The eternal child

Once upon a time, about 20 years ago in fact, Enid Blyton appeared to be a fading force – hopelessly out of fashion; attacked as elitist, sexist, even racist; stuck in a ginger-beer world that no relevance to contemporary children. Blyton had died in 1968, and it seemed that her work was destined to die within a generation. Good riddance, said an army of teachers and librarians who found her attitudes pernicious, her vocabulary impoverished, her storytelling formulaic, her output overpowering.

How wrong they were to write her off. In 1997, her centenary year, the Blyton industry is rolling more efficiently than ever: Noddy is storming the US; Channel 5 last week launched the Enid Blyton Adventure Series; on Monday ITV unveils its second Famous Five series; this weekend sees a collection of children’s book luminaries reappraising her work at Roehampton Institute; and in September she gets the official seal of approval – a commemorative set of stamps featuring her best-known characters.

Commercially, she is a hot property. The company that controls her estate was last year sold sold to the Trocadero Group for £14m; it is now reckoned to be worth treble that. The newly formed Enid Blyton Ltd has taken a tough line in renegotiating copyright and royalty deals, undertaken new film and animation projects and looked to expand Blyton-based merchandising. The centenery is being marketed for all it is worth: Christmas displays in Regent Street, exhibitions, even a debate at the Oxford Union where the pro-Blyton group routed her critics by three to one.

Blyton also gets top-level PR support these days, in the form of Freud Communications, which sends out a useful factfile detailing her 700-plus books and offering a battery of celebrity quotes from Blyton fans. “Enid Blyton is a perfect retreat from the stress of stardom” – Elizabeth Hurley. “The shelves in my room are covered with her books and I’ve read every single one” – Claudia Schiffer. (Supermodels, it would seem, adore her.) Or, perhaps less encouragingly, “Enid Blyton was the inspiration for my writing career” – Ken Follett.

In death Blyton has remained as indomitable as she was in life. She is translated into almost 30 languages, sells eight million books a year, is immensely popular in Japan and India, which appear to have a limitless appetite for tales of girls at boarding school, and views with Roald Dahl for the palm of most-bought and most-borrowed children’s author in the UK.

As a piece of instant market research I scanned my 10-year-old son’s shelves for Blytonia, unearthing a varied collection of 22 titles. He has probably borrowed twice that number, suggesting that he may have read over 10% of her books, without ever getting hooked on her in the way I did as a child in the mid-1960s, devouring every Secret Seven and Famous Five with that obsessiveness – collecting rather than reading – that her critics came to argue was debilitating.

My favourite book was The Enchanted Wood – a story of three children who have crazy adventures when they climb a miraculous tree. Try to read it today and it is desperately, mind-numbingly dull – in a way that no decent contemporary children’s writer could be. Blyton, it seems, can only be appreciated by children; and only adults who loved her work as children can understand what the fuss was about.

Come to her without that retrospective sympathy and you will loathe her – thin characters, banal plots, petty snobberies. Blyton-hating is a murky combination of two things: disdain for her work and dislike of her personality. The former really began with attacks on Noddy in the 1950s – “the most egocentric, joyless, snivelling and pious anti-hero in the history of British fiction”, according to one critic. A stage version of Noddy in Toyland was labelled racist – vicious golliwogs attacking Toytown etc – and Colin Welch did a funny and effective job in Encounter called “Dear Little Noddy – A Parent’s Lament”.

Dislike of her as a person and criticisms of hypocrisy came rather later. Her younger daughter, Imogen Smallwood, wrote a memoir in 1989 called A Childhood at Green Hedges, in which she alleged that her mother was “emotionally crippled” and had more time for the thousands of children who wrote to her than for her own daughters. “My mother loved a relationship with children through her books,” she said. “Those were her best friends. Real children were an intrusion. We didn’t belong. I found her very cold and saw little of her. She didn’t mean to be cold. The world she was living in was too important to her to embrace those who intruded on her.”

Smallwood’s version of events is contested by her elder sister Gillian Baverstock, who oversees the company which controls all Bylton’s copyrights and is in effect her mother’s representative on earth. She paints a very different picture of her mother and defends her, both personally and professionally, against all-comers. Not surprisingly, the two sisters are barely on speaking terms.

Last December, Channel 4 gave Blyton a psychological going-over in its Secret Lives series. It alleged that she was indeed a very distant mother, behaved appallingly to her first husband, had a lesbian relationship with a close friend called Dorothy Richards, was snobbish, self-centred and mean – the very opposite of the caring, maternal image she spent a lifetime propagating through her books, writing for magazine and charity work.

Secret Lives is a sensationalist series, and there was certainly a good deal of exaggeration and supposition – the lesbianism remains unproven and Baverstock claims that important evidence contradicting her sister’s claims was suppressed. But there is undoubtedly a kernel of truth in the picture of a difficult, driven, often selfish woman.

There is plenty of evidence to support Smallwood’s contention that while she was endlessly accommodating to strangers, she was frequently cruel to her own family. Blyton was never close to her mother and eventually cut her of completely; she rarely saw her brother and gave him little support when their mother was dying; she ensured that her first husband took responsibility for their divorce and was denied access to their two daughters. Even her great friend Dorothy was despatched when she became inconvenient.

Blyton’s biographer, Barbara Stoney, reached this conclusion: “She was a talented, hard-working writer for children who, behind the public image which she guarded so carefully, was a very insecure, complex and often difficult, childlike woman whose life was at times far removed from the sunny world she created for herself in her highly successful writings. Emotionally she never matured beyond the unhappy little girl from Beckenham who was not allowed to tell anyone that her beloved father had deserted her for someone who appeared to mean more to him than herself.”

