“Everything was a lot simpler in those days,” continued Mrs. Hilly, “and the twisted and corrupting morals we see in modern life are but an aberration that we Blytonians aim to put right. By returning the books to their original and unsullied state before the heinous hand of political correctness trampled their true and guiding spirit, we will build a new England. One that smells of freshly baked bread and echoes with the sprightly call of rosy-cheeked farmers’ wives dispensing fresh milk from churns to children dressed in corduroy and summer dresses.”

She was in full flow by now. We had all stopped eating and were staring at her. I think she mistook our shock as agreement, and so she carried on with even more gusto.

“To deny modern children the historical context of an age in which most foreigners were untrustworthy and women were useful only for the kitchen denies them a realistic window into a bygone era that we should be promoting as an ideal to be cherished rather than a past to be improved and airbrushed.”

She stopped and smiled, then began to distribute leaflets that defined in more detail her Blyton-based political ideology.

It was true that Blyton books had been extensively revised over the years to move with shifting opinions, and it was also true that her books had been unfairly marked out as being a lot more offensive than they were—probably due to a certain degree of intellectual snobbery and a fundamental misunderstanding over why they were written. The argument had raged for decades on either side and culminated in the so-called Noddy Riots of 1990, when the warring factions clashed on the streets of Canterbury, inflicting almost 6 million pounds’ worth of damage and leaving six dead—not even the Marlowe/Shakespeare riots of 1967 had been that fierce.

“Let me get this totally straight,” I said. “You don’t want to just stop any more changes—you want to return the books to their prerevisionist state and use them as a template for your view of a new and better England?”

“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” she replied, beaming happily. “A woman’s place is definitely in the home, England functioned better when the working class knew their place, and foreigners are incorrigibly suspect. What do you think ‘Fundamentalist’ means in ‘Blyton Fundamentalist’? In fact,” she went on, now in something of a lather, “we aim to reinterpret and enhance the texts to more subtly export our own ultra-English worldview and have even written a series of commentaries as to what Our Blyton truly meant when she penned her great works. It is our intention to run the nation upon this new and radicalized Word of Blyton—we will insist that England is returned to a world of perpetual summers, simplistic politics, the expulsion of anyone who looks even vaguely foreign, and we will make the sacred words ‘gosh,’ ‘crikey’ and ‘wizzo’ a compulsory part of the English lexicon.”