Enid Blyton (10 page)

But these educational books provided only a part of Enid’s published work during her early years at Elfin Cottage. In 1926 she took on the editing of a new twopenny magazine for children –
Sunny Stories
– published by George Newnes, which was to grow considerably in popularity over the years and to be forever associated with her name.
The Play’s the Thing
(Home Library Company), a series of musical plays for children with music by Alec Rowley, and a book about animals for Newnes were both published in 1927.
Let’s Pretend,
a story book for Thomas Nelson, which Enid thought ‘beautifully produced and very artistic’ came out the following year. Her verses continued to be accepted by national periodicals and she maintained her flow of contributions to
Teachers’ World,
many of which eventually found their way into book form. Among several full-page features for this magazine were accounts of her meetings with A.A. Milne and Marion St. John Webb, published in a special October 1926 supplement on
The Children’s Poets.

Enid greatly enjoyed these two commissioned interviews. She was charmed by Mr Milne: ‘this writer of exquisite child poems and lighthearted lyrics’. She wrote:

His son, Christopher Robin, she thought, looked ‘just like the pictures by Ernest Shepard, except that he has much more hair’. When the interview ended the poet presented her with an advance copy of his latest book ‘… which has the most exciting title of
Winnie the Pooh’.
She was equally impressed by Marion St. John Webb, whom she described as a ‘small and pixie-like woman’.

Enid was also featured in the supplement in a full-page article written by Hugh, under the initials ‘H.A.’. He had, he wrote, found his ‘hostess’ in the garden of Elfin Cottage:

His final question was one he had been ‘meaning to ask for a long time: why must she work so hard when she had a husband, home, happiness and peace?’ Enid had replied that ‘so long as one child tells me that my work brings him pleasure, just so long shall I go on writing.’ But she admitted, also, to another reason: ‘and this is a secret – I’d love to write a novel about children, and the jolly, happy things of life.’ ‘If the book should ever be written,’ commented ‘H.A.’, ‘we shall have something worthwhile from this young understander of that which is in the hearts of all helpless things, be they children, animals, birds, or flowers.’

Hugh’s article on his wife was read out in classrooms all over the country and this evidently endeared her still further to her readers for, from then on, her mail increased at an alarming rate. By 1927 she was replying to an average of about a hundred letters each week and her Christmas post contained five hundred letters, two hundred cards and a hundred or more presents from teachers and children all over the world. Although by this time Hugh had persuaded her to use a typewriter for her manuscripts, she continued to answer all her correspondence by hand – a practice she was never to relinquish.

She had at first been reluctant to follow up Hugh’s suggestion that she should learn how to type but early in 1927 she decided to give it a try, though she recorded in her diary that at the beginning the method seemed to take her ‘twice as long’. However, with typical determination and Hugh’s encouragement, she persevered and within two months, using only her forefingers, was typing as quickly as she could write in long hand. By the end of the year she was able to record: ‘Worked till 4.30 and did 6,000 words – a record for me.’

She learned how to drive during the same year, but this did not prove quite as successful. The Pollocks had bought their first car at the beginning of March – a red and white Rover with a registration number that began YE – ‘Young Enid’ as friends laughingly called it. As neither could drive they began to take lessons and Hugh, rather to Enid’s annoyance, made the quicker progress. She could not resist sarcastically noting in her diary, after their instructor had pronounced him capable of driving on his own:

She did manage to drive eventually, but was always the first to admit that she was not very proficient and consequently limited her range of travel to within a few miles of home. The mechanism of the car always remained a mystery to her – as evidenced by an incident ruefully recorded by her later in the year. A mystified garage mechanic had been called after Enid had made repeated, unsuccessful attempts to start the engine. She remembered four days later, after the car had been thoroughly overhauled and sparking plugs renewed, that she had ‘poured paraffin oil into the car battery instead of water’. She was, even so, very attached to the small car and made many happy excursions in it with Hugh. Most of these she wrote about in her column – without, however, mentioning the misfortunes that sometimes befell them en route. A holiday taken in Scotland gives an example of this.

She wrote in her newly-commenced
Letter to Children,
which replaced
From my Window
on 31 August 1927, that she would shortly be travelling to Scotland in her small red car, with a bunch of white heather on the front. She hoped her readers would wave to her if they spotted her on the way. ‘Here we go’, she wrote, ‘seeking adventure away on the white, high roads, up to the heather mountains away in the North!’ They met with adventures, but not of the kind Enid had envisaged. In fact the holiday became something of a disaster. Much of it was spent in heavy rain, the car developed a puncture soon after they left home, another occurred seven miles out of Edinburgh and a third close to Oban. ‘At the same time’, Enid recorded in her diary, ‘the clutch lever rod broke and we had to get a man to go to Oban and have another made.’ Later in the week, when they had arranged to meet Hugh’s family, the car again had a puncture ‘which had to be mended six times and still went flat … It has been a hell of a day!’ One can well understand this final comment and her relief on returning to Elfin Cottage two days later. Though she wrote very amusingly of this in her diary, her column gave a rather different story. According to this, the weather had stayed fine and she had done ‘all the things’ she had wanted to do – but she was also quick to add how good it was to be home again, and went on to describe her reunion with Bobs and her pleasure at seeing ‘the old familiar things’ around her once more. The minor disasters of the past two weeks were forgotten – or ignored.

