Enid Blyton (24 page)

It was early in 1967, during one of these rare journeys into reality, that she telephoned a surprised Hanly, who had not heard from his sister for nearly seventeen years, and begged him to visit her. Kenneth had been taken into hospital for a short period, her daughters were both away from home and she was, she told him, ‘desperately lonely’. Realising, with some concern, that Enid was obviously a sick woman, he made the journey from Kent a few days later, only to find his sister quite unable to recall her urgent summons and barely able to recognise him. Once the realisation came that this ‘strange man’ was indeed her brother, she was obsessed with the thought that she must immediately return ‘home’ with him to Beckenham and ‘Mother and Father’ and this idea persisted long after he had left. She could remember only the happy times the little family had spent together before their father had left them, and all the pain of parting had mercifully been obliterated. Hanly continued to visit her from time to time and even took her back to Beckenham on one occasion in an endeavour to prove to her that her old world no longer existed and that her life now revolved around Green Hedges, but the moment she returned to Beaconsfield the visit was forgotten and she talked once more of returning ‘home’.

Yet in the midst of this childhood dream world, Kenneth still remained beside her, solid and reassuring. Sick man though he was, he recognised the responsibilities she had laid upon him and was determined not to fail the wife he had cherished for so long. When he realised that time was running out for him, he characteristically set about putting his own and Enid’s affairs in order. He cleared her desk and burnt many of the documents it contained including, it is thought, most of her diaries. Only those prior to 1936, which Enid had stored elsewhere, and a few covering the last years of her life, remain. These later diaries are by no means complete but sadly show the confusion of mind under which she laboured at that time – which makes the one clear and concise entry for 1967 all the more poignant. She wrote on Friday 15 September:

The news of his death, at the London hospital where he had been for more than a week, had somehow penetrated the comforting wall she had built around herself and brought her cruelly back to the reality of her life at Green Hedges. For a few days she appeared to be in command of her actions and her thoughts were only of the husband she had lost, but after returning from his cremation at Amersham, she again relapsed into her old dream world and the desire to return to her childhood home once more obsessed her.

During the months that followed, without her beloved Kenneth beside her, she declined rapidly, both physically and mentally. She was cared for throughout this time by her faithful housekeeper, Doris Cox, who had been with the family since 1945, and other members of her staff who had also known Enid in happier days. Her daughters and friends visited her regularly, but by December 1967 Gillian and Donald and their four young children had moved toYorkshire and Imogen, who had recently married, was living in Sussex with her husband, Duncan Smallwood. Both daughters did what they could for their mother, but her illness grew progressively worse and some three months after being admitted to a Hampstead nursing home, she died peacefully in her sleep on 28 November 1968.

Only Enid’s family and close friends were present at her cremation at Golders Green in North London, but her memorial service at St James’s Church, Piccadilly, on 3 January of the following year, was attended by representatives of her many publishing houses and of the four children’s clubs with which she had for so long been associated. The service was conducted by the rector, the Reverend William Baddeley, and included a reading by her eldest grandchild, ten-year-old Sian Baverstock, of Enid’s own version of the Parable of the Sower. Paul Hodder-Williams, the chairman of one of her main publishing houses, spoke of Enid’s incomparable gift for ‘making friends’ with children from all backgrounds and of several generations:

No plaque marks the place where Green Hedges once stood and other houses have now taken its place, but Enid Blyton surely needs no memorial other than her books. Several years after her death, despite her critics being as fierce as ever in the condemnation of her work, her stories continue to be bought and enjoyed by children the world over. To them and to hundreds of her former readers she remains the spinner of magical tales, almost without equal.

Many have tried to solve the mystery of her phenomenal success and apparently ageless appeal, but perhaps psychologist Michael Woods, who attempted to analyse Enid – the woman – from her books (see Appendix 9) came closer than most when he wrote:

Certainly her emotional immaturity was very evident throughout her adult life, particularly in her relationships with others, but that she never left her childhood entirely behind might well explain her ability to produce the kind of writing to which children of all ages and nationalities seem able to relate. She did, of course, possess extraordinary creative and imaginative gifts, an amazing capacity for hard work and a shrewd business acumen, but she was also able to look with a child’s eye at the stories she was creating and to project herself into them with such enthusiasm that her young readers very quickly became caught up in her excitement, as they avidly devoured each page. As for Enid, they provided an escape into a world of constant enchantment and surprise, where she could put aside those things which were unpleasant and keep only her dreams of life as she would like it to be.

Some of her work may, as her critics claim, show the occasionally vicious side of her childlike nature or perpetuate views and attitudes that are no longer acceptable to present day society, but those who are worried by complaints that her stories are repetitive, lacking in characterisation and limited in their vocabulary, may like to be reminded that young children generally feel secure when they are covering easy, familiar ground and that as they mature most want to venture further afield – hopefully, in this case, to more demanding literature.

