Enid Blyton (6 page)
Being always alert to possible teaching aids, her attention was drawn one day at a London tube station to several brightly coloured posters displayed on the platform. Thinking how much the subjects chosen would appeal to her class, she tracked down the sales office and bought a selection. These she duly took back to Southernhay and from then on, the child who reached the top of the class each week had the privilege of choosing the picture to be hung on the wall for the following five days.
Handwork for the boys and girls usually consisted of cane and basket-work or threading dried and coloured melon seeds into necklaces and bracelets – an occupation often accompanied by the reading or telling of one of her own stories, which for many was the highlight of their day.
Enid was happier than she had been for many years. She enjoyed the teaching and really felt herself to be a member of a loving family. ‘Uncle Horace’ and ‘Aunt Gertrude’ were always there to give encouragement and to the children ‘Auntie Enid’, as she was known from the beginning, was someone very special. Undoubtedly this background of affection helped the young governess when, during her first summer at Southernhay, she received some news from her uncle that must have come as a great shock – her father had died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of fifty, while out fishing on the Thames at Sunbury.
His brother, Charles, was the first to be informed and he quickly notified the rest of the family and then arranged for the funeral to take place at Beckenham for, despite having lived with another woman for the past ten years, suburban proprieties dictated that as Thomas was still Theresa’s legal husband he must be buried as such.
Enid had never lost touch with her father over the years, even though she was estranged from the rest of her family. She never visited him in his new home, but she would often call to see him at his office in the City and they would talk and laugh over things together, almost like the old days, for nothing that had happened in the past could completely obliterate the deep bond of affection that still existed between them. All the more curious, then, that she did not attend his funeral.
Hanly thinks there may have been two reasons for this. Firstly, she was not to know that the ‘other woman’, whom she had never been able to accept, would not be present. Secondly, and perhaps more probably, after four years away it would have been painful and embarrassing for her to return to her family at such a time and make her explanations. Her pupils at Southernhay have no recollection of any mention being made of the death by Enid or their parents – either at the time or in later years – so her feelings on hearing the news and reasons for not being present at the funeral can only be a matter for speculation. Maybe the Enid, who was able to shelve so many other unpleasant aspects of her life, decided to put away the almost unbearable truth that she would never again see her father. If she had attended his burial, she would have been forced into an acceptance of this reality.
Thomas left small bequests to Theresa, Enid and her brothers and due to this some slight contact was re-established between them. Carey had decided to join the Royal Air Force for a seven-year engagement but Hanly remained at home with his mother at Westfield Road and took over the management of his father’s business, where he had been working since his war-time service overseas with the army. As there was still great antipathy between mother and daughter, meetings between Hanly and Enid usually took place at his London office and there was never time for long conversations. They rarely spoke of their personal affairs and he was to learn nothing of his sister’s movements since she had left home in 1916. He knew that at the time of their father’s death she was a nursery governess in Surrey, but she never told him of her training at Ipswich or of the Hunt family and Seckford Hall. It is therefore not surprising that he assumed Enid had been with the Thompson family ever since her ‘disastrous’ service in the Land Army so often referred to by his mother.
Home for Enid was now with Mabel Attenborough and her parents at Oakwood Avenue and it was here that she spent most of her weekends and holidays – far enough away from the Westfield Road area of Beckenham for her to avoid painful encounters with her mother. It was at a garden party at Oakwood Avenue in the late summer of 1920 that she renewed the acquaintance of an old friend from St Christopher’s – Phyllis Chase. The two had known each other since their early days at the school, had played in the lacrosse team together and joined in most of the senior activities, but Phyllis had left first and the pair had then lost touch. Phyllis had always been a good artist and was now beginning to sell some of her illustrations, so it seemed inevitable that before the day was out, the two should decide to try and submit work together. Their first joint sale, early in the following year, was a children’s fairy story to one of Cassells’ weekly magazines and this was the beginning of a partnership that was to last for several years.
Enid was as determined as ever to achieve success as a writer and during her first year with the Thompsons had been aiming mostly for the adult periodical market but, apart from a small poem for a Presbyterian church magazine –
The Messenger
– everything had been rejected. Her meeting with Phyllis Chase and the acceptance of her story by Cassells seemed to be a turning point. Soon afterwards she won a competition in the
Saturday Westminster Review
of 19 February 1921 with, according to the magazine editor’s comment at the time, ‘a pointed piece of nonsense’ entitled ‘On the Popular Fallacy that to the Pure All Things are Pure’ (see Appendix 2). Later in the year came acceptances by
The Londoner
and
The Bystander
of two short humorous pieces and of a romantic story for
Home Weekly
entitled ‘The Man She Trusted’. More stories were accepted by
The Bystander
and
Passing Show
during 1922 and she and Phyllis took on a variety of other commissions together. They tackled everything from illustrated rhymes for newspaper advertisements to Christmas and Easter cards for children and adults, Enid writing the verse and Phyllis designing the covers. They also worked on numerous illustrated poems and stories for children – the majority of which were accepted by
Teachers’ World,
an educational weekly published by Evans Brothers.
Having discovered, as she suspected, that the writing she enjoyed most was for children, Enid had begun to study her own young charges to gauge their reactions to the poems and stories she used in her lessons. She found that the boys favoured tales of bravery and loyalty, while girls liked fairy stories. Both, however, shared a taste for adventure, animal stories and bits of nonsense that made them laugh. So certain was she that most children would react in the same way that she decided to send a selection of her most popular items to the educational weeklies.
