Enid Blyton (11 page)

E
nid and Hugh moved to Old Thatch on 2 August 1929. ‘It is perfect, both outside and in …’ she wrote in her diary, ‘just like a Fairy Tale house and three minutes from the river.’ She described it at some length in her
Letter to Children.
The house, she informed her readers, was approached ‘side ways on’ through an old lychgate which led into a lovely garden ‘about nine times as big’ as that of Elfin Cottage. There were several old yew trees and an orchard with apples and pears in abundance, a large, somewhat overgrown lily pond, a rosewalk, a kitchen garden, ‘with everything growing there that you could possibly want’, a small wood and a brook ‘with a little bridge of its own’. There was also an old well beside one of the two front doors. The cottage had once been an inn and years later Enid wrote of how she had always felt that people had been happy there ‘because the whole place had a lovely feel to it – friendly, happy, welcoming …’ She was to use the house and its setting many times in her stories and it also figured largely in her new complete page for children in
Teachers’ World,
which began a month after her arrival at Old Thatch.

The first
Enid Blyton’s Children’s Page
which included a photograph of Enid and her pets and a drawing of her new home, was introduced by the editor of the magazine, Mr Allen:

Enid saw to it that this extra space was used to the fullest advantage. In addition to her letter to the children and another, purporting to come from Bobs, the page contained each week a full-column story, a photograph (usually taken by herself) and a poem or competition. It says much for her astuteness and Hugh’s careful guidance, that most of what she wrote for this page – and for
Sunny Stories
–was eventually reused elsewhere, for the stories, verses and puzzles were all brought out later in book form by various publishers, and even Bobs’s ‘letters’ were privately published by Hugh and Enid themselves. The extent of her readership appeal at that time is evident from the phenomenal success of the first of these small booklets, sold direct from Old Thatch in October 1933 at threepence each. Within six days of
Letters from Bobs
being issued, sales exceeded ten thousand and subsequent editions – in 1937, also from Old Thatch and in 1938 from Green Hedges – went on to sell at the same rate.

Her other work for
Teachers’ World
at that time provided another source of material for book publication.
Tales from Arabian Nights, Tales of Ancient Greece, Knights of the Round Table
(all published by Newnes) and
Stories from World History
and
Round the Year with Enid Blyton
(Evans Brothers) were all written initially as weekly or monthly series for the magazine. But by far the most popular was her ‘weekly course of seasonal nature study’ –
Round the Year with Enid Blyton.

This course of forty-eight lessons covered every conceivable facet of nature study from such things as weather observation to pond and insect life. Pupils were shown how to plant bulbs, stock aquaria, make school gardens and bird-tables and each lesson ended with Things to Do, Things to Write, Questions to Answer, Things to Find or Things to Learn. Throughout, Enid used some of the imaginative teaching methods that she had once applied to her own classes at Southernhay and the series, which was followed by children in classrooms all over the country and overseas, proved a resounding success. The editor received glowing letters from teachers, including one from a headmaster in Loughborough, who declared the course had been ‘quite the most practical and finest’ he had yet encountered throughout many years of teaching.

He went on to pay tribute to Enid’s weekly page and wrote of revisiting a rural school in the east of England, which had long been a by-word for the poor quality of its work – due, he explained, to the extreme poverty of the surrounding area and the lack of interest and discipline among its pupils. This school had now undergone a ‘miraculous change’, brought about almost entirely through the regular reading of Enid’s columns. All her suggestions had been followed through and the pupils now had their own flower garden, planted with the thirty-two different blooms she had recommended, a bird-table had been installed and a well-cared-for aquarium now stood in the classroom. The whole atmosphere among the pupils, claimed the headmaster, had been changed ‘to one of happiness and an interested awareness of the things around them.’

There were certainly thousands of children and their teachers who knew that Enid had moved and that the name of her new cottage was Old Thatch. Most could describe the trees and flowers that grew in her garden and the birds and animals that frequented it – just as they had been able to do when she had been at Elfin Cottage. Many children living in industrial towns enjoyed a vicarious pleasure, through her pages, in the delights of rural life, for too often in those hungry ‘thirties fathers were on the dole and there was barely enough money coming in to feed their families, let alone provide for visits to the country. From her correspondence she was well aware of their yearnings and on one occasion suggested that country readers might like to send such things as budding twigs and wild flowers to their counterparts in the towns, and this suggestion met with such enthusiasm that she eventually had to recruit a ‘go-between’ to deal with the scheme. Children without pets gained the same kind of enjoyment from hearing about Enid’s own collection, which yearly increased in number with more pigeons, another tortoise, a pair of Siamese cats, their kittens, and Sandy, a mate for Bobs, who in turn also produced several puppies. But it was Bobs, the little black and white terrier, who always remained the favourite.

A personality in his own right, this much-photographed dog received a hefty mail and hundreds of presents from young admirers. There was great concern about him when Enid told her readers of the floods that had swept through Old Thatch during her first winter and of how he and Patabang (the first of the Siamese kittens) had had to walk across planks in the dining room ‘with seven inches of water below’. The children feared he might have caught cold as he had signed off his letter that week ‘with a shiver and a splash’. They sympathised with him when he was in disgrace over his misdeeds, particularly on the occasion when he and Sandy were in trouble over ‘a dirty little dog we often meet on our walks.’ Enid had warned them, ‘wrote’ Bobs, not to go near this dog but they had disobeyed her and had picked up ‘some nasty insects’ which had meant a dusting with some ‘very strong-smelling powder’, isolation from the other pets and the fumigating of their kennel. Enid recorded this incident in her diary and it is interesting to see how she was able to turn it into a vehicle for a lesson on animal care, for Bobs’ letter ended:

When Bobs ‘joined’ the Tail Waggers Club, he urged other dogs to follow suit and hundreds of applications were received by the Club, resulting in a presentation to him of a silver medal in recognition of his ‘splendid recruiting effort’.

