Your fav author from childhood

I loved the Chalet School books and bought them for my daughter who loved them too. She still has some. I so wanted to be at their boarding school and to be part of that world. Any time we were playing and had to choose a name I was Allegra (one of the characters) .
How does anyone live without books?

Enid Blyton and Charles Kingsley - loved The Water Babies. Also Francis Hodgson Burnett for The Secret Garden.

Thank you DoraMarr I couldn’t recall the name of the author. I found the MMM books really comforting.

P.s. I’ve started another thread on childhood stresses if anyone is interested?

Oh, I forgot the Milly Molly Mandy books by Joyce Lankester Bristley. I loved the map of the village inside the cover, which reminded me of the village my grandmother lived in.

Enid Blyton, W E Johns, Malcolm Saville....there must be loads more.

Milly Molly Mandy (and little friend Susan and Billy Blunt, remember?)

Then Swallows and Amazons and We didn’t mean to go to sea.

Children of Willow Farm and the Adventure series

But my absolute, all-time favourite was Elinor M Brent Dyer’s Chalet School books which I adored and bought with any book token or birthday or Christmas money.

And all of which my mother, without my knowledge, gave to a local hospital while I was at college. It still makes me cross!

What an enjoyable thread.

Enid Blyton for me. I envied the children in the Famous Five so much.

Anna Sewell and Black Beauty. I still have my copy of that.

Without a doubt, Arthur Ransome. I started with Swallows and Amazons and just kept reading.

Definitely the ‘Milly Molly Mandy’ books. Absolutely loved them (especially the little road map of the cottages at the front) when I was in junior school. Also ‘The Borrowers’.

I was about 9y old when I read ‘Alice in Wonderland’ at home, in bed, getting over ? chickenpox. Was in my mum’s bed (a treat cos I wasn’t well) on my own. Mum had gone to work - I must have been over the worst - but still ... ? No telephone in the house. Just told ‘stay in bed till I get back’. Needs must I suppose - no grandparents.

Different times indeed.

Are we too soft nowadays?

Or was it so traumatic that’s why I remember it so vividly? I admit I was a little bit scared.

Discuss.
Oh maybe a new thread - sorry to derail this one - I’ll shut up now.

Enid Blyton's Circus Days Again was the book which turned me into a lifelong reader. My favourite childhood read

I forgot Milly Molly Mandy - by Joyce Lankester (sp?) Brisley, IIRC.

It was Enid Blyton for me as a child. Faraway Tree, Famous Five, Adventure Series and the Children of Cherry Tree Farm and Willow Farm because I loved farms.

There were some books about a family who had adventures. There was a map inside the front of the book because they pretended these places were part of their game. I would love to know what that was!

Arthur Ransome - I loved 'Swallows and Amazons'

Enid Blyton - which horrifies me now with her racist, classist undertones.

Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Curlywurly

Same for me, I longed to go to Mallory Towers. I nagged and nagged to go to boarding school, not realising that children from council estates had no chance of going to a wonderful school by the sea.

Then I fell in love with Arthur Ransom books, and my love affair with a privileged middle class life style continued.

Oh and Eve Garnett’s The Family from One End Street.

Lorna Hill’s ballet books.

There was also a non-fiction series I loved but cannot find any trace of. It was two children, Jane & Paul or Susan & Bill, names like that, Go To Paris/Rome/Amsterdam etc. They seemed so exotic, to me!

I loved “What Katy Did” by Susan Coolidge, and the sequels. I enjoyed the “Jennings” stories by Anthony Buckeridge, set in a boys’ prep school. I loved the “William” stories too. Later, in the last year at Junior school, I discovered Dickens, especially “David Copperfield” and “Oliver Twist.” An aunt used to give me Dean and Son’s classics for birthdays- I remember “Robin Hood”, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table”, “Treasure Island”, and many more. I was a bookish child, and used to go to the library by myself from quite a young age.

Laura Ingalls Wilder especially The Long Winter.

I only really liked EB’s Malory Towers books.

AA Milne - Christopher Robin and Will Scott who wrote about the Cherry Family.

Got to be Enid Blyton. I read every Famous Five book and then Secret Seven . Can't remember any others although I read every book in the girls section of our library.

I meant to say, I read Jane Ayre aged 10 when sick with yellow jaundice.

Dickens and Charlotte Bronte.
I read a book at school called Torrie by Annabel Johnson, about a wagon train going west across America. It was a fabulous story. Out of print now.

Enid Blyton for me too, lucky for me my grandchildren enjoyed them when they were younger, so got to enjoy them all over again

Enid Blyton for me.

Also, Richmal Crompton - the William books.

Does anyone remember Pookie (the rabbit with wings)? I loved those and the illustrations were beautiful.