Footnotes Read online

  Enid understood better than anyone the importance of tending her brand. She ensured her wartime divorce (and swift remarriage) was kept secret from the world by swapping husbands (and her married name) while everyone’s attention was elsewhere. After the war was over she carried on as though nothing had changed, except the children’s ‘daddy’ was no longer a man in uniform, he was a doctor called Kenneth. Gillian and Imogen are still there in the family photos, stroking kittens and riding horses, but it was now Enid and twinkly Dr Kenneth Darrell Waters who were looking on fondly. The change of name didn’t matter, because Enid was never Mrs Pollock or Mrs Darrell Waters anyway – not to the world and its children. She was ‘Miss Blyton’. And throughout a life of hectic industry Enid kept her famous signature, marking every book with its comfortingly rounded initial ‘E’, its soft but perky pen-work and the firm double underline a binding promise of extra helpings of adventure and fun.

  Enid Blyton may have said that her stories and their settings emerged from her subconscious, but Swanage, the Isle of Purbeck and its fields and moors, farmhouses, beaches, coves and caves are what fed her imagination. I am slipping and skidding along the coastal path that leads from Swanage to the village of Studland, battered by the ferocious wind, scoured by sleet, hood up, head down, wondering what would happen if I just keeled over into a ditch – and how long it would take before I was found. I am the only fool on the path. The way is narrow and glutinous with a cold, deep, clutching mud. In places, especially where the path is steep, clumps of blackthorn are crowding close, the early blossom clinging in misery to the branches, but at least the bushes provide a veneer of shelter. Once I reach the top, the wind rages over the open fields and I have to fight my way to the headland and the view of Old Harry Rocks – three collapsed chalky arches rising from the sea. There are a couple of people here, whooping into the gale, and then, emerging out of the snow (the temperature is dropping) a party of teenagers comes into view, one bouncing a football, some on their phones, laughing and sauntering along as if they were on Oxford Street.

  It is exhilarating here, at Britain’s southern edge, leaning into the wind at the top of the giddy cliffs, watching the waves heave and thrash against Old Harry Rocks. A seagull comes screaming up from the sea and is flung inland. Everything – the deadly waves, the torn trees, the shrieking people – feels wild and unfettered. Unhinged even. Do not imagine for a second that Enid, for all her mimsy, would not have revelled in this mayhem. She loved a good thunderstorm. And even though Gillian thought her mother was essentially a shy person, she lived her life with passion and a whirling energy. Gillian’s sister Imogen, in her troubling ‘fragment’ of autobiography A Childhood at Green Hedges, published twenty years after her mother’s death, quotes her friend Diana Biggs:

  Your parents came over for a drink and I remember walking into our drawing-room. Enid Blyton was sitting in that settee. It is over forty years ago, but … none of that has dimmed my first impression. She was incredibly vibrant, an absolutely vital person. Everyone else in the room sort of faded. It was just this incredible personality sitting on the settee …

  So. Enid had energy and fire and immense creativity (measured by volume, at the very least). But what she did not have, it turns out, is the ability to bring specific landscapes to life. She is not, in that portentous phrase, ‘a writer of place’ – looking to portray with fine detail a well-loved meadow or clifftop walk – or indeed to take that meadow and transform it through her art into something that sparks with its own unique essence and fire. The simple fact is that Enid writes in archetypes (another word would be clichés). She had no interest in writing with evocative precision about specific places. It is certainly very hard to pin them down in her writings. I am criss-crossing the south-eastern tip of the Isle of Purbeck, from Swanage to Studland, via Old Harry Rocks and the Agglestone Rock, taking in Agglestone Cottage and the views from the moor over to Brownsea Island, and although I know (because I’ve been told) that Hill Cottage near the golf course (bought by Enid’s second husband Kenneth for £1 in 1951) is the model for Agglestone Cottage, and that George found Timmy (found him!) on the moor above Kirrin Cottage, and that Brownsea Island was transformed into Whispering (or Wailing) Island in Five Have a Mystery to Solve, there really is almost no clue in most of her books. What you will find is an ‘old’ farmhouse and a ‘blue’ sea and a ‘lovely’ bay.