With so many letters and packages to Bobs and his mistress, it was not surprising that the small village post office at Bourne End soon found that the mail to Old Thatch warranted a special delivery. The children enclosed all manner of items in their post. They sent posies of wild flowers or small insects in match boxes and, on one occasion, even a dead bird was sent along for Enid to identify. She nevertheless took a delight in opening every package herself – even if it was, at times, with a certain amount of apprehension.

Some months before her move to Old Thatch, she had been forced to suggest that letters stood more chance of a reply if they came together from schools, rather than individuals. But even the ‘school envelopes’ soon contained between twenty and fifty separate letters and she decided to inform her readers that she would put ‘a penny into a box for the Children’s Hospital in London’ each time she failed to reply. This resulted in ‘quite a tidy sum’ being passed on to the Great Ormond Street Hospital – the first of many contributions it was to receive as a result of Enid’s writings in subsequent years.

In the early ‘thirties, she asked the children if they would help to collect silver paper and foil for the hospital to sell and, within a few days, bundles of flattened paper and rolls of foil began arriving at Old Thatch. This continued for several years and one of her many daily tasks was to help her staff fill sack after sack, ready for forwarding to London. From time to time she wrote a progress report in her column on the number she had sent and the money that had been raised in this way ‘to help sick children’, and by 1935 she was able to tell her readers that they were the ‘largest collectors’ in the country.

Nothing, it seemed, was too much trouble if it was for a worthy cause. Her readers appreciated this and eagerly took up every suggestion she put forward. She happened to mention in a 1929 ‘letter’ in both
Teachers’ World
and
Sunny Stories,
that she considered the Pug Pups (Pick Up Glass and Pick Up Paper Society) was a very worthwhile organisation and gave the name of the founder – a Mrs Jean Brodie Hoare. Within three weeks, much to her astonishment, thousands of children had joined the Society and the factory which supplied the badges had to work overtime to keep up with the demand. Four months later, Enid was able to report that twenty-five thousand badges had been ordered, seventy-five thousand Pug Pup postcards had been sent out and orders were still pouring in, many from overseas. ‘It wasn’t my idea’, she wrote, ‘but I wish it had been. Perhaps one day I’ll think of a good society too, one really my own and we’ll all belong together.’

At Old Thatch, Enid was moving in rather more sophisticated social circles than hitherto and her pattern of life changed accordingly. Bourne End in those days was a quiet residential area, consisting of a few shops and several large country houses, some of which were used as weekend retreats by businessmen from the City. Life was leisurely, with a plentiful supply of servants to help make it so, and Enid and Hugh soon found themselves drawn into the social round of cocktails, bridge, tennis and dinner parties. It was not long before she was persuaded to leave her writing for a few hours and play bridge two and sometimes three afternoons a week. She took up tennis again and one of the lawns at Old Thatch was converted into a grass court, to which she invited her new friends for return matches. It was all ‘great fun’, she wrote in her diary, and in complete contrast to the quiet times she had enjoyed with Hugh at Elfin Cottage.

Even the pattern of their previously cosy evenings alone together had been changed, for a promotion from Newnes now meant that Hugh occasionally returned late and, with her own increased social activities during the day, Enid found she had sometimes to resort to catching up with her proof-reading or writing after dinner. Nor did she have the time to give much attention to the garden at her new home, although she managed to do some of the planting and sowing which she always enjoyed. The rest of the work she now delegated to her gardener-chauffeur, Dick Hughes. A young cook-general continued to relieve her of most of the household tasks, but there were several changes in this quarter during the Pollocks’ early years at Bourne End.

Enid’s rather unsympathetic conduct towards the young girls who came to work for her, many of whom were given notice after barely a month’s work, is apparent from her diaries, and contrasts sharply with the warmhearted, friendly personality projected by her
Teachers’ World
columns:

Another maid was given notice because the friend she had been out with the previous week had since developed scarlet fever. Enid commented:

The young woman never did contract the illness but she was still expected to leave on the termination of the quarantine period. Enid was not, it appears, always the perfect employer, but her attitude was not an uncommon one in those days and she also had her share of dishonest and unsatisfactory maids. One young girl was arrested by a police superintendent in the drawing room at Old Thatch, after being discovered making off with the family silver and other articles. Enid recorded the episode with some relish in her diary and, like so many other incidents in her life, it was to re-surface many years later in one of her stories.

The move to Old Thatch certainly brought about changes in the Pollocks’ life together and another, even greater, was not far distant when the pair embarked on a cruise to Madeira and the Canary Islands in October 1930. Some weeks beforehand Enid had informed her readers of her intention to make the voyage and had included a photograph of the ship – the
Stella Polaris
– on her weekly page. Her page of 8 October, when she and Hugh were already away on the high seas, showed a map of the proposed route, drawn by Enid, and once again the teacher in her could not resist the opportunity to give a minor geography lesson:

After writing that she would have to take a train to Southampton and then ‘start out over the sea, past the jutting-out piece of France and across the Bay of Biscay’ she suggested the children should find her first port – Lisbon. ‘Do you see the river it is on …?’ Madeira, Tenerife, Las Palmas, Casablanca, Gibraltar and the city of Seville were all placed and commented upon. The following week she caused great excitement in many a classroom for at the head of her page was written ‘By Air Mail from Lisbon’ and underneath was a photograph of the port.