I mean the kind of rural holiday location where children get to sleep in barns, camp out on islands and cycle, walk or even hitch-hike long miles through country lanes, relieved by picnics packed up by friendly adults who know when to back off and when to interfere.
Optional but highly desirable elements are caves, horses, dogs (actually, I’m not sure the dog is optional, I think it’s essential) and the frisson of danger provided by a treasure hunt or an odd character lurking around, clearly up to something fishy.
And then came to the right conclusion:
The Famous Five come to mind, and still have their following. But I think a strong contender for that place in the collective juvenile consciousness would be the Lone Pine novels by Malcolm Saville. The Lone Pine Club is a group of around eight children, the bonds between them forged on exactly the kind of holidays described above.
Similar to the Arthur Ransome novels, the precise line-up of characters varies according to location, but the heart of their adventures might truly be said to be the remote Shropshire countryside between Shrewsbury in the north and Ludlow in the south, and specifically the country around the mountains of the Long Mynd and the Stiperstones.
"The Neglected Mountain" is what Jenny calls the Stiperstones in the story to give the book its title.
Miranda of Miranda's Island had reread the book before writing her post:
My husband claimed it was "throbbing with UST [unresolved sexual tension]" and certainly Saville doesn’t ignore the - ahem - emotional development of fifteen and sixteen year olds.
There are two boy/girl pairings - David, very much the leader of the group, and Petronella (known as Peter), an independent local girl who loves to ride her pony around the country lanes when she’s not away "at boarding school in Shrewsbury", a statement that neatly conveys the all-important 1950s identifier of social class.
Jenny, from a village post office/general store and Tom, who works on a farm, make up the second couple. It is implicit, though never openly stated, that Jenny has something of a crush on David, but he’s out of her league, and she pairs off comfortably with Tom.
Peter's school fees are paid by her Uncle Micah, though how he has derived such wealth from farming the unpromising country around the Stiperstones is never made clear, but I shall look for signs of Jenny's crush on David next time I read one of the early Lone Pine stories.
Miranda goes on:
Why do these adventures continue to be appealing? I think it’s because the issues that tend to worry adults now – premature sexualisation, social diversity and the degree of freedom it is appropriate to offer older children – are addressed quite differently. That is not to say they are ignored. Far from it. Here is Saville on the subject of gypsies:
The gypsies and Mr Cantor respected each other. The detective knew how honest and trustworthy they were. Gypsies are often accused of many things unjustly, but in their wanderings they pick up a lot of information: and when Miranda handed the detective a cup of tea she knew at once that there were questions he wanted to ask them.
Laid on with a trowel perhaps, but you would never, I think, find such a passage in an Enid Blyton adventure.
The Miranda's Island post makes equally interesting observations on adventures and the development of character, and on children and the adult world.
It ends by praising the Girls Gone By reprints of the Lone Pine stories. These paperbacks are now becoming collectable in their own right, by they do have the full text of the original hardbacks. The Armada paperbacks that many young readers relied upon in the Sixties and Seventies were quite heavily edited - and not well edited, in Saville's own judgement.
Saville hardbacks with their dust wrappers fetch silly prices, and I don't suppose it's as easy to find battered hardbacks without them at reasonable prices as it was when I acquired most of my collection of his work. So a second-hand Girls Gone By edition may be your best bet if you want to read the books as Saville wrote them.
Finally, I hope Miranda is still with us and well. The last post on her blog was written in 2022 when she was obviously seriously ill. I am reminded of my post on disappearances from the net.
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