  The path from Old Harry Rocks heads north and east along the clifftop, following the coast, through stretches of flowering gorse and scraps of woodland, and into the village of Studland. Enid and Kenneth started taking their holidays here from 1960 onwards, abandoning the Grand in Swanage in favour of the Knoll House Hotel. It’s possible that Enid wanted to be more secluded (she was very famous by now), or that she wanted to be near Kenneth’s golf course (she learned late, but could whip through three rounds in a day). The price wouldn’t have bothered her. Kenneth, said Enid’s daughter Imogen, was not slow to take advantage of his and Enid’s joint account, and ‘once he had acquired the taste for spending money, he began to spend a great deal’. But only on the big things (jewellery and a chauffeur for Enid, a Rolls-Royce and a Bentley); he would also hoard paperclips and hand-deliver any letter he could. Enid didn’t care either way. She found it funny. Anyway, people seem to agree that Kenneth was a good husband for Enid: an old-school doctor, devoted, somewhat rigid, energetic, enjoyed a simple joke, conservative, busy and serious, rather deaf (which didn’t help his temper, although Enid’s perfect diction was a boon), and resolutely middle-brow in his cultural tastes. At one time there was talk of Enid becoming a professional musician (or at least her father had hoped so) and she was also a talented artist, but all of that seems to have faded away in the Kenneth years.

  The Knoll House Hotel is low, friendly and soothing – and I can see why Enid was drawn to it. By 1960 she was already suffering from the Alzheimer’s that led to her death in November 1968, aged just seventy-one. Certainly her output was dropping: she wrote the last Famous Five book in 1963, published three books in 1964, and then fell uneasily silent. As Barbara Stoney writes in her biography, ‘as time went by she found it increasingly difficult to concentrate long enough to write coherently or to stop her fantasy world from spinning over into the reality of her day-to-day life’. She had always had a fear of losing control – of what might be lurking in her memories, or in the depths of her subconscious – and these years must have been terrifying.

  But I like to think she found pleasure at the Knoll. She used to sit in the dining room watching the children. There are gorgeous views from some of the public rooms (and her preferred bedroom at the back), over Scots pines and a weather-worn tennis court down to the sparkling bay. There’s a brass bust of Enid in an alcove at the hotel (they are very proud of the connection) as well as one of Winston Churchill. I wonder if the Churchill bust was here when Enid was staying. Her first husband, Hugh Pollock, oversaw the production of Churchill’s monumental The World Crisis (later The Great War) in the 1930s, the two of them spending long days locked away at Chartwell, editing and rewriting, tucking into the brandy and cigars. It must have been a thrilling experience for Hugh (he revered Churchill), but another turbo-boost to his alcoholism. He drank heavily for most of his and Enid’s marriage, although he tried to hide it from her. And she was eager to be deceived, even if her diaries are full of his illnesses and indispositions. When he fell seriously ill in 1938 Enid found a great cache of empty bottles in their cellar – his secret hoard, brooding under their home, like a long-forgotten treasure trove in an ancient dungeon, just waiting to be discovered. Enid had plenty of secrets of her own, but she hated other people’s.

  It is troubling to think of Enid in these later years, her mind skimming between the daily routine and her ‘fantasy world’. She had always dreaded what might be waiting for her, once her defences were down. It’s no wonder there are so many caves and secret passageways and hidden tunnels in her books. It’s right there in Five on a Treasure
Island, after the enormous storm has upended everything: ‘There was something else out on the sea by the rocks beside the waves – something dark, something big, something that seemed to lurch out of the waves and settle down again.’

  Once, everything flowed so easily for Enid; the boundary connecting her ‘under-mind’, as she called it, was porous and thin; and she only had to peek inside, hold the door ajar, and her stories (her safe, jolly stories) would slip out and arrange themselves on the page. But now the doors were wide open and dark things were stirring. I don’t think she was hiding anything genuinely horrifying (or even criminal) from herself. I think it is more likely that she was agonized by the gap between the way she wanted to be, the way, in fact, the best characters in her story books always behaved – Christian, kind, loving, open, generous – and the way she had been in her life. Or maybe she found it hard to reconcile what she thought and felt and wanted (her ferocious drive, her self-absorbed writing life) with the way she imagined she should behave. Perhaps she was tormented by how far she had fallen short of her own absurd and impossibly perfect brand.

