This book is one of the "Deans Popular Rewards" series of Blyton books that were published in the UK in the 1960s. There were 48 brightly-coloured hardbacked books in the series, and many children of the 1970s had a small collection of these on their bookshelves - if their parents weren't too right-on to let them have them, that is!
Looking back at all the Blytons I read as a child, I remember them as very moralising, very focused on class and probably too archaic for me to consider them as good reading material for children today. From the books I read back then, I think perhaps only The Magic Faraway Tree series (which is extremely inventive and magical) really stands up alongside the wealth of children's literature being produced today.
Sunshine Book was one of the Deans Rewards series that my sister owned as a child, and I thought it would be interesting to re-read the stories and see what I thought as an adult. I picked up this particular copy in a charity shop. It has a jolly picture of some children catching tadpoles on the cover and a bored child has coloured in some of the line-drawings inside with a variety of crayons and felt-tips. Reading it was like nursery-food for the brain; there was something quite comforting about being tucked up in bed re-acquainting myself with these old stories even if half of them are about pixies and I did feel like a bit of a berk. I reminded myself that I do have a Classics degree, and have the latest Helen Dunmore on order from Amazon, and then got over myself.
So! On to the stories. By far the most interesting and inventive was Father Time and his Pattern Book. A young boy, Robin, hears footsteps outside late at night on New Year's Eve, and finds that it is Father Time himself, calling round the houses to pick up the "patterns" which everyone creates, year on year, the design of which depends on the individual's behaviour. Robin asks to see some so Father Time whips out the patterns of various friends - brother Lennie has a beautiful pattern because he is kind, nasty Harry from next door has an ugly pattern, etc. Robin's own pattern is generally lovely but has ugly smudges which show that he told some fibs, so he resolves to make a better pattern next year. It's as moralising as many other Blyton tales, but somehow this story manages to do so without grating. The concept of people creating patterns made me wonder if Blyton had pinched it from folklore - I need to do more digging. Certainly another of her stories in another of the Rewards books (not sure which, I read it nearly 30 years ago!) has a fairy living in a hut that runs around on legs, which is very very similar to Baba Yaga's hut on fowl's legs which appears in Slavic folklore.
Another nice little story is Prince Rollo's Kite. A wicked wizard kidnaps Prince Rollo and hides him in a hut far away. Luckily he has his kite with him, so he writes a message describing his whereabouts on its tail and then lets it fly away, allowing the person who finds it discover where he is being held.
I'm a big fan of the countryside, so theoretically I should have enjoyed the two factual pieces called A Country Walk in England(Spring/Summer) and A Country Walk in England (Autumn/Winter). Sadly the conversational style made me want to heave: "Oh look, what do we see here? It is a Germander Speedwell. How pretty! Let us go and look at the old pond" and so on. It seems horribly twee and patronising, but I suppose they could have been written for poor towny kids who have never even seen a cow before (cf Benjy in the Happy House stories at the end of the book). Thank god for the internet, for books containing colour photography, and for actually being able to travel to the countryside.
There are some poems in the book too. Ugh, Ugh. I can remember hating them as a child as well, so this isn't just me being snobby about them as an adult. One of them is about pixies sleeping in rose beds and is suspiciously like The Old Man's Beard Fairy poem by Cicely Mary Barker, only without the charm.
Well, there we are. I am fascinated enough to want to read more of these books now, and they do look colourful on my bookshelf. Deans Rewards have become extremely rare to find in charity shops though, so it might take a while. I wonder what the original owner of my copy of Sunshine Book would think of it.....her name was written in the front, and I've actually just managed to find her profile on Facebook (she now has two kids of her own and is listed as having been to school eight miles from here). It is a very different world today, indeed.
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