The Haunted Wood, page 32
* Freud described the archetypal “family romance,” in which a child fantasizes that he or she will turn out to be born to different, higher-status parents. Here, in outline, is a plot that runs through countless children’s stories.
† This is maybe a nod to the metafictional gleam of the novels: “gramarye” is a medieval word meaning book-learning.
‡ In fact, Malory’s identity remains obscure. The Newbold Revel man is only one of several candidates. In any case, this would place the action of White’s story
in the early fifteenth century; but elsewhere the narrator airily places the story “in the twelfth century, or whenever it was,” and at least on the face of it we’re just a generation on from the Norman Conquest. So, as I say, a fudge. White was quite knowing about this, noting in a letter to a friend that Malory dressed the past in the armour of his own age and that “We [i.e. White and Malory] care very little for exact dates.”
* Letter to L.J. Potts, 14 January 1938, quoted in Sylvia Townsend Warner, T.H. White: A Biography, [p].
* “The Pleasure of Learning,” lecture delivered in Troy, New York, 1963, quoted in Townsend Warner, T.H. White: A Biography.
* Diary entry quoted in Townsend Warner, T.H. White: A Biography.
† Ibid.
‡ I should be less categorical. White considered himself homosexual and thought that doomed him to unhappiness. He tried and failed to court women, and in later life he was unrequitedly and secretly tormented by love for a boy his diaries called Zed. His agent and friend David Higham, though, thought Townsend Warner painted him as a tormented closet-case to fit her own agenda, going so far as to claim he had put her in touch with a female lover of White’s whose evidence she ignored. Let’s just leave it with the traditional “he never married.”
* Prologue to The Book of Merlyn (University of Texas Press, 1977).
* Originally The Witch in The Wood (1939), but substantially revised and retitled as The Queen of Air and Darkness in the 1958 collected edition.
VII
LASHINGS AND LASHINGS
Enid Blyton · Alison Uttley · Philippa Pearce · Lucy M. Boston · C.S. Lewis · Tove Jansson · Astrid Lindgren
POST-WAR WRITERS
IF THE GREAT WAR SCARRED THE NATIONAL PSYCHE – with the countless young men who never came home or came home irrevocably damaged – the Second World War too left its marks. More than the first war, it marked not just the adults but the children who lived through it. The experience of aerial bombardment, and the realistic fear of invasion, meant that the violence wasn’t over there, but over here. Families had lived through blackouts, become familiar with the close confines of Anderson shelters, jostled with strangers as they sheltered in tube stations from the bombs. In ruined cities, children made improvised playgrounds of bomb craters.
The evacuation of children to the countryside began on the day Germany invaded Poland in 1939. One and a half million children were displaced in three days. They called it “Operation Pied Piper.” (Did nobody remember that in Robert Browning’s poem the piper was leading children into danger, not out of it?). Families were separated. New connections formed where the evacuee children were taken in by strangers, and new worlds opened up to the evacuees: town mice found themselves amid country mice, and the children of the poor fell, often, on the charity of the more prosperous.
But there was also mistrust, misunderstanding, homesickness, and the pain of separation. When the feared bombing raids didn’t at first materialize, around half that first wave of evacuees were brought home by their anxious parents just a few months after leaving, in the face of government advice to leave them where they were. Further waves of evacuations followed in 1940 when the bombing raids started and when there were fears of a German naval invasion.
It need scarcely be said that as the war came to an end, and the liberating armies crossing Europe discovered the death camps, there came a general reappraisal in the adult world of what modern civilization meant, if anything. The Holocaust doesn’t make its way into children’s stories directly – hard to see how it could – though Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, published in the original Dutch in 1947, went into English in 1952. It shadows, you could say, the children’s stories of the era.
The post-war years were far from triumphal. Rationing in the UK went on till 1954: fresh eggs, meat, and dairy were scarce. In his memoir Miracles of Life, the writer J.G. Ballard described arriving in the UK from China in 1946:
Looking at the English people around me, it was impossible to believe that they had won the war. They behaved like a defeated population. I wrote in The Kindness of Women that the English talked as if they had won the war, but acted as if they had lost it. They were clearly exhausted by the war, and expected little of the future. Everything was rationed – food, clothing, petrol – or simply unobtainable. […] More importantly, hope itself was rationed, and people’s spirits were bent low.