  Enid preferred to write her books, and live her life, on the surface. And to keep things vague. But even if it is hard to locate specific places, here in the Isle of Purbeck, the truth is that everything inside an Enid Blyton book is instantly recognizable. She takes the world and makes it less confusing, kneading her ingredients into something manageable, safe, tidy and above all familiar. Even when she is leading us up a Faraway Tree to a land of saucepan men and irritated polar bears, all of these things have their untroubling place – and the children are free to go home once the fun is over. Perhaps, on second thoughts, Enid really did manage to capture the essence of the Isle of Purbeck. And all those people who have moved here, looking for a lost land of unlocked front doors, well-tended hedgerows and a steam train panting in a siding at the heart of an English village – perhaps it is Enid Blyton who has drawn them here. Just how deep does her influence run? There was a time, not so long ago, when it would have been hard to find a single child in Britain who had not read (or been read) at least one Blyton book, and suckled themselves to sleep on her warm, tender, infinitely reassuring words. We are all, as she so often said, her children. And she is our storyteller.

  Here’s Julian (the oldest of the four children) in Five Have a Mystery to Solve: ‘I somehow feel more English for having seen those Dorset fields, surrounded by hedges, basking in the sun.’ To be clear, Enid Blyton didn’t invent that particular image of Englishness – you might as well credit P. G. Wodehouse or John Constable or the Acts of Enclosure – but she certainly spread it far and wide. And although I am sure it is true, as Enid’s daughter Gillian said, that ‘every nationality enjoyed them [her books] just as much as the English children did’, that only goes to show that it is not just the English who are in thrall to the vision – that wistful English vision, polished over the years – of pure, unsullied village life, of George Orwell’s ‘old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings’. Orwell wrote much more than that, of course, in his attempt to define Englishness (‘the diversity of it, the chaos!’), and even in the same paragraph there is plenty about ‘clogs in the Lancashire mill towns’ and ‘queues outside the Labour exchanges’. But it is the misty mornings that linger. Perhaps they get to us all in the end. And the fact is, these things really do exist – ancient water meadows, thistledown drifting in country lanes, cheery publicans, apple-choked orchards and the soft silence of village greens fading into the twilight – and even now they are here, right here, in the Isle of Purbeck. However much the frozen wind may howl. And whether or not you are all of a sudden shaken by an irresistible urge (a spasm of fury from the world outside this muffling cocoon) to rage and stamp all over someone’s immaculate front lawn. It is here – and everything else will pass. Softly now. Just come on in. It’s all lovely. Quite, quite lovely.

  When I throw open the curtains in my top-floor room at the Grand the next morning, I am met by a searing blaze of sunshine. The wind has gone. The sky is a tentative, early morning blue, rinsed and in recovery from yesterday’s storms. The sea is flat, tense even (and also, as Enid could tell us, undeniably blue). There’s a ginger cat sitting on the sleek green lawn just below my window, where Enid once walked (the world is full of colour this fine day), and as I watch it stretches and strolls with its tail high towards the steps that lead to the Grand’s private beach. It is a day to be up and doing. Adventures are around the corner. My wife, Anna, has arrived and I turn, the curtains still in my hands, and half-shout, ‘Look at this weather. It’s LOVELY!’ Ah, the salty tang of the fresh Swanage air.

  Enid moved her Swanage base from the Grosvenor Hotel to the Grand in 1952 and kept on coming until she discovered Studland’s Knoll House Hotel in 1960. The holidays of her most prolific years were spent here in the Grand, swimming and playing golf with Dr Kenneth now that her children had left for their universities. In essence, the place probably hasn’t changed much since. The great central staircase, now quietly suffocating under the weight of its own dusky blue carpet, was presumably here; the pictures, of sailing ships and sunny seas and storms, look ageless; the views from the back, over the sea, are of course the same (if you squint and wear blinkers to block out some more recent developments); but I’m not so sure about the insinuatingly bland background music that chases us from bedroom to breakfast. It wouldn’t have bothered Kenneth (if he listened to music at all he liked it simple and LOUD), but I can imagine Enid telling someone sharply to turn it off.

