GUEST BLOG: Sara Morrison

Sara Morrison's essay was one of my favourites in the Gilmore Girls-themed Coffee At Luke's collection. And I'm a huge fan of TV recap site, Television Without Pity, for which she also writes. So I was thrilled when she agreed to write a guest blog for us. Over to Sara...

I read more as a child than I do now. My mother was a children's librarian, which meant easy access and no overdue fines. The books she brought home were my escape from the fears and anxieties that kept me awake every night. Even though we lived in a safe suburban neighborhood in a house filled with working smoke detectors, I still worried that someone would break in or a fire would start while my family and I slept. Reading took my mind off of this and relaxed me enough for sleep to finally overtake me. I liked a lot of different genres, but my favorite was undoubtedly mystery. There was no shortage of mystery books and series for children, although I had discriminating tastes. I didn’t really go for Nancy Drew; at 18, she was too old for me and I always thought it was weird how she had to mention her dead mom in the beginning of every book. The Hardy Boys were lunkheads, and those books were for boys anyway. The Bobbsey Twins looked like pussies, so I skipped right over them. The Boxcar Children were endlessly boring and have the dubious distinction of being one of the only mystery stories I put down without bothering to find out who did it.

It was my father who actually introduced me to what would become my mystery series of choice. He's from England, and on one of our trips there I ran out of reading material and went looking for more books to buy. He introduced me to Enid Blyton, who was the English children's author before J.K. Rowling came along. She wrote many stories, but her most famous and my favorites were the Famous Five series. The Famous Five consisted of four very Englishly-named children: siblings Julian, 12, Dick, 11, and Anne, 10 (apparently their parents had three years of nonstop action, followed by either finally getting the rhythm method down or sleeping in separate beds), their cousin Georgina, 11, and her dog, Timmy (age unknown).

Georgina was my favorite character* because she was the only one with a distinct personality, and one that was very much similar to my own. She was a tomboy and insisted on being called George, cutting her hair short, and wearing boy's clothes. She had a temper and was known to sulk, especially when Julian and Dick deemed a mission too dangerous for her girl self to accompany them on. George loved it when people mistook her for a boy, and who could blame her? The books were written in the forties and fifties, when women were relegated to household chores and skirts. As the lone model of femininity, Anne was always stuck preparing meals and cleaning up when the children went on adventures, always fretting that things were scary and dangerous and bursting into tears at the drop of a hat. Who wanted to be like that? Certainly not me, nor, I suspect, Enid Blyton.

Apparently, in England sixty years ago, it was considered unfashionable to supervise one's children, so the four children and their dog were always free to fall into adventures, whether they be at George's awesome seaside home Kirrin Cottage or on her own private island (which had its own castle!!), or various trips around the country during their frequent school holidays. A good percentage of these adventures involved stumbling upon a smuggling ring, although what goods were being smuggled and why people were still engaged in a rather outdated crime (even for the forties and fifties), usually remained unknown. They were constantly finding secret passages and tunnels. Every house they went to had a network of them! Once, they went to a school friend's house called Smuggler's Top (bet you'll never guess what happened there!) and found a system of underground caverns under the deadly marshes they were allowed to walk around completely unsupervised even though they were warned that one wrong step and the marshes would suck you down forever. My dad used to joke that it was amazing that Enid Blyton's England didn't fall in on itself, being so riddled with tunnels. Kirrin Cottage never sank into the tunnels it stood upon, although a big tree fell on it once during a storm.

The Five never traveled as far as Nancy Drew (who once went to freaking AFRICA on her boyfriend's school trip), but then, they didn't need to. They usually rode their bikes into the countryside where they'd inevitably find a ruined house to stay in and some suspicious persons, most likely unspecified foreigners, who were in the process of committing crimes. The Five only left England once that I can recall, and that was to go to Wales, which was written to seem just as exotic as Nancy Drew's Africa, full of strange-speaking people, snow, mountains, shimmering rainbow clouds, and, of course, wicked foreigners attempting to mine the hills for an unspecified radioactive element to supply to the unspecified enemy.

