Enid Blyton (13 page)

Her readers heard how she and Gillian had watched the new-born lambs on the farm near their home and fed the ducks on the river and she studied and delighted in the little girl’s reaction to each new experience. The pram on these occasions was also often used as a means of transporting to the local post office sacks of silver paper bound for Great Ormond Street, or dozens of tobacco tins filled with pondweed – requested by schools for their new aquaria and collected and packed for them by Enid herself.

When she started a vivarium, during her writing of the
Round the Year
nature series, she enlisted the help of Dick Hughes, her young gardener, in hunting for the necessary frogs, toads and other small garden creatures. So carried away was he by her knowledge and enthusiasm that he soon began to take a fresh interest in the bird, animal and plant life around him and before long was keeping, at her suggestion, a daily record of his observations. These he would periodically pass over to her for comment and her further encouragement led him into taking a diploma course in botany and zoology at his local technical college. But Enid also benefited from his studies for, together with his daily jottings, they provided her with many ideas for regular features and for her new monthly
Country Letter
(see Appendix 4), which appeared during the twelve months of 1935 in
The Nature Lover
magazine.

Dick Hughes was the only member of the staff to remain with the Pollocks throughout their nine years at Old Thatch. He was in his early twenties and newly married when he took on the job and, by the time he left, four of his six children had been born in the small, two-bedroomed cottage they occupied in a corner of the garden. He was originally engaged as a chauffeur-gardener, but was soon turning his hand to a host of other jobs around the house and garden. He saw to he pumps which operated the water system – for there were no mains at Old Thatch in those days – fed the animals, painted and decorated and carried out most of the general repairs.

When a bedroom and dressing room extension was built on to Old Thatch, he used the left-over timber, brick and other materials to build a miniature house for Gillian in the garden. This delighted all who saw it and prompted Enid to write about it at length on her children’s pages. It had a tiled roof with gables, a brick chimney and fireplace, latticed windows – which opened and shut on miniature latches – and a front door complete with knocker, doorknob and lock. It was furnished with ‘a blue rug, a round table, two stools, a blue teaset, two pictures on the walls, a little lamp hanging from the ceiling, and a tiny carpet-sweeper, so that she can keep the house clean … It looked,’ Enid wrote, ‘just like a fairy cottage so small and quaint!’ From then on, her young daughter spent most of her summers playing with her dolls in what came to be known to Enid’s readers as ‘Dilly’s Cottage’ – ‘Dilly’ being Gillian’s own name for herself.

But life for the occupants of Old Thatch was not always as idyllic as Enid’s writings would sometimes have her readers believe. The house’s proximity to the river often meant heavy flooding during the winter months and the consequent dampness taxed even Enid’s normally robust constitution, resulting in her being confined to bed on several occasions with severe colds and throat infections. This did not prevent her from seeing to it that her page went in on time, for she told her readers how, during one such illness, she had been writing her column sitting up in bed with her head swathed in bandages. Although she passed off what she termed her ‘booming ear’ very lightly, she had really been seriously ill with a painful ear infection, which necessitated the calling in of a London specialist. But nothing, it seemed, could stop her from honouring her writing commitments. Conscientious almost to a fault, she expected the same devotion to duty from her staff which explains why, when they became ill themselves, she brooked no malingering. Her readers were told of this illness and of the household’s adventures during the floods, but there were certain other incidents about which she made no mention.

When Dick Hughes first pointed out to her that Bobs was showing signs of age, she refused to discuss it – or to believe that he was failing. The old dog dragged on for several months in pain and when he died, in November 1935, although she made a short mention of it in her diary, she refused to speak of his death to anyone or to let Dick and Hugh, who had buried the dog in the garden, mark his grave. For her, Bobs still lived on. His letters continued to appear for as long as she wrote her page and her readers were kept unaware of his death.

They were also unaware of another incident – not quite in keeping with the Arcadian pattern of country living so often portrayed within her columns – an invasion of Old Thatch by a horde of scavenging rats. Rats were a species of wild creature that Enid had always detested and when Dick told her that they were coming up the stream and forming colonies all over the garden, she thought he was exaggerating and that normal methods of control would soon drive them away. In her
Country Letter
in
The Nature Lover
magazine she was writing:

Yet her animals were unable to cope with such an army and it was not long before the rats were carrying off a bushel of apples or a sack of vegetables in a single night. They got into the house, running beneath the floorboards and inside the sixteenth-century wattle and daub walls, on their way to the attic to reach the fruit stored there – and the traffic to and fro kept the whole household awake. Ordinary poisons also failed and eventually Hugh decided on more drastic methods and instructed Dick to set a day aside to conduct an all-out war, by gassing the animals out of their underground eyries. Enid took Gillian away to friends, the pets – with the exception of Bobs and Sandy, who were sensible enough to be of help in the hunt – were shut up out of harm’s way and battle commenced. By midday, close on a hundred had been killed by Dick, Bobs or Sandy and by evening, the pit the young gardener had dug for the bodies was filled and Old Thatch once again returned to normal. Enid must have been aware of what had taken place, but she never spoke to Dick of his sterling work while she had been away. As far as she was concerned the matter was closed, and such an unpleasant episode was best forgotten.

Protective as always, Hugh instructed Dick – as he was later to do over Bobs’ death – that he was never to mention the matter to his mistress again.

But not so easily put aside was the household’s increasing awareness that all was not well with Hugh.

