Enid blighted
Kenneth Robinson
Eflid Blyton Barbara Stoney (Hodder and t•oulghton Ea 25) Enid Blyton's father had a sallow face, an engaging personality and a nose just a fraction Loo large. Too large for what? The author doesn't tell S. But she does say that Mr Blyton played the banjo, so doubtless he was able to deflect attention from his disability with a few gems trotn the Christy Minstrels. Not that people would have looked at him Very carefully if Enid was around as well. She, are told, "had a usually bright facade."
Both these Blytons were as highly-strung as the nasturtiums they trained together over their Beckenham wall. They each gave hints, it seems, of the Restlessness Within, he with his arresting eyes and she with her ability to break down a lavatory door with her bare hands.
if you think I'm dipping too freely into trle author's bag of clichés, let me get a few pore Out of the way as quickly as possible. Both Lther and daughter, says the author, enjoyed ife ("to the full"), delighted in the sharing of ;dents ("no mean"), the living-room book-case ‘"a veritable treasure-trove") and the piano C'much cherished"). Each night, after her father's banjo sessions "ad given way to piano practice, Enid would lie awake listening as he ran through familiar Passages. Quite often he ran right through the front door as well And one night he slammed it e'n his wife for the very last time. Enid didn't pre for life without him and as she now had the acility to read books "from cover to cover," as .the author puts it incredulously, she left home to become a teacher. She also met a husband. Somebody else's nashand, as it happened; an ex-soldier who, sYS the author, delving again into her bag of ic„hds, was "war-weary." Before long Enid was , 17"Ing him "Bun" and he was calling her "Little -,1`innY." So they got married, made snowmen, P'aYed French cricket and broke each other's Ecmkers. They also broke each other's hearts; 'Jut not before they had acquired two daughters and lived in three houses in succession, 'Elfin Cottage," 'Old Thatch' and 'Green Hedges.' In rveVle last house, says the author, Enid Blyton
d for thiry ntful years.
Yllat sort of Al? "The first autumn got tichr to a bad start when the whole family leveloPed influenza. In the alearitime warica'ouds had been gathering." GJIy, that was a ad start wasn't it? Not just influenza, but wwar-clouds as well. Very soon Enid's husband off to fight and she had him replaced. The husband couldn't hear very well. So when sn returned home from her publishers they we both gather round his old-fashioned tear-trumpet and "he would invariably finish up A7gning until the tears ran down his cheeks." 1 the way to the bank, no doubt. ,f.l Thus they lived on through the 'forties, the kfties and most of the 'sixties, the whole a'Alsiness being made to sound as fatuous, by the wlithor, as all the paragraphs above. "They ere not over-lavish in their expenditure," she saa's. in one of her daftest moments, "They ran '`..311s-Royce, a Bentley and a small MG—." E tand so it goes on, 'until we say farewell to r,11111 8lYton who, the author suggests, did not e-.5p.•. like what she saw in her self towards the the u. Perhaps, we are told, she remembered edead mother she had neglected since the daerlY 'twenties. Perhaps she remembered her at father, whose funeral she had not tad 11,,„eit:}11tled. Perhaps she remembered her first f," and and the way she had kept the children
Or perhaps nothing of the kind. The biography is loaded with nasty implications, a lot of them based on Miss Blyton's pre-war diary. If, for example, she fails to mention taking tea with her children, the author allows us to fear the worst — that on this day she had not taken tea with her children. If Miss Blyton writes in the diary about sacking a nurse for dropping a baby on the floor, then again we are led to think badly of her. Here, we are supposed to believe, is a woman who was not only offhand with her daughters, but also harsh with baby-dropping nurses. And that is not all, ,says the author. Casual visitors, she points out, were always. made to feel unwelcome if they interrupted Miss Blyton's work. How, we are expected to ask ourselves, could this apparently warm-hearted woman put her own work before the needs of casual visitors? And suddenly we realise that such criticisms do not diminish Miss Blyton but the author herself, and her stature as a biographer. And then, if we begin to pay attention to what is actually written — not to the sensationalism between the lines — we find we cannot accept the author's impertinent assumptions about Miss Blyton's private life. There are statements about her most intimate relationship with her first husband, for instance, that only she or her husband could have revealed. Neither was alive to do so. And there are sly remarks about Miss Blyton's love life that even the yellowest press would not bother to toy with.
If we discount all the guesswork about Enid Blyton a very nice person come through these pages. There are quotations from her diary which show her in love for the first time. They make touching and amusing reading. Then there are excerpts from her letters to a more conventionally-religious friend. These, with her confessions of "an arrogant spirit," are charming and disarming. I like, above all, Miss Blyton's own simPle description of her books as a help to reluctant readers and a framework on which the more imaginative can build. A lot of the very best things about Enid Blyton can be found in this biography. For example, her ability to write in the language of a child and with the thoughts that any child might have. Then there is her educational and religious writing, which she did almost as much as her ordinary story-telling. And very important was her continual observation of life in the country. This brought a new interest to many of her readers when they were evacuated during the war. Miss Blyton's biographer ends up on the side of her victim. After writing a book that has encouraged reviewers to gloat over the Professional family-lover with broken families of her own, she throws all the virtues she can think of into the final glowing sentences. But by then she has done a lot of damage. It is sad, of course, that somebody so dedicated to guiding children's minds should have lived in two unhappy homes. But what matters is that Enid Blyton's thousands of readers continued to enjoy stories in which they found "nothing wrong, hideous, horrible, murderous or vulgar." Equally important, and this would be a surprise to many people who have never looked at her books, the stories are very well written — with none of the clichés of Ian Fleming, the clumsiness of Agatha Christie, the middlebrow fantasising of C. S. Lewis ...
As you see, in spite of this silly biography, and partly because of it, I like Enid Blyton.
Kenneth Robinson is still well-known as a broadcaster on radio and television.
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