I longed for such adventures and wanted to be just like the Famous Five. But, alas, there were differences. I didn't have a dog named Timmy, although, by sheer coincidence, my guinea pig was named Timmy. Unless the mysteries involved carrots, though, he'd be more of a liability than an asset. I had no cousins, so I had to make do with my brother and some friends. Unfortunately, our parents were annoyingly watchful and would never dream of allowing us to go off camping in the countryside alone, no matter how many times we asked. Our homes were devoid of secret passages and tunnels. There was a brief excitement when it was discovered that Sarah B. had a crawlspace in her bedroom closet. Sadly, it only lead to her mystery-free attic. Still, my friends and I were always on the lookout for mysteries. If they wouldn't come to us, we'd just have to come to them.

The street I lived on had a few possibilities. There was an old lady who lived in a house surrounded by tall trees. We were sure she had something to hide because she yelled at us every time we got close to her lawn. That also made any investigations rather difficult. There was an old barn at the top of the hill -- the oldest building in the neighborhood -- that was sure to have its share of hidden secrets, hopefully in tunnel form. My friends and I dug up some rocks and searched around, but all we found was an old key that was not accompanied by a map to the hidden treasure it unlocked. There was once a rash of BB gun drive-by shootings on the street. Nighttime attacks claimed two windows and a piece of siding. My next door neighbor and I got right on the case, making a list of suspects (the kid down the street we didn't like at the moment because he was mean; a home remodeling business hoping to get new business from the repairs; the nuns who lived in the convent up the street because we thought they were weird) and planned a stakeout. It never happened; we soon discovered that her bedroom window faced my parents' bedroom window, so in order for us to both watch the street and stay in contact via a phone system made of cups and string (our brothers wouldn't lend us their walkie talkies), I'd have to sneak into my parents' room and sit at their window after they'd gone to bed. There was no way that was going to happen. As it was, the BB gun bandit never struck again. We never found out who it was, either. My money is still on the nuns.

So there would be no adventures at home, but perhaps my brother and I could happen upon one on vacation. While vacations were always fun, the biggest mystery was probably "why didn't the hotel maid replace the towels even though we left them on the bathroom floor as instructed?" Even England, home of the Famous Five, had nothing to offer. My grandparent's house didn't even have a basement, let alone a secret passage. Much to my bitter disappointment, they certainly didn't live in a cottage by the sea with its own island. Talking with the neighborhood kids revealed that the only suspicious person on the block was actually my grandmother, who refused to let kids retrieve any balls they'd accidentally hit into her yard. This did, however, solve the mystery of where that garbage barrel full of tennis balls in their garage came from.

And so, my life progressed, mystery-free. As an adult, I sometimes re-read my old Famous Five books, but things have changed. Where I was once envious of the kids and their incredible adventures and lack of adult supervision, I now wonder why no one ever bothered to call Child Welfare on those kids' parents for neglect. I think of how very lucky they were not to encounter a suspicious man with intentions far more evil than bringing unspecified goods into the country, all too pleased to see four small children all alone to prey upon.

But the way I've changed the most is that I now realize that Anne, once my least favorite character, was right all along. When the other kids were jumping into ancient dungeons, ruined houses, and recently surfaced shipwrecks, Anne was begging them to let her stay behind, back in the cave or whatever other random shelter they'd happened upon because she was too scared to go where the action was. I used to think she was a wet blanket and symbol of everything I hated about having to be a girl. Now I think she was the only one in that group who had any sense.

I guess that's what happens when you grow up; your childhood fearlessness, drawn from ignorance and innocence about what could go wrong, turns into worry about all the bad things you now know are possible. And maybe that works in the reverse as well; the nightly fears of burglary and fire that dominated my childhood have long since disappeared, even though the things that used to keep me up at night are much more real now than they ever were then. There's no point in waiting for mysteries to come to you just like there's no point in keeping yourself up at night worrying about something that might never happen, and wouldn't be the end of the world if it did. When I'm not up all night freaking out about how I'm going to pay the rent next month, I sleep just fine.

Thanks, Sara!

*read more about Georgina by our regular writer, Helen Redfern.

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