Footnotes Read online

  3. She was vicious

  Enid asked Hugh to take the blame for the breakdown of their marriage because she thought news of a divorce would be disastrous for her reputation. In return, she promised Hugh full access to their children, Gillian and Imogen. She broke this promise and Hugh never saw his children again.

  We don’t know what was agreed, but this sounds right. It’s true that poor Hugh (alcoholic, paranoid and adrift) seems at one point to have decided that his children were better off without him. Time drifted. Also, there’s something undeniably absent about Hugh. Ida describes how when Alistair, Hugh’s son from his first marriage, wrote to let him know he was getting married and ask him to the wedding, Hugh contrived not to go – and possibly never even contacted him.

  4. And she was spiteful

  Here’s Imogen: ‘I remember one remark she made before a meal in the dining-room to my stepfather. “I do dislike people with inferiority complexes. Don’t you, Kenneth?” When he had made the required affirmative answer, she continued with her superb timing. “Don’t you think that Imogen has a dreadful inferiority complex?”’

  Imogen’s book is a howl of pain. She writes with scrupulous honesty about her feelings and memories – and a strange air of judicious detachment (‘I read many Enid Blyton books …’). Or maybe she’s just numb. But it is painful to read; and contrasts starkly with Gillian’s bland, amiable memories. In her afterword to Imogen’s book, Gillian writes: ‘It is strange to see one’s childhood through the eyes of a sister: people, events, emotions charged with a different significance; reinterpreted.’ And she finishes: ‘I and my children are very happy to have this record of a part of our family history and I think that my mother would have been delighted that it had been written by her daughter, Imogen.’ Which is an extraordinarily diplomatic response to Imogen’s raging memoirs. Her mother would have been ‘delighted’? Really? It sounds to me like she’s handling Imogen with kid gloves.

  5. And she was vindictive

  After the war, when Hugh tried to find employment at his old firm, George Newnes, Enid is said to have blocked him. As his boss said: ‘In the end, Enid is more important to us than you are.’ Many other publishers closed their doors to Hugh.

  Here’s Ida Pollock: ‘It soon became clear that the Blyton “camp” had started to set in motion a serious smear campaign. Hugh Pollock, the story went, was an adulterous alcoholic who had shamelessly betrayed, then cold-bloodedly abandoned his brilliant and long-suffering wife.’

  Was this Enid herself at work? Possibly, but publishers are an unsentimental bunch. Not to mention the most appalling gossips.

  6. But it gets worse

  Hugh and Ida’s daughter, Rosemary (Ba) suffered from terrifying asthma attacks, sometimes only surviving on ‘a cocktail of drugs’. Hugh and Ida were bankrupt (he couldn’t get any work …), so Ida’s friend Dora (an actress, who relished a scene) went to see Enid at Green Hedges to ask if she would include Ba in the Trust that Hugh had set up for Gillian and Imogen – so they could afford to buy Ba some medicine.

  Here’s Ida:

  Told this woman on the doorstep was a relation of mine Enid may have felt a degree of curiosity, or perhaps she was drawn by the tenuous link with Hugh. Anyway, Dora was admitted. To begin with, I think, she was polite and conciliatory. Surely, she suggested, it should be possible to open up the Trust – after all, Hugh had established it for the security of his children. And his little girl, Rosemary, was very unwell.

  ‘Definitely not’, said Enid – or words to that effect. The Trust had been set up for Gillian and Imogen, and she had their interests to consider. But now, Dora pointed out, Hugh had another daughter. Everyone was worried about Rosemary – alias Ba – and surely …

  ‘I don’t care’, said Enid Blyton, ‘if the child dies.’

  According to Ida, Enid regretted what she had said and ‘eventually’ opened the Trust. But, still … what kind of person says that? Assuming that is what she said.

  7. Her stories are unbearably sexist

  What with Anne always doing the dishes and making the sandwiches and waving Dick and Julian (and George, on sufferance) off on their adventures. The mothers stay at home and smile a lot. The fathers go out to work. Yes, these books are sexist.

