Blyton’s world of fantasy not confined to books

Date Published: 24-Nov-2009

BACK before the world revolved around Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 or other video games, boys with a sense of adventure made do with the comings and goings of the Famous Five as they spent Summer after glorious Summer solving mysteries and watching criminals who never seemed to know that Kirrin Island was the last place on earth you should hide out if you wanted to lie low.

Younger bookworms entered the world of Noddy and Big Ears and goblins and gollywogs, or escaped into the world of the Faraway Tree.

And every one of her millions of fans probably imagined Enid Blyton – the author of the Famous Five, the Secret Seven, Noddy and Malory Towers – to be the perfect mother, entering into a children’s world of fiction and fantasy at will.

BBC4’s new series, Women We Loved, certainly blew any notion of that sort of idyllic lifestyle out of the water with its opening programme, Enid, the story of the most popular children’s author ever.

She was herself a child of a broken home, and throughout her life, she was haunted by her father’s leaving. She blamed her mother and regarded her as dead from the minute she was able to leave home herself.

The portrait created by this study is not a pleasant one; Helena Bonham Carter is superb as the cold, single-minded, selfish mother who turned on the ‘perfect mother routine’ like a tap – but only when publicity for her books demanded it.

She marries her agent Hugh Pollack after he agreed to publish her early books, but he’s a man who drinks too much and she’s more pre-occupied with the world that holds Julian, Dick and Anne than she is with the real one.

Enid has difficulty conceiving, but then has two daughters, Gillian and Imogen, both of whom she subsequently does her best to ignore – most of the time, she seems to care more for her dogs. In her efforts to create this image as a perfect mother, she invites other children – those who read her books – to a tea party at her home, while at the same time banishing her own girls to the nursery.

By the beginning of World War II, she is making more money than the Chancellor of the Exchequer – she wrote 23 books that year alone – but she is growing both bored and tired of her husband.

That’s when she meets Kenneth Waters, a surgeon, at bridge when Hugh is in Sussex with the Home Guard – that quickly develops into an affair and eventually a marriage.

Cold-hearted as ever, she excludes Hugh from their children’s lives and even demands he isn’t allowed back to work as an agent at her publishers after the war.

Time and time again she is painted as a callous, singular woman who cares little for anyone around her but herself. She pretends her mother was dead years before she actually died; she never bothered with her brothers again after she left home, because she never wanted to see anything that reminded her of her past.

She successfully turned her life into a work of fiction, just like her books, but if she sold the world a pup during her lifetime, this drama certainly ensured she was painted in a very different light. And yet for all of that she was the woman who gave the world some of the best loved and bestselling children’s books of all times – she wrote an incredible 750 of them in a prolific career – before she died in 1968 aged 71 suffering from dementia.

This warts and all portrayal of Enid Blyton might have been on a minority channel but, with one and a quarter million viewers, it drew the second biggest audience BBC4 has ever enjoyed .