Early in 1933, he was more than usually busy at Newnes. There were several notable authors under his aegis at that time, including those producing ‘part-works’ – abridged books published in weekly or fortnightly instalments and eventually bound into volumes. Winston Churchill’s
The World Crisis
was one such work to reach a wider public in this way and Hugh was delighted to be responsible for its production. He was always intensely patriotic and admired the politician for his forthright views. He greatly enjoyed his periodic visits to Chartwell to discuss illustrations, or minor revisions and additions to the original script but his involvement was to have another, less pleasant side. As they discussed many of the major battles in which he had taken part as a young man, Hugh found himself reliving some of the traumatic experiences of that time which he had tried to forget. The volume and pressure of his other work at Newnes only added to his stress for, always something of a perfectionist, he was finding it increasingly difficult to keep up his commitments without a lowering of his own standards. Even at home it was difficult to relax for all too often he returned, physically and mentally exhausted, to find that Enid had arranged a bridge or tennis party, and the pair seemed to be spending less time alone together than ever before. It was therefore not until the early summer that Enid came to realise what Dick Hughes had been aware of for some time – that Hugh was on the verge of a breakdown.

Dick had a great respect for Enid, but it was always to Hugh that he gave his allegiance. He had long realised that his employer expected the same high standards from his staff – in or out of the office – that he imposed upon himself, but he was also aware of the keen sense of humour and old-world charm and courtesy that earned Hugh the respect and devotion of all who worked for him. During their drives to and from Taplow and the London train, Hugh would encourage his young chauffeur to talk about himself and in return would tell something of his own life: of his strict but happy boyhood in Scotland, of the friends he had lost in the war and his life in the trenches. At other times he would suggest books he thought might interest Dick, or discuss improvements he had planned for Old Thatch and its garden and, after a while, it was easy for the young man to gauge the nature of his employer’s mood by the brevity or otherwise of their conversation. By mid-May it was apparent to Dick that something was seriously wrong. Hugh was looking tired and ill, was morose and silent in the car and, on some of his now frequently late return journeys to Old Thatch, it was evident that he had been drinking.

Like many another who had experienced the horrors of the war and had found temporary relief in alcohol, Hugh was still prone to turn to the same palliative in times of stress. Whether Enid suspected this at the beginning of their relationship is doubtful, but the happiness of their early years together possibly removed any worries she may have had. By July she was forced to acknowledge what was now apparent to the other members of her household, that Hugh was sick and in need of care. She made no reference to this in her diary, but in her weekly
Teachers’ World
letter wrote: ‘Gillian’s Daddy has been working very hard and I want to take him as far away from London as possible.’ Gillian and her nurse were sent to a residential nursery in London and Enid and Hugh took a few weeks’ holiday on their own in Scotland – but even there he could not leave his working cares behind. He spent a whole day at an Edinburgh printing works and made a flying visit back to London on ‘urgent business’. Nevertheless, the holiday appeared to ease the pressures for them both and they seemed more relaxed and happy on their return to Old Thatch. They had a joint celebration of their birthdays a few days later and presents were exchanged as usual – though Enid’s gift to Hugh came as something of a surprise. As she could never bear loud noises of any kind, particularly when she was working – complaining if Dick Hughes so much as whistled or Gillian was too noisy at her play – both Hugh and her staff were astonished when she gave him, of all things, a set of drums, something he had always wanted.

If she had intended the present to serve as an alternative safety valve for his tensions, it was a brave try, for he spent many hours after that playing by himself to the music of dance bands on the radio, or as an accompaniment to his own whistling of Scottish reels, and for a while he seemed his old self. But her worries were not over. After several references in her diary to his late or ‘very late’ homecomings, there appears on 30 December another of those cryptic entries which gives cause for speculation: ‘Wrote a letter to Hugh all p.m.’ As he was at home at the time, it is reasonable to assume that this was Enid’s way of communicating something to her husband about which she had to give great thought and care. Again no mention is made of its contents, nor of how it was received by Hugh – her only note the following day being an account of the New Year’s Eve Ball, which they had attended with publishing friends in London, and their journey home in the fog.

But whatever the contents of the letter, 1934 appears to have begun happily enough and Enid’s early diary jottings refer only to her writing or social engagements and her daily ‘play-times’ with Gillian. These now included first lessons for her young daughter in reading, writing and ‘number puzzles’ and Gillian made good progress under her mother’s expert tuition. She writes often of having ‘gardened with Dilly’ and no doubt these sessions, greatly enjoyed by both, prompted her to write
The Children’s Garden,
published by Newnes the following year. This popular book, which instructed children on how to grow their own flowers and vegetables and make them ‘feel very proud indeed’, went into several reprints and prompted many of its readers to seek further advice from the author on the management of their own small gardens. But her happy times with Gillian did not lessen her renewed anxieties over Hugh when, in the early summer, it was apparent that his old troubles were returning.

Editing the further volumes of
The Great War
– as Churchill’s revised book was entitled – continued to take up much of his time, without any lessening of his other work and the familiar stress symptoms reappeared. It was during the latter half of May, while his mother was staying at Old Thatch, that Enid mentioned for the first time in her diary that Hugh was not well and that the doctor had been called in. She makes no reference to the nature of his illness, but change was evidently prescribed, for she writes of him having journeyed back to Scotland with his mother the following day for a short holiday in Ayr. A further diary entry two weeks later seems to indicate that he was still not fully recovered when she went to meet him at the station: ‘He drove home and we nearly had several accidents!!’ But apparently he felt well enough after a few days to join the rest of his family in the small furnished house at Seaview, on the Isle of Wight, that had been rented for the summer.

Although Enid continued to work at her writing commitments and Hugh had to make one or two hurried visits back to his London office, they enjoyed this quiet time together: bathing with Gillian, building sandcastles on the beach, taking boats out and picnicking on sunny days. By the end of the holiday, Hugh seemed to be very much refreshed and overjoyed by the knowledge that Enid was once again pregnant. Both hoped that this time it might be a boy and eagerly looked forward to the birth. They were bitterly disappointed when she miscarried a few months later – but this was soon forgotten when early the following year she conceived again.