  It’s a small thing, but there’s always George, everyone’s favourite character, the girl who’d rather be a boy. Reinforcing stereotypes, sure, but she has such fierce honesty. She is based on Enid herself.

  8. Her stories are undeniably racist

  Exhibit ‘A’: Here Comes Noddy Again, written in 1951. In which our little hero gives a lift to an ill-mannered golliwog, who leads him to the dark woods and ‘three black faces suddenly appeared in the light of the car’s lamps’ and Noddy is mugged, his clothes and car stolen. Enid insisted that there were more bad teddy bears in her stories than bad golliwogs – and that they’re ‘merely lovable black toys, not Negroes [sic]’.

  Some years after Enid’s death, the golliwogs in her books were all replaced by goblins – and it’s certainly easier to excuse Enid than it is anyone who agitates, today, for their reinstatement.

  9. Her stories are maddeningly middle-class

  Indeed they are. All the villains in the Famous Five stories have rough voices and beards, the foreigners are wrong ’uns to a man, and the circus folk and gypsies are, at best, a mixed bunch. Meanwhile, the cooks are all apple-cheeked and smiling, the gardeners tip their caps and tell the young scamps to run along, and the police protect the property interests of the privileged.

  Maybe it’s best to read Enid Blyton’s books as science fiction. Or even pause and wonder why the (much worse, but also of-its-time) sexism and xenophobia on show in the Biggles books or John Buchan are more often brushed aside with an indulgent chuckle.

  10. And she couldn’t bloody write

  She may have written too much too fast, but don’t pretend that her stories aren’t some of the most accessible, immersive, utterly thrilling works that have ever been created. For children. I have reread dozens of her books recently and although they follow a grimly predictable (reassuring) pattern, and her incessant use of the words ‘lovely’ and ‘blue’ is irritating, I also quietly wept (yes, I did) when Elizabeth, The Naughtiest Girl in the School, is redeemed and her best instincts are coaxed into life. More often than not, Enid Blyton writes with addictive verve and JOY – and she knew exactly how to grip her audience.

  11. She threatened to fire a chauffeur for coughing …

  … while staring at him with breathtaking malignancy.

  Really though, did she? As they write with Fargo-esque candour at the beginning of the BBC’s Enid: ‘The following drama is based on the lives of real people. Some scenes have been invented and some events conflated for the purposes of the narrative.’

  It is worth asking how well any of us would fare under this detail of scrutiny. And why Enid Blyton was (and is) on the kicking end of so much virulent criticism. It couldn’t be because she’s a woman, could it? A wildly successful businesswoman, who dragged herself up from modest beginnings to become the world’s bestselling children’s author. Negotiating her own, highly favourable author deals. Planning and executing the roll-out of innumerable brands. This should have made her a hero to many, but she was also culturally and politically conservative and, crucially – as the new century took hold – a prominent symbol of the ‘nanny knows best’ Britain, with her hectoring morality lessons and smothering, Edwardian aspirations. As the country changed around her, most people moved on from Enid. But there were also plenty of others who wondered if there wasn’t more to her story than the one she was so keen to tell about herself. They were undeniably gratified to learn that there was.

  When I was studying English literature at university in the 1980s, we were asked to read Kingsley Amis’s Jake’s Thing, a book about a middle-aged man who’s worried about his non-functioning penis (his ‘thing’, you see). One of my fellow students walked out within five minutes of the star
t of the first lecture, because she found the views of Kingsley Amis (the man, not the author) obnoxious and didn’t want to hear what he might have put into his (probably obnoxious) book. Enid would have been the first to agree that there was an indissoluble connection between a writer’s life and character and their work:

  As you can imagine, we are a happy little family. I could not possibly write a single good book for children if I were not happy with my family, or if I didn’t put them first and foremost. How could I write good books for children if I didn’t care about my own? You wouldn’t like my books, if I were that kind of mother!

  And – flipping it over: ‘You cannot help knowing, too, whether you would like the writer or not, once you have read two or three of his books.’

