Footnotes Read online

  None of this has changed, although the abundant glut of ‘very large and sweet’ ‘lobsters and crabs and shrimps’ that Celia noted (and devoured, ‘boyled in the sea water and scarce cold’) has taken a battering over the last three hyperactive centuries of unchecked consumption.

  There are very few people about on this early spring day. We pass the occasional middle-aged couple and greet them with a wave of cheery recognition. A climber is letting himself slowly down the cliff, shouting to someone far below. A rescue helicopter appears noisily over the horizon and hovers, before disappearing back the way it came. We walk on, and at Dancing Ledge (an artificial swimming pool created in a cove when a schoolmaster dynamited the rocks so his pupils could enjoy a safer swim) we meet a man who runs ‘adventures’: climbing, sea kayaking, caving … Imagine living in a time when gunpowder was freely available – and anyone who wanted to rearrange the coastline could just crack on. It’s only 100 years ago. Enid came here often with Gillian and Imogen, and the place emerged straight onto the pages of First Term at Malory Towers (1946):

  [It] had been hollowed out of a stretch of rocks, so that it had a nice, rocky, uneven bottom. Seaweed grew at the sides, and sometimes the rocky bed of the pool felt a little slimy. But the sea swept into the big, natural pool each day, filled it, and made lovely waves all across it.

  Yes, it’s here all right. The ‘adventure man’ is urging us huskily to join him in climbing the cliffs today or, failing that, to come back tomorrow and get involved in some sea-caving. He seems especially keen to convince my wife. Apparently it’s quite hard work, but well worth it. And not at all dangerous. Oh no.

  I am sure Enid would have tried it. She had a love of nature and adventure instilled in her by her father, she always said, and it was partly his restless influence (as well as a horror of turning into her mother, a bored, bereft housewife) that drove her on. Her father, Thomas, was a cutlery salesman from Sheffield when he married Theresa Mary Harrison. Enid, their first child, was born in 1897. Two boys followed rapidly – Hanly and Carey – by which time the family was living in a semi-detached house with a sizeable garden in Beckenham, Kent. Enid said that her father gave her a small patch of this garden and, as she told her young readers in The Story of My Life:

  Nobody knew how much I loved it. Well, you might know, perhaps, because some of you feel exactly the same about such things as I felt. You don’t tell anyone at all, you just think about them and hug them to yourself.

  Enid was a lonely, secretive child, most likely. She didn’t get on with her mother and blamed her when Thomas went to live with another woman, leaving Theresa to bring up the three children. Her mother, she wrote later, ‘was not very fond of animals’, the sure-fire signifier in Enid’s fiction that someone was a wrong ’un. Enid was twelve when her father left home for good. On the night before he left, as he and Theresa screamed and raged at each other, Enid tried to drown out the noise by telling stories to little Hanly and Carey. And that, as any amateur psychologist could tell you, was what she continued to do for the rest of her life. Drown out the noise with her stories.

  This is not to say that she had a miserable childhood. She had friends. She was offensively successful at school (head girl for her final two years; tennis champion; captain of the lacrosse team; recipient of endless academic prizes). But it is also true that none of her friends knew that her father had left home, and when Enid herself was given the chance to leave (in 1916, aged nineteen, to work on a farm and then at a kindergarten, launching herself on a career of teaching), she hardly ever saw her family again. She was twenty-three when her father died of a stroke at his new home (and not out boating on the Thames, as she was told, to spare her hearing about his new lover). Although she had seen a bit of him over the years, she didn’t go to his funeral.

  So maybe now is the moment to take a longer look at the elephant in the room (or drag Jumbo out of the toy cupboard). There is a popular view of Enid Blyton, entirely at odds with her own carefully tended self-image, that she was an unpleasant, cold-hearted, cruel woman and a neglectful, spiteful mother. As her daughter Imogen put it on the very first page of her ‘fragment’ of autobiography: ‘Which of us was the more emotionally crippled I cannot tell.’