Stoney’s book is useful but rather humdrum and unquestioning: she doesn’t take on the work at all, just marvels at Blyton’s productivity and unrelenting success, and she is coy about the relationship with Richards. Baverstock is adamant that the relationship was never sexual, but it seems odd that Blyton’s second husband burned many of her diaries and that Stoney, who was chosen by Baverstock as her mother’s biographer, uses the surviving diaries so sparingly, saying only that they “confirm beyond doubt the closeness of her relationship with Dorothy”.

Stoney has, though hit on the key factor in Blyton’s emotional make-up – the separation of her parents and the loss of her father – and the word that best describes her writing and her continuing appeal to children: child-like. These are not books mediated by an adult sensibility. They are books written about children, for children, which could almost have been written by a child. Blyton was a clever woman with a powerful will to control, but in her writing – when what she called her “undermind” took over – she became a child again, living out fantasies with which children then and now, in the UK and all over the world, are able to identify.

Stoney quotes an analysis of Blyton’s work by the psychologist Michael Woods that gets close to the heart of her appeal: “She was really a child at heart, a person who never developed emotionally beyond the basic infantile level … She thought as a child and she wrote as a child; of course the craft of an extremely competent adult writer is there, but the basic feeling is pre-adolescent.”

Everything that makes critics dislike her books, according to Woods’ analysis, makes children love them: “It seems a deliberate policy on Blyton’s part to define the characters in her books only in the haziest terms … Elaborate characterisation may be necessary in an adult novel, but in children’s fiction it is probably a waste of time at best. Children’s imaginations readily supply characters to suit their own needs, and Blyton’s policy of being vague about her characters enables the young reader to identify more easily with them.”

Wood also makes a sharp point about food in Blyton’s books: it is “reminiscent of an orgy in an Edwardian emporium … tongues, ham, pies, lemonade and ginger beer. This is not just food, it is archetypal feasting, the author’s longing for the palmy days of her own childhood.”

My abiding memory of Blyton is of Anne’s amazing meals, al fresco delights prepared with fresh ingredients supplied by the friendly farmer’ wife always conveniently on hand. These instant feasts underlined the point that children could not only fend for themselves but actually had a better time when released from the constraints of adult control.

The abandoned child is a recurrent theme in Blyton’s books – often, parents either aren’t there or don’t much care. Take Susan in Hollow Tree House, who with her brother has been sent to love with an awful aunt following their mother’s death. “I want a proper home now, while I’m little, with a mother in it, Somebody who will welcome me when I come home from school, and somebody who will come and see me when I’m in bed and say goodnight. ‘Oh Susan, you know that’s impossible,’ said Peter.”

Blyton’s world is “sunny”, despite these parental failures. Children act independently to organise their lives and get things done. Adults are at best obstacles, at worst villains. Uncle Quentin is a famous scientist but hasn’t got a clue about life.; PC Goon is incapable of catching criminals. Children are on their own – and all the better for it.

Nicholas Tucker, author of The Child and the Book, stresses this sense of empowerment: “In Enid Blyton-land, children have wonderful independence and omniscience. They are always two steps ahead of the adults, whereas in the real world they are five steps behind.”

Tucker accepts that Blyton’s work is in many respects limited and outdated, but he denies that she is bad for children. “She is very much of her time – snobbish and intolerant of people who didn’t meet her own standards – and children’s literature since Enid Blyton has grown up, become less repetitive, more demanding. But she isn’t pernicious and you can’t talk about her properly as an adult unless you read her as a child. I was intoxicated by her storytelling – they were heroic and flattering daydreams.”

She is now edited to rid the books of non-PC elements – a process which award-winning children’s author Anne Fine says is essential. “You simply couldn’t give children the original editions,” she says. “There is one story about a doll with a black face that is unpopular in the nursery because it is black. Only when it is turned nice and white in a thunderstorm does it become a hero.”

Yet so far has the pendulum swung that even this well-intentioned tampering with the text now finds disfavour among some literary liberals. “She is part of our history,” says Kim Reynolds, director of the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature, which is organising this weekend’s conference. “You couldn’t get rid of her books even if you wanted to. I oppose modernising and amending them – that is falsification of our past. In The Island of Adventure a black man called Jo-Jo has been replaced by a working-class white character – that is nonsensical and all that has happened is that a racist image has been replaced by a classist one.”

Reynolds says the key attraction of Blyton’s books for children is the freedom that her characters have, a freedom that has has all but disappeared. Children in her books roam around forests and islands, control their own destinies, outwit adults, solve mysteries. They really do represent a sunnier, funnier time when children weren’t locked up with game shows and CD-Roms to amuse them.

Baverstock thinks it significant that many of these books were written during the second world war (the first Famous Five book was published in 1942), arguing that they represented a form of escapism from the limitations imposed by war. But the opposite may be the case: the dislocation of war, the mass movement around the country of evacuated children, the fact that many men were away from home suddenly gave children a power and freedom they hadn’t had before. War was liberating, rather than limiting, for children, and the books reflect that.

Blyton had an emotionally troubled life and sought to make up for that in her work. Her well-organised, well-integrated groups of children mirror a family set-up but without the unhappy intrusion of adults. The dangers they face are comic-book ones and they are never are serious risk. Unlike in life, everything will be all right in the end. Her books combine subversive pleasures with bourgeois satisfactions – the situation is never so bad that there isn’t time to consume the hame and tomatoes, the fruitcake and the ginger beer. The children in her books are heroes who never really suffer knocks. It’s a wonderful dream, though a useless preparation for adulthood.

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