My parents, omnivorous readers themselves, ignored (if they were even aware of) the ban on Enid Blyton promulgated by all educators in the 1960s and ’70s. We read all the classics growing up, but we also enjoyed the Five Find-Outers, the Famous Five, Malory Towers, St Clare’s and other memorable books written by this controversial author. We never liked the Secret Seven (for some reason), but our favourite of all was an almost once-off (there was a sequel) The Adventurous Four. We read and re-read all these books in Armada and Dragon paperbacks we gave each other for birthday and Christmas presents, and, inspired by them, made up shamelessly derivative stories we told to one another in bed at night or walking home from school. Some of these we wrote down in copybooks, complete with illustrations. Luckily none have survived.
The Five Find-Outers (in The Mystery of series) consisted of Fatty, Larry, Daisy, Pip and Bets. Fatty was so-called not just because he was overweight, but because his initials were F.A.T – Frederick Algernon Trotwood (or Trotter – I can’t quite remember.) He was quite comfortable with his size and respected and admired by the others. This Clever Fat Boy was a refreshing contrast to the outright derision of the fat boy in my brother’s Billy Bunter books by Frank Richards, which we all read too. The other four Find-Outers were all individuated – Larry was strong, Daisy was clever, Pip was agile and when I read the Narnia books years later, Lucy reminded me of Bets, the youngest – small and valiant. This Blyton series originated in 1943, long before the first Narnia book, so she wasn’t imitating C.S. Lewis.
I re-read all the Famous Fives when one of my daughters went through a phase of them about 20 years ago, reissued in paperback with the original Eileen Soper illustrations. Julian, Dick and Anne have great adventures when they go to stay with their cousin George (Georgina, but she wants to be a boy) and her dog, Timmy, in a seaside location. George’s parents are Uncle Quentin ( Cross because he is a Very Important Scientist) and Aunt Fanny (Not Cross, because she is the Very Important Scientist’s wife.) One of the great things about the Famous Five books is the food – picnics with sandwiches, bread-and -butter with hard-boiled eggs, jammy buns, fruit cake and bottles of ginger-beer. (We never knew what ginger-beer was.) This is the breakfast in a country inn where the Five stay when they’re on a cross-country hike:
….a steaming tureen of porridge, a bowl of golden syrup, a jug of very thick cream,and a dish of bacon and eggs, all piled high on crisp brown toast. Little mushrooms were on the same dish…’Toast, marmalade and butter to come, and the coffee and hot milk’ said the woman, busily setting everything out…
The illustration accompanying this feast shows Julian in a jacket and tie. On a hike. But before the advent of jeans and hoodies and anoraks, townies didn’t have special walking clothes, and farming men wore old suits when working on the farm. The old illustrations remind the reader that these books are about an earlier era, and deepen the reading experience.
I’ve written before in this blog about how the school story was a key genre in girls’ reading from the 1880s to about the 1970s. Blyton had two school-story streams, the St Clare’s and the Malory Towers books – I always preferred Malory Towers, in its Cornish seaside setting. Personality traits which were deplored in both schools were being ‘feminine’, (that word is used and it means, unwilling to participate in games and over-interested in personal appearance), snobbery and meanness. A ‘temper’ was the sign of a strong character, a ‘scatterbrain’ was gently tut-tutted over but loved, a ‘timid’ girl was liked, and the tomboy – the girl who loved horses and the outdoors – was always a decent sort. Teachers were firm and fair, even French teachers (Mam’zelles) who were a bit more flighty and temperamental. The stories were subtle about how girls can be both good and bad to each other – Alicia in the Malory Towers books is basically all right, but too sharp-tongued and scornful of those not as clever as she is, and Darrell, when she is elevated to head of her form, finds she has a bit of a sense of humour deficit. Gwendoline is despised because she always cries when saying goodbye to her mother at the school train (this is seen as obvious ‘putting-on’ because nobody could be that upset, surely, at parting with their parents?) But there is even some sympathy for her, when she goes through a bad patch. Teasing is bracing (‘Buck up Gwen!’) rather than bullying. (Although, speaking as someone who was teased a lot as a child,I’d say there is a very thin line between the two.) One of Blyton’s earliest books, The Naughtiest Girl in the School (1940) is about Elizabeth, a spoilt, wilful girl who is sent away to Whyteleafe School, run by Miss Belle and Miss Best. Miss Buss and Miss Beale (Frances and Dorothea respectively) were the two celebrated pioneers of girls’ secondary education in England in the late 19th-early 20th century, and Blyton was no doubt aware of this. Whyteleafe is the kind of progressive school mocked by C.S.Lewis in The Silver Chair, where boys and girls have lessons together, the teachers don’t mind being given nicknames, and the children enforce their own code of behaviour by the application of community sanctions. I wonder why Blyton decided to make St Clare’s and Malory Towers fit the more conventional school mould.