  But it goes deeper. There are plenty of people who are consumed with a visceral loathing of Enid Blyton – the author, the person – and all her works. This includes many librarians (whose lives have been devoted to the joys of reading), who would like to build a funeral pyre of every last book that Enid ever wrote, hose it down with petrol and toss on the flaming match. She has been denounced by fellow writers, clerics, critics, parents and politicians. Her plotlines are all the same, they say. The characters are wooden. The language is lumpen. Everything she ever created is suffused with a ghastly middle-class morality, a small-minded insularity, a twee, limping, class-ridden, racist, sexist, smug, sanctimonious sentimentality. Her stories are vicious, bullying, shallow, preposterous, predictable, unfunny, patronizing. They are lost in a never-never land of happy families, boarding school tuck shops, forelock-tugging, cap-doffing retainers and creepy elves. Goddammit, they’re childish.

  Here’s the critic Colin Welch writing in Encounter magazine in 1958, in an article called ‘This Insipid Doll’, thrashing about in impotent rage because his children loved Noddy and would accept nothing else for their bedtime story:

  If Noddy is ‘like the children themselves’ [Enid’s stated aim], ‘it is the most unpleasant child that he most resembles. He is querulous, irritable, and humourless. In this witless, spiritless, snivelling, sneaking doll the children of England are expected to find themselves reflected.

  Almost as much of Colin Welch’s fury seemed to be aimed at the author, Enid Blyton, as it was at her creation, little Noddy. What especially enraged him (apart from having to read Noddy books to his children every night) was that he thought Enid Blyton was writing down to her audience: ‘by putting everything within the reach of the child’s mind, they cripple it … Enid Blyton is the first successful writer of children’s books to write beneath her audience’. He writes longingly of the Winnie the Pooh books, Alice in Wonderland and Edward Lear, books he could enjoy reading (stretching, wondrous, magical books) as much as his children would enjoy hearing them. But he misses the point, because Enid’s books were written for children. She was quite clear on this point, especially as the grown-up criticism grew: she couldn’t care less what adults thought. They could go whistle, taking their harsh and confusing adult world with them. It is probably why Enid set up so many clubs. Just for her and ‘her’ children. There must have been hundreds of thousands of children in the Famous Five Club: collecting silver foil to raise money for charity, writing to Enid, sharing their hopes and dreams.

  Are the works of Enid Blyton a gateway drug, luring young children into the joys of reading, before guiding them on to better and brighter things? Or is there a danger that the youthful Blyton aficionado will get trapped in her two-dimensional world, mainlining monosyllables and addicted to easy thrills? Thirty years later you’ll find them slumped and drooling on a sofa, watching Friends on an eternal Netflix loop.

  Enid herself set out to write for every age group. You could grow up with Blyton, she proclaimed, from Mister Twiddle to the Famous Five via Noddy and St Clare’s. But surely even in her headier moments she didn’t expect children to read only her works? I certainly had my fill of Noddy growing up (and not just the books, but the jigsaw puzzles and clockwork cars and pert pink toothpaste). And I remember the Bible stories and dipping into the Secret Seven. But it was the Famous Five books that obsessed me – Mystery Moor, Smuggler’s Top, Finniston Farm – right up to the day I arrived at my new school, aged eight, clutching my absolute favourite, Five Go Adventuring Again (you know, the one with the secret passage and the bearded tutor, Mr Roland, whom Timmy bites on the ankle, because he knows, doesn’t he, that Roland’s a bad ’un – he has a beard, for God’s sake! – and is plotting to steal Uncle Quentin’s
inventions), and I was sneered at by one of the older boys. ‘What a baby – reading Enid Blyton,’ he scoffed. ‘Everyone’s a critic,’ I must have sobbed, as I stuffed the book back down deep into my bag, never to be opened again. Or not until I read it to my own children. Ha! Take that, school bully.

