The Secret Seven and the missing words

One of things I have made a bit of a start on is getting replacement hard back copies of my Secret Seven books that I originally wrote a bit about on here a few years ago with the bulk of them being modern edition but with good original illustrations and the other five being 1970's paperback ones.

This series is for me a link of that nine through thirteen period where  having moved from the first 'proper' reading books I had from around  six with Mr Twiddle, I was looking for something a bit more 'grown up', a bit challenging both by the style of writing and also use of a wider vocabulary and that of older children.

It's an adventure series of a group of children who meet up having adventures while trying to solve mysteries and in it we see their personalities such as a somewhat bossy Peter, club leader.
In many ways it touches on that sense of longing to be long to a group, a circle which as a child of that age  you sure felt and in the series we see Susie, one of more quick thinking children kept out, perhaps more that she might undermine Peter than anything else.

They have a scottie dog called Scamper who rather like George's dog Timmy in the Famous Five plays a big role, big enough to be counted as a member even!

Actually it is the similarities that invite comparison between both of Enid Blyton's adventure series usually to the the detriment of the Secret Seven in which two later stories do clearly reference Famous Five books almost as if she was saying "If you read this, please consider reading the Famous Five!" but that's negate the point which is this is a self contained series aimed at younger children or children with a lower reading age which was probably why I got them given my reading issues when I did.

The series was started in nineteen forty-nine  and concluded in nineteen sixty-three and like the Famous Five editions later copies were subject not just to things such as changes in currency but also in dress where the girls generally wear pinafores rather as I do now but these were again changed for jeans or shorts and the boys wore jeans unlike boys even in the early to mid nineteen-seventies in school who wore tailored hard wearing lined shorts.

The text also was altered in recent copies to 'reflect' modern social ideas so where in the second novel, Secret Seven Adventure, Peter says to Jack as he is being scolded for allowing his sister Suzie to have his  Secret Seven badge she should be smacked for it and a grown up says to the children  the girl at the circus should be spanked for her constant fibbing, that is removed. Given it was written in nineteen-fifty that would of happened and I can well recall when I did something like that in the nineteen seventies I and my peers sure  were smacked or spanked.

It's small details like that, the references to things in 'shillings' that set the backdrop of this adventure as are things like the circus acts a child of that era saw, regardless of our own views on that today and why apart from the feel of having the hard back I'm slowly building up a collection of them hopefully all with dust jackets, to read and enjoy as I did back then.