  But we were being told that there was no link between the biographical details of an author and what she puts into her work. It doesn’t matter that Coleridge consumed opium by the jar or that Ezra Pound was a fascist – just look at what they wrote and ignore their lives. Their words should stand on their own.

  I seem to remember that the philosophical foundation for this was a book by a man called Stanley Fish, and our lecturer excitedly pointed out that in chapter two of Jake’s Thing, Jake gets a sum wrong when counting out some change in a shop: so Jake cannot possibly be Kingsley Amis. And anything that Jake says (however crude and unpleasant – and there was plenty) is not the view of the author, Kingsley Amis, but only of his character, Jake. What I wanted to ask (but didn’t dare) was that if Jake’s pustular outpourings were not the same as Kingsley Amis’s, then how come you could read more or less the same stuff in Amis’s gleefully inflammatory journalism? And anyway, Kingsley Amis was a notorious drunk, so he was bound to have got his sums wrong. (Incidentally, Kingsley Amis’s suggested cure for the very worst of hangovers was a ‘brisk fuck’ – and I can easily imagine that waking up with a sore head to find a sour-breathed Kingsley humping and puffing on top of you would be enough to get anyone out of bed in double quick time and running for the shower, although it seems optimistic of Kingsley to think that he could have offered this service to everyone.)

  We all know that not every (or any) character in an author’s books necessarily reflects her own views, but I think Enid’s deeper point is also true: we can’t help knowing if we’d like an author after reading a couple of her books – and it makes me realize that I do like Enid Blyton. Kingsley too (and his jokes are better), but neither of them makes it especially easy.

  If you walk inland from the Dancing Ledge, across fields lush with early grasses, through stands of elder, alder and ash, and skirt the hedgerows with the blackthorn blossoming, and climb the bare hills that circle the village of Worth Matravers, you will eventually reach the Square & Compass pub. I am sitting here with Anna, outside in the drowsy afternoon sunshine, and there is a robin preening itself at the far end of our wooden table. If Enid were ever reincarnated, she would definitely come back as a robin: eager, busy, bright-eyed, interfering and occasionally vicious. The pub (or so it seems on this limpid afternoon) is probably the best pub in the world. There are home-made pies and own-brewed cider being served indoors, a warren of old, dark, secret rooms (yes!) and blazing fires. I have already tried rapping on the panels, looking for a hidden passageway. Our view takes in a steep country lane, ancient trees tipped with fresh spring leaves, and a patchwork of fields unfurling to the blue horizon. It’s like Enid said, writing home in 1930 to the young readers of Teachers’ World from her cruise ship docked at Lisbon:

  but I hadn’t seen any countryside anywhere that I thought was lovelier than England’s. I had seen no animals nicer than ours, and no children that I liked better than English children … and I know that, no matter where I go or what I see in other countries, I shall always love England best.

  If you are of a certain age, your mind will once have been filled with this stuff. It hasn’t gone away. Enid understood – just look at the easy way she conjured her stories and teased at our childish longings. How warm and safe she made us feel. The promise of a green hill far away, and a land, right here, that could be better, cleaner, kinder and happier. How we yearn for it. The pleasant pastures and the clouded hills. The sweet peas and roses rising in perfumed abundance from busy front gardens. The unhurried village streets. But we’ve lingered too long and it’s time to move on. There are places to see and other people to meet. So it’s goodbye, Enid! Goodbye, Imogen and Hugh and Gillian! Goodbye, Dr Kenneth! Goodbye! We’ll meet again, I feel sure. There’s a train waiting, and we’re not going to hide here any longer.

  ‌Two

  ‘Walk, and Be Merry’

  ‘Never scramble your toes about, where toes have no business to be.’

