A school photo of Michael age 7
A short piece on reading in primary school with a special mention of the Famous Five, Enid Blyton series
Books were scarce in rural Sligo in the 1950s and early 1960s when I attended our small village two-teacher school. There was plenty of other reading material of course. I read the daily newspaper, the Irish Independent and The Sunday Press. My mother got Woman’s Weekly and I read parts of it, the Robin Family story of course, but also Mary Marryat Advises, which was fascinating but often incomprehensible to a pre-teen. My grandfather bought us weekly comics, the Beano and Knockout, which we devoured. So we were readers from an early age thanks to parents and grandparents.
Rockfield NS showing the original two rooms of the school. These are now a small section of a much enlarged school.
At school our English textbooks were series such as New Prospect, On Wings of Words, Fact and Fancy and these were full of wonder, of poems and stories from some of the great writers. We encountered Wordsworth, Yeats, Eva Gore Booth, Dickens, Longfellow, Colum and many more in their pages. When I got my new text books in June I immediately read the lot. I can still remember lines from poems they contained. Shelley in fifth class:
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red.
We also had a small school library which was supplied by the County Library service
and this was magic. I don’t know how often the books were changed but when they were I rushed up when allowed to see what wonders were available. I remember the great Sligo County Librarian, Nora Niland herself, bringing the new books to our school at least once. She noticed that we had been reading The Little Waves of Breffny by Eva Gore-Booth and she chatted to us about that poem and its author. Nora Niland, of course, began the art collection, including many Jack B Yeats works, which is now such a treasure in Sligo.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46529/the-little-waves-of-breffny
Nora Niland photo from the website of the Model Gallery, Sligo where the Niland Collection is housed and displayed
It was in that school library that I discovered the Famous Five. I think the first one I read was Five Go to Billycock Hill, which was first published in 1957. I was immediately captivated. What did I find so enthralling? This was a book aimed at a reader like me. There was no obvious moral, though the good always came out on top; the children were always right, the adults less trustworthy. Uncle Quentin was grumpy as some adults I knew. The settings were familiar, Dorset didn’t seem all that different from the rolling hills and wandering streams of south Sligo. True, we didn’t have a castle with gold ingots in the dungeons but it was easy to imagine that such could be over the next hill. While our parents would never have allowed us to go off in a caravan for a week we did have a lot of freedom to wander around the local area especially during those summer holidays. The illustrations by Eileen Soper seemed to complement the text so well.
The Famous Five books on my shelves
At each library change I looked to see which new Famous Five book* has come and if there was none I had to make do with a Robert Louis Stevenson, a Jennings and Darbyshire or a Bobbsey Twins book. I moved beyond Enid Blyton of course but still regard those books with great respect and affection. Now, among my poetry volumes, my Evelyn Waugh Penguin paperbacks, and all my other books are the twenty one Hodder & Stoughton hardback editions, complete with dust jackets, of the Famous Five series as I remember them.
Michael Farry
Michael Farry is a native of Coolaney, Co Sligo and is a retired primary teacher. He has researched and published extensively on the history of the War of Independence and Civil War in Sligo. He has also had four poetry collection published. The most recent is An Apology for Our Survival, was published earlier this year by Revival Press, Limerick. His previous collections were Troubles (2020), The Age of Glass, (2017) and Asking for Directions (2012). He spent most of his teaching life in County Meath
*https://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/famous-five.php
https://archive.org/details/jennings_202205