Enid Blyton (23 page)

Kenneth, who was about to retire, had been trying for some time to persuade his wife to take things more easily, by relinquishing some of her full-length books and concentrating instead on her magazine work and shorter stories. But with each post came more letters from children urging her to write ‘just one more’ of the series which involved their favourite characters and she found it difficult to ignore their requests. He knew how much Enid’s work meant to her and that she was not really happy unless she had a new project on hand, but at the same time he was concerned about her health and felt there was no reason why she should not ease up a little on her activities and join him in a well-earned retirement with, perhaps, occasional visits overseas.

There were certainly no domestic or financial reasons to prevent Enid from taking holidays wherever and whenever she pleased. After their schooling at Benenden, both of her daughters had gone on to university. Imogen was still reading economics at St Andrews, but Gillian had been living and working away from home since she graduated some three years earlier, and there seemed every likelihood that Imogen would soon follow suit. Green Hedges continued to run smoothly and efficiently with its regular staff of cook, housemaid, gardener and chauffeur, and Enid’s well-invested income alone (estimated at that time to be over £100,000 a year) was more than sufficient to keep up their present standard of living for the rest of their lives, without her writing another word.

They entertained friends from time to time at their comfortable, if not lavishly furnished home, ran a Rolls-Royce, a Bentley and a small M.G., lunched weekly with business associates at the Savoy and enjoyed their golfing holidays (several times a year) at Swanage. For Enid, the pleasant life they led together incorporated everything she had ever wanted – freedom to write, a happy companionship and, above all, a feeling of security that depended more upon Kenneth’s love and devotion than financial considerations. Nevertheless, she was not prepared to make any drastic changes in her writing life – just because Kenneth wished to spend more time with her – and knowing how stubborn his wife could be once she had made up her mind, Kenneth ceased trying to persuade her. But the matter was shortly to be decided for them.

During a round of golf together on the course at Beaconsfield early in May, Enid suddenly complained of feeling faint and ‘breathless’. Kenneth took her pulse and, not satisfied with the result, insisted on taking her back to Green Hedges, putting her to bed and summoning a heart specialist friend from London. When he arrived Enid was showing some agitation, for Kenneth’s quick action in summoning the cardiologist had convinced her that she was seriously ill and memories of her father’s fatal heart attack all those years before, which she had tried so hard to bury, resurfaced. She was sure that she had a condition similar to his and felt that the ‘attack’ was by way of a warning to her that she had, as Kenneth had often told her, been working too hard.

The cardiologist diagnosed that her discomfort and pain was due, not to a diseased heart, but to a digestive malfunction, brought on he thought by Enid’s many long hours hunched over her typewriter. But despite his assurance that her heart was working satisfactorily, she did not believe him, and Kenneth, for reasons known only to himself, appears to have encouraged this self-deception. The specialist prescribed no treatment other than a mild sedative and certainly put no embargo on her work – which makes the events that followed even more curious.

Gillian and Imogen were both away at the time – Gillian in America and Imogen at university – and were disturbed to hear from Kenneth on their return a month later, that their mother had suffered a heart attack and that she had been told to rest. She was to undertake no more ‘rush’ jobs or public appearances that might cause additional strain and there was to be a general easing up on all her activities.

Why Kenneth should have kept up such a pretence with Enid’s daughters as well as herself is difficult to understand. It could be that, despite his friend’s diagnosis, he genuinely believed that Enid had suffered a minor heart attack, but the most feasible explanation seems to be that he had already noticed certain signs in her behaviour which indicated a breakdown in her health in other directions, and sought to delay this in some way by curtailing her activities, without divulging his own fears as to the real nature of her illness. His concern convinced Enid even more that her heart was not sound and that the specialist had not told her the truth.

Despite the pressures under which she worked, she had kept remarkably well in past years. Except for a short, sharp bout of pneumonia in 1954 and a spell in St Stephen’s Hospital two years earlier – after Kenneth had repaired the injuries to her leg, which had been badly bitten by a stray dog – she had rarely had more than a few days in bed and had always been able to fulfil her writing commitments. She consoled herself by the thought that, as most of her magazine work was prepared well in advance and much of this was material that was later made up in book form, her publishers would not be kept waiting and need not be told of her illness – at least for the time being. But rest from her work did not appear to alleviate the situation. Instead it brought about other, more distressing, side-effects.

She confided to Imogen that, whereas previously she had always been able to ride disaster by ‘keeping busy’ she was now finding her thoughts ‘closing in’ upon her. It is easy to suppose that, now she was no longer directing most of her thoughts towards the fantasy worlds of her own creation, some of the harsh realities she had for so long ‘put away’ were at last rising to the surface – aided, perhaps, by the sedative drug she had been prescribed. So much of her life she had kept hidden from those around her, and what little she had revealed had been embroidered into stories she now half-believed herself. Perhaps with time now to brood over some of the unhappy events of the past, triggered off no doubt by the reminder of her father’s sudden death, she may even have experienced certain feelings of guilt over her treatment of those once close to her – particularly of Hugh and her mother.

She had heard nothing from Hugh for some years. He had long given up his attempts to visit his daughters and was not prepared to take the matter further, but Enid must have known in her heart that she had not treated him fairly by going back on her original promise to him. Nor had she been fair in the much over-dramatised accounts she had given of his supposed misdeeds, both to their daughters and friends, in order to exonerate herself. But it was far too late for her to retract any of her stories.