  I feel sure that Enid enjoyed her journey along Britain’s social scale. She was often accused of being class-obsessed (or rather, for unthinkingly writing about families with cooks and gardeners and tuck boxes), but I’m not convinced she was any more preoccupied with class than other writers of her time, whatever their background. That’s just the way it was – and is. In fact, there was an awful lot of snobbery about Enid Blyton. Sure, she lived in a large house in the country and wore tweeds, she kept a chauffeur and spoke with a honeyed, nursery nanny accent, and she took her holidays at the Grand in Swanage (although don’t get your hopes up, it’s not that grand …), but everyone knew, or at least those awful English people who care so much about such things knew, and they made sure that everyone else knew, that she had been born in a small two-bedroom flat above a shop in south-east London (No. 354 Lordship Lane, East Dulwich, if you’d like to go and pay homage) and she wasn’t the blue-blooded grande dame of Beaconsfield that she was never even pretending to be. You see, Enid got it in the neck from every kind of snob: intellectual, literary, high culture, inverted, Oxbridge, working class, the middle don’t-get-above-yourself class, anti-women snobs, anti-success snobs, and all the other dreary, run-of-the-mill, ‘where-do-you-come-from?’ snob snobs.

  She didn’t seem to care. Of course it grieved her that the BBC had a secret policy to keep her from their programmes. She also found it easier, as the years went by, to define herself as solely a children’s writer (although she had always wanted more and hoped one day to write for adults, even if, as seems likely, she had no talent for the task). But she was buoyed by Hugh and then Kenneth and found infinite reassurance in her clubs and readers and her all-conquering book sales.

  And then there were the joys of Swanage, which we are keen to see on this extraordinary, unexpectedly bright day. More than that, it would be a relief to get away from the Grand’s busy conservatory breakfast room, which is in danger of being overwhelmed by an awkward, infectious silence, a familiar English embarrassment that fills and agitates the tense air (and even now is no doubt stifling hotel and B&B breakfast rooms across the land). I’m as susceptible to it as anyone. Knives scrape on plates; feet shuffle towards the buffet and back; uneasy, secretive whispers escape from the tables (‘full English?’; ‘looks like a nice day’; ‘did you bring the suncream?’; ‘more tea?’); and all the while the morning Mail’s crisp new pages crackle and softly fall, to the ‘tut’ and snort o
f its readers and even, just once, a plaintive moan of despair.

  We leave in a hurry and head westwards along the coastal path from Swanage. We pass the Wellington Clock Tower, which once stood by London Bridge before it was dismantled and brought here, along with any number of London iron bollards and the actual façade of Swanage’s town hall (which came from a building in Cheapside). Nothing is quite what it seems. We skirt the lifeboat station (well supported by Enid in her day) and Peveril Point, site of many shipwrecks (and a naval battle between King Alfred and the Danes). The path runs through green fields, with the cliffs and the sea on our left. Banks of dark, bare thorn bushes keep us from the edge. Young teasels nod and bob in a slight breeze. There are larks overhead and when we stop to lie on a grassy bank a blackbird hops close and inspects us with an eager eye. I would be even happier if I could find some heather (you will remember that no Enid Blyton camping trip is complete without a bed of heather, gathered in armfuls and arranged under sleeping bags into soft, springy mattresses), but all I can see is yellow gorse and empty fields, cropped close by sheep.

  There’s a mist gathering far out to sea, but no cloud in the sky. Below us, just over the thorns, the sea is whumping into the caves at the foot of the cliffs, the waves sucking and slapping at the rocks. When Celia Fiennes came here in the 1680s on one of her horseback tours around Britain, she – like Enid – became obsessed with the craggy shoreline and its caves:

  At a place called Sea Cume [Seacombe] the rockes are so craggy and the creekes of land so many that the sea is very turbulent, there I pick’d shells and it being a spring-tide I saw the sea beat upon the rockes at least 20 yards with such a foame or froth, and at another place the rockes had so large a cavity and hollow that when the sea flowed in it runne almost round, and sounded like some hall or high arch.