  But was my emotional and mental development stunted by my love of Blyton? The BBC was quite clear that it would have been – and seems to have carried out a policy of no-platforming from the very earliest days. In 1938 Enid’s first husband, Hugh Pollock, even wrote to the head of the BBC, John Reith (whom he knew slightly) asking if he could put in a good word for Enid. It didn’t work. An internal BBC memo from 1940 was brutal in its reasons for rejecting one of her submissions, ‘The Monkey and the Barrel Organ’: ‘This not really good enough. Very little happens and the dialogue is so stilted and long-winded … It really is odd to think that this woman is a best-seller. It is all such very small beer.’

  In 1949 a BBC producer called Lionel Gamlin wrote to Enid Blyton asking if she would be happy to be interviewed for one of his programmes. He must have been startled by the reply:

  Dear Mr Gamlin

  Thank you for your nice letter. It all sounds very interesting – but I ought to warn you of something you obviously don’t know, but which has been well-known in the literary and publishing world for some time – I and my stories are completely banned by the B.B.C. as far as children are concerned – not one story has ever been broadcast, and, so it is said, not one ever will be.

  She suggested that Lionel Gamlin seek confirmation from his bosses, which he must have done because in his next letter to Enid he glosses over his invitation and says he regrets that she felt unable to contribute to the programme. Enid set him straight: ‘I think, if you don’t mind, I must just put it on record that I did not refuse to appear in your Autograph Album series, but, on the contrary, would have been delighted to do so.’

  But the ban continued. In November 1954, with Enid at the height of her fame, the BBC show Woman’s Hour came under immense pressure from its listeners to include an interview with Blyton, or at least broadcast some of her stories. The editor, Janet Quigley, wrote to Jean Sutcliffe of the Schools Department, asking for her help in beating back the BBC producers who thought that ‘we are being rather stuffy and dictatorial in not allowing listeners to hear somebody whose name is a household word’.

  Jean Sutcliffe’s reply is a masterclass in old-school elitism. She says that if the invitation to Enid Blyton is ‘simply to meet her’ and ask her to give her views on ‘Horror comics or Hats … then no harm could be done’. But if she is ‘allowed to lay down the law on … writing for children – unchallenged … the BBC becomes just another victim of the amazing advertising campaign which has raised this competent and tenacious second-rater to such astronomical heights of success’. She goes on: ‘It is because of all this that I think people in positions like ours have every right to exercise our judgement in deciding who shall utter unchallenged on certain subjects.’

  In other words, Enid could come on to the BBC to talk about hats and horror comics, but under no circumstances would she be allowed to discuss her own writing ‘unchallenged’. And nor would the BBC be dramatizing any of her stories. These days we’d say that Enid Blyton was the victim of a culture war. Or maybe standards have slipped. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the BBC finally relented with the release of the Noddy videos (‘Milk-o-o-o’).

  Even after her death, the BBC hadn’t finished with Enid. They’d banned her books; now they trashed her character. In Enid, a 2009 dramatization of her life, they had Helena Bonham Carter play her in full-on Bellatrix Lestrange mode: an ice-cold witch who’d rather hug a fox terrier than pick up her own crying baby; who threatens to dismiss her chauffeur for coughing and then goes back to gloating over another bundle of fan mail; who drives her sweet and loving husband Hugh to drink (it’s Matthew Macfadyen playing Hugh, his whipped-spaniel eyes milking every vicious slight from his wife); and who warmly (falsely!) welcomes the children who’ve won the chance to meet her by ushering them into her study for home-made cakes and stories (while her own two little girls, whom she hardly ever talks to, look on in misery through the bars of the banisters).

  As Hugh slurs at one point: ‘the only reason your fans adore you is because they don’t actually know you’. And then he goes to bury Bobs the terrier in the garden while she stares at him with cold contempt from her study window before rattling out another cloying story on her infernal typewriter about how happy ‘Bobs’ is with his daddy and mummy in their sham of a rural idyll.

  You can see why the film-makers did it. It’s a lip-smacking story: iconic children’s author, twee moralist and the epitome of old-school England turns out to be a hypocritical bastard. And it has helped shape what most of us think we know about Enid Blyton. The main source was presumably Imogen’s book, A Childhood at Green Hedges: A Fragment of Autobiography by Enid Blyton’s Daughter, although Barbara Stoney’s more measured biography certainly includes some juicy plums, and if you want to delve deeper there’s also Starlight by Ida Pollock, Hugh’s heroic second wife (also a prolific writer, but of romantic fiction).