  Wilkie Collins, 1850

  Wilkie Collins,

  Plymouth to Lamorna Cove, July and August 1850

  In July 1850 the twenty-six-year-old Wilkie Collins was travelling west from London to Plymouth, ensconced in one of the well-groomed carriages of the Great Western Railway (I’m guessing it was first class – Wilkie liked to live it large), on his way to Cornwall with a friend, the artist Henry Charles Brandling, to write a book about ‘a part of your own country which is too rarely visited and too little known’. Rambles Beyond Railways was the descriptive title, and the plan was to ‘wander hither and thither, in a zig-zag course’, out of reach of railways, highways, stagecoaches, timetables and guidebooks, taking note with sketchbook and pen of the local characters and scenery. In 1850 Plymouth was literally the end of the line; in fact, according to Wilkie, the only other place left on earth that wasn’t yet inundated with travel books was ‘Kamtschatka’ – and for practical reasons (he said ‘patriotic’), Wilkie had chosen to set his own travel book in Cornwall. ‘Even the railway stops short at Plymouth, and shrinks from penetrating to the savage regions beyond!’ he trumpeted, in a manner calculated to send shivers down the spine of any modern-day marketing department. There was nothing anyone could ever tell Wilkie about how to promote his own books.

  Things were looking up for Wilkie in the summer of 1850. His first published novel had appeared in February – Antonina, a spicy Gothic tale of feuding brothers set in the last days of Rome – and he was basking in the afterglow of a slew of positive reviews. (Better, he wrote in the introduction to the 1861 edition, than anything he had experienced since.) Also in February, his first play, A Court Duel, had been staged at a small theatre in Dean Street, with Wilkie awarding himself the minor part of a courtier. He had by now definitively abandoned a half-hearted plan (more his anxious father’s than his own) to become a lawyer or indeed (his father’s earlier plan) a clerk in the tea trade, and the trip to Cornwall was Wilkie’s way of announcing, to himself and others, that he was determined to make his living as a writer. A travel book must have seemed like a canny next step: a modest way of sliding into the literary scene, in a genre that had predictably solid sales. With Henry Brandling providing the illustrations, they hoped to knock together a guide to a little-known part of Britain and, with luck, have it on the shelves in time for Christmas.

  The railways were relatively new to Britain, but by 1850 about 6,000 miles of track had already been laid; that is, a staggering 5,900 more than had been there just twenty years earlier. Despite complaints about the noise and dirt, people were adapting fast to the presence of this transformative technology. Of course, progress was patchy and not all the track was actually connected to the network. Some of the railway companies were even using different gauges and, right up to the 1850s, different times (the GWR, where Wilkie rattled and lolled, used an ultra-wide gauge; and most cities ran to a local time that could be several minutes behind or ahead of London). But the railways had opened up Britain, connecting villages and valleys to the towns and cities with a timetabled ease that would have been inconceivable a generation earlier. People and goods were on the move and the country was shifting and shrinking in the minds of its inhabitants. In fact, the roll-out of the railways was so rapid in mid-nineteenth-cent
ury Britain that if you fast-forward 100 years, to a time when Enid, Gillian and Imogen were travelling home by train to Beaconsfield from their holiday in Swanage, the network they used was essentially the same one that Wilkie explored 100 years earlier. They could have intersected at Bath, Reading or even Didcot, all stations that were up and running in the year 1850.

  Wilkie was never a fan of the discomfort of railways. Indeed, despite the persona he would adopt in Rambles Beyond Railways, he probably didn’t much care for the outdoors either. Here he is describing the countryside in a letter written to his friend Charles Ward just three months earlier:

  cursed confused chirping of birds – an unnecessarily large supply of fresh air – and a d–d absence of cabs, omnibuses, circulating libraries, public houses, newspaper offices, pastry cooks shops, and other articles of civilisation.

  Or maybe Wilkie is showing off, a young man feeding lines to a sophisticated older friend. But he was always a Londoner at heart, more so than any other Victorian novelist, even his friend Charles Dickens, who moved to London as a child and split his time between the capital and Kent in middle age. Wilkie had London baked into his bones. He was born in Cavendish Street, Marylebone and he died at home in Wimpole Street, aged sixty-five, just a short stroll (or anguished, morphine-clouded, gout-ridden hobble) from his place of birth. He always liked to travel, though (to Paris and the English coast, especially), and it was probably this trip to Cornwall that sparked his lifelong love of the sea.