Earlier this year, the village of Beaconsfield in the UK, where Enid Blyton lived for 30 years, was in the news for being divided over installing a plaque in her name on the grounds that she was/ not racist. As children, many of us devoured Enid Blytons greedily, blindly, ignorant of the political incorrectness of it all. That blind immersion may have sprung from there being very little for Indian children to read in the ’70s and ’80s – there were the Amar Chitra Kathas, which too, in recent years, have been alleged to be communal and sexist. Chandamama, Children’s World, National Book Trust publications, some anthologies of folk tales and later, the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series were what were most popular.

This ignorance ensured Blyton’s world was as fascinating as it was fantastic – we took it for the fiction it was and did not take it seriously. Never mind that those kids regularly got into terrible danger, that they went off wandering around the misty moors, spotting smugglers, getting mixed up with kidnappers, hiding in caves. Never mind that they got into trouble in other countries as well. It was all good fun. And the food they ate? Exotic, much of it, to children in pre-liberalisation India then - ham, lettuce, ginger beer, clotted cream, potted meat, tongue sandwiches, blancmange, cream cheese. Even if our mouth watered, there was not much we could do about it and the reading went on uninterrupted. I don’t remember feeling either belonging or alienation with the characters and the settings.

Of course, there are people who wanted to and did join boarding school after having read St Clare’s and Malory Towers, but I was not one of them. At college, I did live in a hostel, though, and was always sceptical when I heard midnight feasts being plotted and planned.

Not that I was invited to many, so I can’t say how enjoyable they were. But the other residents were blasé enough to discuss them in front of the uninvited and I would wonder if it wasn’t a rather wannabe effort. There was no pool where we could go for a midnight swim, no kippers that would stink up the hostel and threaten to wake up the warden, and no matron to suss out what we had been up to and give us nasty medicine. Not willing to miss out on any bit of the experience associated with this boarding school tradition, the party planners even hoped the warden or assistant warden would catch them at it. Would they have offered her a piece of bread with mango pickle, I wonder, a la Mam’zelle who was offered a kipper or a fried sausage when she chanced on one of those clandestine feasts?

Those then, were the snacks of hostel life. Bread, chappatis stored from dinner time and biscuits, all smeared with pickle or jam, chips, fruit, cake and other snacks if family had visited recently or we had acquired them on our outing day. I don’t remember much about the only midnight feast I attended, except that we didn’t get caught despite having the tubelight on even after 10 p.m., and that there was a huge watermelon and we had to finish it because we had no way to store the leftovers.

There is the theory that many English authors of the World War II era, including Blyton, made up for the severe food rationing in force by conjuring up visions of bountiful meals. No wonder then, that to hostelites who were kept on a tight leash, allowed out only twice a week and had to subsist largely on what the mess dished out, a midnight feast, even if it didn’t remotely resemble or live up to Blyton’s exalted standards, must have seemed romantic and revolutionary.

Did you have midnight feasts? How did you celebrate them?

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