably because the Queen lives there, but I would like to know if these castles actually are full of secret passages. The only castle that I went to that you can wonder around was Dover Castle, and granted there were tunnels and passages in this sprawling complex, but not like what one would expect from the Famous Five.
You can walk around most of Dover Castle, and like other English castles, it consists of a tall square inner keep which is surrounded by an old wall. However, due to the castles' strategic location, overlooking the narrowest section of the English Channel, the castle has been added to and improved upon, right up to World War II where it was still being used as a military base. I only wondered around the medieval part of the castle, namely the Keep and some old Napoleonic tunnels, however on the drive up there you do pass the old, underground, World War II hospital and store rooms. Okay, I did not explore the castle too deeply, so I cannot actually say if there were any secret doors there at all. The best way to find them though is to look for abnormally thick walls, or sections of the floor that do not seem to have an entrance. However, finding the entrance can be a real trick in itself.
As for the older houses, I really cannot say. A lot of those houses are privately owned and I doubt the occupants would really appreciate some tourists tramping all over their lovely house looking for secret passages. Further, I suspect you will need to know the area really well to find them,because I suspect that even if there were passages, the exits would either be covered in undergrowth, or caved in. However, as mentioned, I do suspect that there are probably such passages in some of the older houses. In anycase, I did discover a secret hole once, and that was in an elevator at the University of Adelaide. I still do not know what it is used for, but the back of the elevator could be swung open, and down the bottom was a small space that poked out of the back, and it was large enough for a human to crawl into it. However a couple of years after my discovery, the university decided to put a lock on the back wall, so I could no longer open it and marvel at my discovery. show less

I remember my family would keep looking at me with strange eyes as I would often laugh at little funny parts of these imaginative children's books. I developed affection towards books right after I started reading them. For my age, they do not sound as interesting but surely are very well and interestingly written and are good enough to attract any child's mind.

The Five (Anne, George, Julian, Dick and Timmy the dog) are back on an adventure again! Now they've gone to their friend's house, a house full of secrets - Smuggler's Top...

There seems to be some signalling going on, and some kidnapping and smuggling. But who kidnapped Sooty and Uncle Quentin? Was it Block, the weird servant of Mr. Lenoir, Sooty's father? Was it Mr. Barling, a well-known smuggler? Or was it Mr. Lenoir himself? There are a lot of bad men to choose from as you get further into the book...

Timmy had to be hidden as Mr. Lenoir did not like dogs. He was hidden in secret passages, and it's quite likely something will happen to him too - but will something happen...or not?

Do you think that Anne, George, Julian and Dick can try show more and help find the prisoners? Even with Sooty's sister's help? show less

Too long ago to remember it, but I *do* know that this was my favourite of all the famous five books - and I owned every one. I remember very little of it. A ghostly train in the night? Hidden panels in the walls? That's about it.

I look forward to re-reading it!

The book is about four children called Juilian, George( Georgina), Dick and Anne along the dog Timmy. During the holidays a tree crashes through the roof of Kirrin cottage and the children have to stay at a house called sumgglers top.
They meet a friend of Juilan and Dick's called Sooty Lenoir and his sister Marybelle. But one mysterious night, Juilan and Dick are woken by Sooty and he tells them to follow him to a small tower room where they see someone signaling out to the marshes.
Then abouta week later George's farther comes to visit but that night Uncle Qyentian and Sooty are kidnapped. Who is behind the kidnappenings and who is signiling...

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