But holidays, generally, were happy times for the Pollocks. Most Easters were spent by the sea in Sussex and their two weeks in the summer a little farther afield – though never outside the British Isles. Wherever they went, they were seldom away from each other for long. Neither sought the more sophisticated pleasures of the resorts. Instead they walked and swam together, lazed on the beaches or explored caves and castles – a favourite pastime of Enid, which also appealed to Hugh. Her notebook and two diaries accompanied her everywhere and she faithfully recorded in her nature diary the changes in the weather and the bird, animal and plant life around her – just as she did each day at home.

Her life at Elfin Cottage had now settled into a regular pattern. If she were not travelling to London to visit publishers, her mornings began with breakfast at around eight o’clock. After seeing Hugh off to the station, she would feed her pets, give instructions for the day to her young maid and then begin writing. She usually wrote in the garden in the summer, or beside the fire in the dining room in winter but always with her notebook or typewriter perched on her knees rather than on a table. She occasionally visited Mabel or other friends in the afternoon but more often she would continue working until it was time to meet Hugh at Shortlands Station – either on foot or in the car. After dinner, work was put away and the evening was their own, for they entertained friends very rarely, though they would sometimes have an outing to the theatre or the cinema – ‘Ben Hur,’ Enid recorded after one such occasion, ‘is the best film I’ve ever seen.’

Like most couples, they had their occasional disagreements and Enid’s fierce temper would flare: ‘Quarrelled with Hugh as he thinks I ought to like his mother and I can’t …’ ‘I went into the spare room [after another quarrel] but Hugh fetched me back.’ However, none of the arguments lasted for long and to all who knew them during those early years together, they appeared ideally suited. Hugh was kind, considerate, and obviously very much in love with his wife. Immensely proud of her achievements, he wrote in another passage of the
Teachers’ World
supplement that she was ‘a constant source of inspiration to those around her …’ and he smiled indulgently at a publisher who introduced him at a Press dinner as ‘Enid Blyton’s husband’.

Enid’s own feelings are expressed in her diary note for 28 August 1926:

Confident in his love, she felt free at last to be herself.

With most people she was, outwardly, what they expected her to be: the imaginative, clever young teacher; the capable, prolific writer; the nature-loving woman of simple pleasures; the dutiful wife. Hugh had seen her play all these roles but knew and loved her for the far more complex person she undoubtedly was, and went along with her every mood. He was her ‘Bun’ and she his ‘Little Bunny’, nicknames Enid had given them both early in their courtship and he indulged her occasional desire to act the part of a child with a beloved father, rather than that of a wife in her early thirties. Together they built snowmen in the garden on cold winter days; played French cricket until dark on summer evenings; took part in games of ‘catch’ against the house wall and collected chestnuts from the tree in the front garden for ‘conker’ matches – ‘… mine is an eighter’ she recorded after one contest. Birthdays and Christmases were occasions for great celebration with the exchange of numerous gifts – ‘Hugh gave me 42 presents and I gave him 25’ – and Bobs and the other pets were not forgotten. She recorded on 25 December 1926:

But these festive enjoyments were marred as year followed year, by Enid’s increasing fears that she might never be able to have a child of her own to share these happy times.

They had hoped, once they had settled in Elfin Cottage, that the baby they both longed for would be conceived. They were seemingly healthy enough, leading what appeared to be a happy and normal sexual life and there seemed no reason for the delay. Everything else she had aspired towards had eventually come her way, yet over this particular ambition she knew she had no control. It did not help that, by 1928, most acquaintances of her own age either had children already or were about to have them. Mary Attenborough was now married and had a young son and so had Phyllis and Felix. Hanly and his wife, Floss, were the parents of a baby daughter, Yvonne, and Mabel’s sisters and other relations were always bringing their latest offspring to visit her at the cottage. She wrote to and for children every day and thought of them constantly. ‘Surely,’ she confided to Phyllis, ‘no one could be better equipped than I to bring up a family.’

Eventually in the late spring of 1928, she consulted a gynaecologist. His diagnosis was that Enid had an unusually undeveloped uterus – ‘almost that of a young girl of 12 or 13,’ she told Phyllis later. (Coincidental, perhaps, but this diagnosis does seem to indicate once again the far-reaching effects upon the thirteen-year-old Enid of her father’s departure from home all those years before.) The specialist suggested a series of hormone injections and these she stoically underwent – daily for a week and progressively less frequently the following month. The Pollocks hoped, once the treatment had been completed, that results would quickly follow but this was not to be. She tried to satisfy her maternal yearnings by seeing as much as she could of her young niece, Yvonne, and Phyllis’s son, Barry, to whom she and Hugh were godparents. She also threw herself, with renewed effort, into her writing. This now included the preparation, with Hugh as co-editor, of a ten-volume
Pictorial Knowledge,
an illustrated ‘Educational Treasury’ for Newnes.

But something else was to occur, early in 1929, which soon occupied her mind in other directions. She wrote in her
Letter to Children
in
Teachers’ World:

In fact, by the time her
Letter
had appeared in print, she had already found her new home. It was a large, rambling, sixteenth-century thatched cottage, close to the River Thames at Bourne End in Buckinghamshire. Her readers were thanked, in subsequent columns, for passing on information about houses they knew were for sale and might be suitable and for their suggestions of names for her new cottage, after she had described it to them. These included Pixie Cottage, Ding Dong-Bell Cottage, Pet Cottage, Fairy Cottage and Brownie Cottage – but, she told them, ‘it is going to be called by the name it has had for a long, long time – ‘Old Thatch’.