How many books are in the series and do you have to start at #1 or are they all self supporting?
I loved all of the **Swallows and Amazons ** books, even though I’ve never learned to sail. I still have my copies of all 12 of them and in fact re-read *Missee Lee * a couple of weeks ago.
I read the first 2 Swallows & Amazons and just adored them. In the first, the father was off to war someplace and the children begged their mother to wire him for permission to sail to an island on the lake, and camp there for a few nights. Mother has her doubts about the plan but Father comes to the rescue with his pithy telegram response:
Better drowned than duffers if not duffers wont drown
Adventures ensue.
I don’t know why, but somehow I lost interest in the later books (after Swallows & Amazons Forever).
Naturally Enid Blyton wrote fantasies. But she didn’t stray too far from what was likely or possible. When I think back to my childhood I was allowed to do things that I can’t imagine children today being permitted to do unsupervised. Camping trips. Overnight Cycle trips along main roads. I sometimes wonder what the hell my parents were thinking!
While there’s certainly a case for restricting children’s movements on roads, as roads are certainly busier, I think that the whole “stranger danger” issue is way over blown . It’s a great shame that we’ve allowed our irrational fears to dictate that our children can’t even be permitted to walk to school alone.
But anyway, to get back to the OP, I have no trouble imagining that children a few decades before my childhood had even greater freedom. Romanticised fantasies or not, you can’t help but think they had it best and far, far better than the virtual prisoners our children must feel. 
Amazons & Swallows is great, BTW. I can’t imagine a better way to spend a summer than the adventures these children had, no matter what your age! And the children’s father’s view about all this messing about on water? “Better drowned than duffers. If not duffers, will not drown.” Sentiments like that would get you arrested nowadays 
When I was ten or twelve we’d all go camping alone. We’d pack a sleeping bag and a tent on our bikes, which our parents would then drop off at a friends house and a dinner wrapped in tin-foil(we wern’t supposed to light a fire, but we did anyway). We’d all take the school bus home with that guy, then get on our bikes and ride as far as we could in the 5 hours or so before dark, and camp by a pond or lake somewhere.
If they followed us to know where we were they were pretty good at it, cause we always went different places and never saw them. Usually only for one night though, cause we got hungry.
In the 60s I walked to school, and only really remember one time when all hell broke loose - I was in first grade [about 6 years old] and decided to go to a chums house to play after school, and didn’t tell anybody [she lived literally 500 yards from our house, about a block away around a corner.]
I found out when the police showed up in a general canvass of the kids I went to school with. I also got the only punishment of my young life.
See, there was an attempt to unionize the family mills trucks, and apparently there had been some rumblings about harming us kids. Ah, the golden years of mob teamsterism.
Considering that my family was the major employment in town [and for several other towns scattered around the east coast] in retrospect it seems foolhardy to have let my brother and I wander around like they did. It was not uncommon for us to wander off in a summer morning and be gone until dinnertime. My favorite haunt was a large [to me at the time] woodlot belonging to the farmer up the hill from the summer house. My other favorite thing to do would be to bag some dry clothes and swim about half a mile to some cousins [it ws faster than walking down the lake shore.] and from about 10 to 16 my morning exercise was to swim the .75 mile across the lake, and then back again. AruBro and I used to wander pretty freely. The wonders of the 60s and 70s when there was pretty much no tv in the summers=)
When I was twelve me and three friends went on a hike to see a dead body.
Actually, no, that was “The Body” by Stephen King.
I’ll leave it to British Dopers to say how realistic it was or wasn’t for 10-12 year old kids to be camping out all over the British Isles with no supervision.
But I will point out that, for better and for worse, our world is not the same as that of Enid Blyton or of my parents, who both grew up in NEw York City in the 1930’s and 1940’s.
My father often talked, casually, about hopping on the subway or a streetcar and going to Yankee Stadium or to Ebbetts Field with his friends when he was 9 or 10. The very concept blew my mind! At that age, I was barely allowed to go more than a few blocks from my house!
On an old episode of “Saturday Night Live” (frobably from around 1975 or 1976), I saw guest host Broderick Crawford reminiscing about his childhood in New York, and the times when he and his friends would camp out overnight in Central Park. Again, the concept boggled my mind! By the 1960’s and 1970’s, when I was a kid, Central Park was synonymous with crime. My parents would never have dreamed of letting me or my brothers spend the night alone in the park!
When I was in high school and read J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” I was mostly bored (as were most of my classmatesd), but we all took notice of one part: we were all astonished when teenage Holden Caulfield spent the night sleeping on the benches at the Port Authority bus terminal. My classmates and I all knew that terminal as a dirty, smelly, creepy place where you’d be crazy to let your guard down. But to adults of my Dad’s generation, that was no big deal. They remembered when people could and DID such things, and the worst thing that could happen was a cop coming along, nudging you with his nightstick, and telling you to move along.
I’m NOT trying to make latter day New York sound worse than it is, nor am I saying that New York was a Paradise a few decades ago. No doubt, there were dangers in old New York that didn’t get publicized as they do today, and it’s quite possible we had an inflated sense of how dangerous NEw York was in the 1970’s.
Still, kids DID go all kinds of places alone in New York City fifty years ago, places their parents would never let them go unsupervised today.
I’d be willing to bet a shilling that it was the same in the Britain of Enid Blyton’s day.
Did you ever find that jar of pennies?
I grew up in NYC in the eighties, and in middle school (ages 11,12,13) I used to go to my orthodontist appointments alone, on the bus, which included having to walk about 5 blocks from the bus stop at Fulton Mall. Which was not a bad neighborhood, but not a good neighborhood either.
I also used to go to far-away movie theaters by bus with my friends, though we knew which ones were in good neighborhoods.
I also took the subway alone or with friends on occasion. (I commuted to my high school, as well. By that time I was an old hand at public transportation)
I also walked alone, about 10 blocks, to the library on a weekly basis. I was just supposed to be home by dark.
Course we also played ball in the street, so maybe my parents were just criminally negligent?
I remember getting a few Famous Five and Secret Seven books as a kid when we went on holidays to Co. Sligo, for some reason we always stopped at a second hand book store in Sligo.
As for an innocent age Mum remembers how she once went off on a raid to catch a potcheen distiller in Co. Cavan, Ireland with her Grand-father (an Irish police sergeant)