But perhaps the final words should be left to one of Enid’s millions of readers who, looking back on a childhood in which Enid’s books played an important part, wrote to her from South Africa in 1957:

Since this book was first published over thirty years ago, Enid’s life and extraordinary writing career have created even more worldwide interest. This has been due in part to the wider use of the internet, fresh information coming to light, the creation of a Society bearing her name and other factors, all of which I have tried to cover in the following new chapter.

M
ost writers of biographies would agree that there are sometimes tantalising missing pieces of the jigsaw they are trying to put together. Occasionally, despite diligent research, there are puzzles which are never fully resolved although, often years later, solutions may be found.

Twenty-five years after this biography was first published in 1974, a diary belonging to Enid Blyton was found stuffed amongst old files in the offices of Darrell Waters Limited. This discovery was made to the surprise of all concerned for it had generally been assumed that any diaries for this period had been destroyed with others by Enid’s second husband, Kenneth Darrell Waters. The diary was dated from January 1937 to December 1940 and as with those few earlier ones that had escaped his notice, passages of which I was able to use for my biography, the daily entries were always confined to a few lines and revealed little more than I had managed to glean from other sources covering those years. There were, however, one or two exceptions.

Contrary to what I was first led to believe, the Pollocks continued to own Old Thatch until 1940. From 1938, when the family moved to Green Hedges, the old house at Bourne End was rented out to several tenants before a buyer was eventually found. This explained the puzzling memories Gillian and Imogen both had of returning there from time to time after 1938 to pick fruit and play in the garden. The diaries now confirm that these were the occasions when the property had to be prepared for new tenants and Hugh or Enid, sometimes accompanied by the ever helpful Dorothy, would take the children with them while they supervised the work.

The 1938 diary also revealed that the actual move to Green Hedges took place when Hugh was still in hospital recovering from pneumonia and that Enid managed to organise the whole operation single-handed, in addition to keeping up with most of her writing commitments and visiting her sick husband. She stayed during this period at a nearby guest-house until he had recovered sufficiently to be taken home. After a few days she then, accompanied by Dorothy, travelled with him to convalesce on the Isle of Wight where Gillian and Imogen had been staying for some weeks with their Nanny. I had been curious about how and when the move had taken place as I thought it must have been around the time Hugh had become ill but I was unable to find any proof. Even Dick Hughes, their faithful gardener, found it difficult to remember details of that period.

Other entries in the diary confirmed the closeness of her relationship with Dorothy over those years and her genuine anxiety over Hugh’s illness, though no mention is made at any time of his alcoholic lapses nor of what transpired between them during that fateful Christmas leave of 1940 as, curiously, the page for 31 December of that year was left blank. It is even more unfortunate that Kenneth should have destroyed the diaries that followed, including that for the next eventful year when he and Enid first met.

Although commercially Enid Blyton has remained the most successful children’s writer of the last century, the controversy over the quality of her work still continues into the twenty-first – albeit to a much lesser degree than formerly. Even some of her fiercest critics concluded, at a 1997 conference organised by the National Centre for Research into Children’s Literature, that her stories were, in the words of one speaker, a ‘thumping good read’ and that recognition should be given to the great contribution she had made to children’s literacy.

As early as 1982 Sheila Ray had commented in her assessment of Enid’s books.
The Blyton Phenomenon,
that the views of librarians and educationalists had begun to change when they became aware of falling literacy standards and realised that no other author at that time appeared to be capable, to the same degree, of writing the kind of stories which would encourage children to take up a book and read it through to the end. Subsequently more of her work began to appear on school and library shelves although her name did not feature in the 1991 list of approved books for the national curriculum, even though she figured that same year on the Public Lending Rights list as being one of the three most borrowed children’s authors. Also in 1991 the
Sunday Times
included Enid’s name in its list of international figures –
1,000 Makers of the 20th Century
– who had shaped and influenced the lives of the British nation. In more recent years her rating on the PLR list has fluctuated but, according to the latest figures for 2005–6, she is still placed sixth in popularity, despite strong competition from best-selling authors such as J.K. Rowling, with her
Harry Potter
series, or Children’s Laureate Jacqueline Wilson, whose books deal with more realistic and down-to-earth life situations than Enid portrayed in most of her stories. Both writers, incidentally among many others, are said to have read Enid’s stories as children.

In the early 1990s some of her publishers made certain text changes to her work – mostly to bring her stories into line with modern thought and sensitivities, particularly with regard to what some construed to be snobbish, racist or sexist attitudes. Even names were ‘modernised’ and other seemingly inexplicable alterations are still being made to some of her original stories. Such ‘sanitising’, as one reviewer described these changes, has brought further controversial publicity to Enid’s books for, although welcomed in some quarters, there are also those who see no reason why children should not be allowed to read the unexpurgated versions for themselves, accepting them in the context of the time in which they were written – as they already do with so many other works of fiction. It is, perhaps, interesting to note here that at the last count, thirty-eight years after her death, her books are continuing to sell at the rate of some six to seven million copies each year, in more than forty languages and worldwide sales of her books have remained buoyant.