It was too late, also, to effect any reconciliation with her mother, for she had died in a hospital at Maidstone in Kent seven years previously, after an illness lasting some years. Although she had sent occasional small sums of money towards her upkeep, Enid had not seen Theresa since the early ’twenties, despite her mother’s pleadings – particularly during her latter years – to see the daughter from whom she had so long been estranged. Hanly found his sister’s attitude towards the dying woman difficult to understand and repeatedly begged her to visit, but Enid’s reply had always been that she was ‘too busy’ to make the journey – and this was also the reason she gave for not attending the funeral. Whatever the origins of her bitter feelings towards her mother it was impossible, it appeared, for her to put them aside. Gillian and Imogen knew nothing of their grandmother until after her death and neither Hugh nor Kenneth were ever given an explanation as to why they were never allowed to meet their mother-in-law. They had no reason to disbelieve Enid’s story, also told to her daughters, that she had been ‘brought up’ by the Attenboroughs, having run away from home as a ‘young girl’. With Carey overseas, it had been left to Hanly to bear the brunt of caring for an ailing and difficult mother throughout his married life and – for the past twenty years – for his two children and a sick and almost bedridden wife. There had been little enough contact between brother and sister before their mother’s death and now there was even less, and Enid must have been aware that Hanly felt she could have given more help of a practical nature at a time when he already had more than enough to cope with at home.

When she was busy with her work, she could shut out any thoughts which conflicted with that of her popular image, but now that she was forced into an unhappy introspection of herself perhaps she did not like what she saw. She found it increasingly difficult to sleep and became even more depressed and irritable. Early in July, Kenneth thought a holiday at Swanage, with a chance to walk through the Dorset countryside she loved, might prove beneficial and refresh her in time for Gillian’s wedding, which was planned for the middle of the following month.

Gillian was to marry a rising young television producer – Donald Baverstock – and Enid was determined that her daughter should have the kind of wedding that she herself had been denied. She had already helped to choose the wedding dress and those of the six bridesmaids, although Gillian had herself decided that the service should be held in London at St James’s, Piccadilly and, with Kenneth, was organising a reception at the Savoy Hotel. Leaving her daughter to work out the final arrangements, Enid left for Swanage, hoping that her husband was right, and that she would indeed feel refreshed on her return.

She tried to rest in Dorset but the breathless feelings returned and Kenneth telephoned Gillian after a few weeks to say that her mother had again had an attack and been put to bed. Gillian was on the point of postponing her wedding, when he telephoned again two days later to say that Enid was much better and that everything could go ahead as planned. She returned in time for the wedding in a more cheerful frame of mind, but those among the guests who knew her well noticed that she was looking tired and strained – though few outside her immediate family were told of any specific ailment. Less than a month later – on 11 September 1957 – she wrote in her
Enid Blyton Magazine,
which had previously made no mention of her illness:

She was also afraid, she told her readers, that they would send more letters and she would not have been able to answer them. But she was better now:

By this time Enid had found herself swept up again into most of her writing commitments. She tried to cut down on the amount of work she normally tackled prior to her ‘illness’, but it was not long before she was once more involved in the casting and other preparations for yet another
Noddy in Toyland
production and plans for additional books for most of her popular series. Now that she was writing again, she seemed happy and more contented and Kenneth, although he tried to curb some of her more strenuous activities, let her go her own way, for by that time he had health problems of his own, with the worsening of an arthritic condition that had troubled him for some years.

As the months passed, both fought against the inevitability of their respective illnesses in their own way. For Kenneth, who had always been an athletic man, the progressive limitation of his physical activities was difficult to accept, but he refused to let the painful disease rob him of his regular games of golf and stubbornly continued to play, with the aid of an electrically driven ‘caddy car’ to take him around the course. Whereas he assessed every problem of his illness as it arose and tackled it accordingly, Enid resorted to the means she had long used for banishing anything unpleasant. She pretended – both to herself and those around her – that she was now fit and well and tried to ignore the occasional bouts of breathlessness and other more alarming symptoms that Kenneth had already noticed and which were now beginning to make themselves even more apparent.

By the early ’sixties, however, she could no longer ignore the fact that her once active brain was refusing to function in its old ‘card-index’ fashion and that the memory upon which she had always relied was failing. She tried to cover up this unhappy situation, but this only resulted in further confusion over which she appeared to have no control. Throughout her life, her greatest fear had always been that she might one day be unable to govern the workings of her own mind. During her correspondence with Peter McKellar (see Appendix 8) she had written on 13 May 1957:

To discover that this was now happening to her was more than she could bear. Kenneth helped as far as he could by taking over most of her business affairs, but 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-today life.

By 1966 Kenneth’s illness became worse and complications set in. He must have known from his medical training that he had not long to live, but even up to the last year of his life, he protected Enid from the harshness of the world outside and very few, apart from those close to her, were aware of the extent of her illness. He rarely left her side, prodding her memory or covering up for any deficiency in her dealings with her publishers and the public, and watching over her correspondence until she was unable to answer her letters even at his dictation. Occasionally, she seemed to awake from the semi-dream world into which she had now drifted, particularly when her grandchildren came to visit her – something which she always enjoyed – or when there was discussion of her books or of the children who continued to write, begging for more stories in their favourite series. But these moments of clarity did not last for long and she soon slipped back into brooding thoughts centred around her own childhood.