  Anyway, it’s time to lift the stone. Yes, she really did beat her children, usually with the back of a hairbrush. She even beat Imogen once for laughing too much with one of the nannies. You could say that child-beating was not unusual in those days, but Enid was also accused by Imogen of emotional neglect: ‘Every week without fail, throughout my whole boarding-school career, my mother wrote to me, short friendly letters, much the same as the ones she wrote to her fans.’

  Enid loved her fan clubs and was nourished by the hundreds of thousands of letters she received. But she also loved her own children, I’m sure of that. The awful truth is that she may have found Gillian easier than Imogen. Certainly that’s what Imogen thought: ‘my sister’s more generous and outgoing personality has always been an easier one to relate to than my suspicious, defensive and often downright rude one.’

  Barbara Stoney and others have decided that Enid was essentially a child herself, hence her astounding facility for getting into children’s minds. Stoney wrote that when Enid was finding it hard to conceive a child, her doctor found she had the ovaries of a twelve-year-old. This rather creepy theorizing has led many to decide that Enid was emotionally frozen at the moment when her father left her mother. She certainly loved practical jokes, because this is how she passed the time on 17 January 1926: ‘Hugh and I threw snowballs at people walking below. It was such fun. Sewed till bed.’ But, no, she did not have the mind of a twelve-year-old.

  We are also told that she never took in any child refugees during the war, and even when her friend, Dorothy Richards, asked her to put up some people who had been bombed out of London, she gave them shelter for a week and then threw them out because they were getting in the way of her writing. I think we can agree she was no Angela Lansbury in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, although she did take in a young maid fleeing Austria in 1939, and they became firm friends. She also ditched most of her friends when she became famous, ignored her brothers as much as she could, and cut off her mother (refusing to send her money and missing her funeral). Years later, as Enid slipped into pre-senile dementia, and even though her mother had been dead for years, she tried, painfully and repeatedly, to go and see her.

  So, yes, she lied to others (and to herself) and there were parts of her life that she worked hard to forget. She could be arrogant (although which writer isn’t, living at the nexus of fantasy and self-doubt?). She had at least one affair, not that it should matter to anyone other than Hugh – but this is squeaky-clean Enid Blyton we are talking about, so of course there’s a prurient interest.

  But that was just the warm-up, because here is a Top Ten of Enid Blyton Accusations (with a bonus at the end):

  1. She really was a terrible mother

  Here’s Imogen:

  On Saturday mornings, my sister and I would go down to the lounge
to collect our pocket money … It was on one of these occasions … that I came upon a new piece of knowledge. Something made me realize that this woman with dark curly hair and brown eyes … who paid me just as she paid the staff … was also my mother. By this time I had met mothers in stories that were read to me, Enid Blyton stories included, and I knew that a mother bore a special relationship to her child, from which others were excluded. In my case the pieces of the puzzle failed to fit together. There was no special relationship. There was scarcely a relationship at all.

  There was a time when British middle-class parents were quite capable of neglecting their children. Seeing them just once a day to bid them goodnight. Sending them to boarding schools. I imagine Enid hoped for more – except she was also just so busy. She seems to have wanted to cram all her mothering moments into her Swanage holidays and the brief hour before dinner. It’s worth knowing that Gillian said that she talked with Enid ‘freely from early childhood’.

  2. But she pretended to be the perfect mother

  Imogen: ‘There is a well-established myth that my mother read frequently to my sister and myself, trying out her stories on us, her own small critics. This is quite untrue. I can only remember her reading one book to me …’

  And Enid: ‘Gillian and Imogen read every book I write, usually before it goes to my publishers. Their favourites have always been your favourites.’

  And Gillian: ‘I used to read chapters of her latest book hot from the typewriter after school, impatient for the next day’s instalment.’