Miss Hilda Russell-Cruise, the assistant editor of
Teachers’ World,
had no hesitation in picking out Enid’s contributions from a batch of stories and poems passed on to her by the editor, Mr E.H. Allen. They seemed to stand out immediately for their freshness and originality. The stories were full of humour, well-constructed, contained plenty of dialogue and, like the poems that accompanied them, were infinitely better than those usually received from freelance writers. All were accepted and the first to be published was a fairy story about a broken magic dish – ‘Peronel and his Pot of Glue’—which appeared on 15 February 1922, with illustrations by Phyllis Chase. From then on, both became regular contributors to the magazine and Enid’s happy working association with Evans Brothers was to continue for many years.
But it was the small, twenty-four-page book of verse, published by J. Saville and Company in the summer of 1922, illustrated again by Phyllis Chase, that first brought Enid’s name before the general public.
Child Whispers
was dedicated to the Thompson boys: ‘four little brothers, David, Brian, Peter and John’ and had the following preface:
The children of nowadays are different in many of their likes and dislikes, from the children of ten years ago. This change of attitude is noticeable as much in the world of children’s poetry as it is in other things. In my experience of teaching I have found the children delight in two distinct types of verses. These are the humorous type and the imaginative poetical type – but the humour must be from the child’s point of view and not from the ‘grown up’s’ – a very different thing. And the imagination in the second type of poem must be clear and whimsical, otherwise the appeal fails and the child does not respond.
As I found a lack of suitable poems of the types I wanted, I began to write them myself for the children under my supervision, taking, in many cases, the ideas, humorous or whimsical, of the children themselves, as the theme of the poems! Finding them to be successful, I continued until the suggestion was made to me that many children other than those in my own school might enjoy hearing and learning the poems. Accordingly this collection of verses is put forward in the hope that it will be a source of sincere enjoyment to the little people of the world.
Enid Blyton, N.F.U.
By all accounts, it was also enjoyed by the reviewers:
… light, lilting, happy tales, told with a charming simplicity of thought and language that should give them an irresistible appeal to all young readers…
was the comment of
The Bookman. The Children’s Newspaper
wrote:
A book of real rhymes … written in the language of a child, and with the thoughts that any child might have …
This reviewer might well have been referring to
Put to Bed
– verses about a small boy sent to his room on a sunny day because he had been drawing pictures over the walls with an orange pencil. He had just started on a giant’s head when he was discovered:
When Nurse came in so cross and red
It made me feel afraid.
It ended:
There’s nothing here that’s nice at all –
‘Cept for Granny’s patchwork quilt.
The Schoolmistress
commented: ‘Witches, fairies, goblins, flowers, little folk, butterflies and other delights all live between its pages …’ Enid’s readers were to become increasingly familiar with all these subjects in the years that followed, for she was to choose them many times for her stories and verse.
The following year the same publishing house brought out her second book of poems –
Real Fairies
– which was again very well received.
The Morning Post
was moved to comment, rather whimsically:
In
Real Fairies,
children have received a new educational charter restoring their right divine to believe in fairies.
The Yorkshire Post
wrote:
To get a just estimate we left the judgement of Miss Blyton’s work to a parliament of children. The children loved her work and asked for more.
Her ability to ‘move into a child’s world of fancy’ (the
Daily Chronicle)
and to understand ‘things dear to the heart of childhood’ (
The Schoolmistress)
, were phrases often used by the reviewers of this fifty-five page book of poems. Although most of the verses were about fairies, Enid’s ability to write from a child’s viewpoint is again evident in poems like
The Open Window:
I’m here all alone in the schoolroom
And the others have gone long ago.
I’m kept in because of my writing,
I’ve really been awfully slow.
You see my desk’s right by the window
And I simply can’t help looking out,
And watching the bees in the flowers,
And the butterflies sailing about.
There’s buttercup fields in the distance,
And hills that look purple and blue
It’s ever so hard to remember,
I’ve got any writing to do.
I never shall finish my writing
With all of these things going on,
I’ll have to wait here till the evening
And do it when everything’s gone.
By this time her output of literary work was becoming so prolific that she began to keep an account book. This shows that during 1923 alone, her writing earned her well over £300 – the price of a small, suburban house at that time. In addition to
Real Fairies,
a small booklet,
Responsive Singing Games,
was published by J. Saville in March and this was followed by a series of story-books for Birn Brothers. During that same year no fewer than a hundred and twenty other items – stories, verses, book reviews and short plays – were also brought out under her name. Eighty-eight of these appeared in
Teachers’ World,
fourteen meriting full pages, and five of her poems were used in a special
Poetry and Song
edition which also included contributions by such noted poets as John Drinkwater, John Masefield, Sir Henry Newbolt, Walter de la Mare and Rudyard Kipling. Her poem, ‘January’, appeared on the first page of the supplement and her ‘Teachers’ Prayer’ on the last. On 4 July came the first of a long series of weekly articles for the magazine –
From my Window
(see Appendix 3) – a full column or more on a variety of subjects, which told something of her life and thoughts at that time.
Such a programme of work would keep many a writer fully occupied during the year, but Enid somehow continued throughout to teach, single-handed, her small class at Southernhay and from all accounts her pupils still progressed satisfactorily. They were proud of their teacher’s ability to write most of the plays, songs and poems used in their lessons and they, in turn, unwittingly provided her with plenty of material for her writing. Sometimes she used a situation or happening connected with them for
From my Window
– ‘A Dinner in Lilliput’ being one example. This was an account of a party for the Thompson children just before Christmas when all the courses of the meal were provided on a miniature scale – even the puddings, jellies and tarts ‘the size of a shilling’. This successful ‘dinner’ was conceived by Enid herself, though she did not mention this fact in her article.