Blyton also wrote books about people of different personalities, and even social categories, finding both good and bad in each other, and coping with hard times –Those Dreadful Children, The Family at Red-Roofs (sic), and Six Cousins at Mistletoe Farm and Six Cousins Again. My memory of these books – I googled the publication dates of course – is that they were less predictable and somehow more real than the mystery series books and the school stories. I loved them.
Even as a child, though, I didn’t like some aspects of Blyton. Ern is the ‘gardener’s boy’ (I think – we were never quite sure if the gardener’s boy was the gardener’s son or the boy who helped the gardener) and he helps out Fatty, Larry, Daisy, Pip and Bets occasionally in the Five Find-Outer series. In one of the books (I can’t remember which, I’m operating entirely from memory here) he writes a poem which has lines that go something like ‘O look at them primroses in in the ditch/Smilin’ all over their faces..’ and the Five Find-Outers howl with laughter and tell him it isn’t really poetry. Blyton – through her characters – derides the poem not because it is clichéd, (which it is, a bit) but because it has bad grammar in it. Why shouldn’t a poem have bad grammar, I asked myself, if that was how the person writing it talked?
Blyton’s books taught me new words like ‘scowl’, and ‘spiteful’, and told me that ‘smugglers’ were dodgy people operating around coastlines (it was never explained exactly what they were doing wrong) who could be caught by intrepid and resourceful children. And that was the most important lesson. Some years ago American biographer Stacy Schiff wrote a lyrical article on how a little benign neglect by, and absence of, elders stimulates imagination and resilience in children. In all the classics of children’s literature, she points out, the adventures and journeys of discovery happen only when parents/guardians are not there. This kind of fantasy is empowering for children, because it is fantasy – children without adult protection are vulnerable to exploitation and physical harm. But a lot of adult fiction is fantasy too – Lee Child’s Jack Reacher is a thoroughly satisfactory and thoroughly fantastic knight errant.
My verdict on Enid Blyton, then, is that she was a good writer who fired my young imagination in many different ways. If she was sexist and xenophobic, so was C.S.Lewis. If she had deplorable class attitudes, so did most British and Irish authors of her time, from Virginia Woolf to Mollie Panter Downes to Kate O’Brien to Annie M.P.Smithson. And if she was mean to her children – something that has often been held against her – she wasn’t half as bad as her contemporaries Antonia White and Rebecca West, who wrote every bit as feelingly as Blyton did, about childhood experiences.
Books more or less in order of appearance – I’m only putting in the publishers when I know them. Blyton hopped around a lot from publisher to publisher. I’d say they were all delighted to sign her up.
Enid Blyton, The Naughtiest Girl in the School (London: Newnes 1940). I think there may have been a sequel.
________, The Twins at St.Clare’s (1941) and several sequels.
________, The Adventurous Four (1941). This, and its sequel, are unusual in Enid Blyton’s work because of their direct references to the war. She usually avoided any mention of contemporary politics.
_________The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage (Five Find-Outers) 1943 – sequels included (but were not limited to) The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat, The Mystery of the Spiteful Letters, The Mystery of the Hidden House, The Mystery of the Secret Room – these are all from my memory-banks.
_________ First Term at Malory Towers (London: Methuen 1946) and several sequels. At least I think it’s Methuen: Upper Fourth at Malory Towers (1949) is Methuen.
_________Five on a Treasure Island (London: Hodder & Stoughton 1942)and its sequels Five Go Adventuring Again, Five Run Away Together and so on. The breakfast is taken from Five on a Hike Together (1951). Hodder republished the originals in paperback in the 1990s.
_______Six Cousins at Mistletoe Farm (London: Evans 1948).
________Those Dreadful Children (London: Lutterworth 1949).
________The Family at Red Roofs (? 1945)
C.S.Lewis, The Silver Chair (London: Geoffrey Bles 1953).
Stacy Schiff, ‘The Runaway Mother’ The New Yorker, November 10 1997. (I read it first in the British Independent on Sunday some time later.)
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