The post-war decades saw the places in which children lived starting to change, too.* A million new houses, many of them prefabs, were built between 1945 and 1955. The 1946 New Towns Act paved the way for the birth of a whole series of new developments – Stevenage, Crawley, Harlow, Welwyn Garden City, Cumbernauld in the midfifties and, in the late sixties, the gigantic Milton Keynes. Slum clearances and relocations were coming, and high-rises started to spring up. The divide between the propertied aristocracy and upper middle classes, and the urban or rural poor, was shifting. More and more people were living in places without a history. The grand country houses that had symbolized pre-war privilege and stability – and for which Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) articulated an elegiac longing – had been requisitioned during the war and were now handed back to their impoverished owners in a dilapidated state. The wrecking ball was coming for Toad Hall.
This long post-war rupture produced new forms and new storytelling possibilities – as well as new audiences. But it also produced a longing, if an equivocal longing, for connection with the past, with older forms of storytelling, and with something that would embed childhood in a history from which it must have felt like it had come unmoored.
* I think it’s in this context – make-do-and-mend, a sense of the instability of home – that we can consider the pint-sized Proudhonists of The Borrowers (1952), the first in Mary Norton’s series about a family of tiny people who live in the walls of victorian houses and “borrow” from humans what they need to survive.
An Englishman’s Home
ENID BLYTON · ALISON UTTLEY · PHILIPPA PEARCE · LUCY M. BOSTON
Child Whispers; The Famous Five;
The Secret Seven; Noddy; Malory Towers;
The Magic Faraway Tree; The Five Find-Outers;
The Naughtiest Girl in the School; The Secret
Island; The Little Black Doll; The Story of
My Life; Little Grey Rabbit; Tom’s Midnight Garden;
The Children of Green Knowe
“WOULD YOU LIKE TO COME WITH ME AND VISIT A village so small that you will tower over the houses?” Enid Blyton asked her readers in 1950. “Would you like to know what it would be like if you visited Fairyland, and felt like a giant, because everything was so tiny, and the people hardly came up to your ankles? Well, I live quite near to a little village like this – it is so close I can see it from my bedroom window. Shall I take you there?”
That is the promise of Enid Blyton’s work – and it is a promise that made her the era-shaping figure of mid-century children’s fiction. It’s the promise of something entirely safe: a pretty little world, like a doll’s house, where everything is under control. Not the haunted wood of folktale, but a carefully tended suburban garden. “All my life I have loved a garden,” she wrote. “It is said that one of the most characteristic things about the British people is their love of a garden, no matter how tiny, and we are supposed to have the loveliest gardens in all the world, small or large.”
There was a real model village, too. Blyton’s home in Beaconsfield, where she lived for the last thirty years of her life, was right next door to the Model village at Bekonscot, which had sprung up, aptly enough, in the back garden of an accountant in the late 1920s. It stands there to this day – a network of seven tiny villages, an acre and a half of “immaculate gardens” and nearly ten miles of railway lines reproduced at a scale of one inch to one foot. “Stuck in a 1930s time warp,” its website boasts today. “See England how it used to be, and discover a wonderful little world tucked away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.”* The future Queen Elizabeth II visited Bekonscot in 1934, when she was eight years old.
Though her first book, Child Whispers, was published in 1922 (the same year as Ulysses and The Waste Land), it was in the years during and after the Second World War that Blyton really got going – the point at which, you could say, her model-village view of the world answered a thirst in a population for the illusion of order and a triumphal view of Englishness. Her earliest work was full of elves and pixies and brownies, coasting in the last of the slipstream of the post-Peter Pan vogue for fairies. The notorious Cottingley Fairies – in 1917 two little girls claimed to have photographed fairies dancing on flowers at the bottom of their garden, and Arthur Conan Doyle was only one of those who swallowed the hoax whole – were still in memory.
But she worked, furiously, toward what was to make her successful. The first in her Naughtiest Girl series, The Naughtiest Girl in the School, was published in 1940. The first in her St Clare’s school series was 1941. The first Famous Five book appeared in 1942. (1941 had seen the lesser-known squib The Adventurous Four, a try-out that fizzled.) The Magic Faraway Tree came in 1943, as did the first of her Five Find-Outers stories. 1946 was the first Malory Towers. The Secret Seven series got going in 1949 as, to the eternal regret of many readers, did the wretched Noddy books – about the adventures in Toyland (itself modelled on Bekonscot) of the eponymous bell-hatted buffoon and his asinine best friend Big Ears.
Perhaps the funniest passage in Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ (1982) is also a telling one as to Enid Blyton’s place in the culture even a decade and a half after her death. Townsend’s young protagonist hopes to signal his passage to moody adolescence by slapping black paint over the Noddy wallpaper in his childhood bedroom. No matter how many times he paints over them, the bright yellow bell on Noddy’s hat still shows through: “Went over hat bells with black felt-tip pen, did 69 tonight, only 124 to go.”*
Blyton was voracious. She tried everything. As early as 1924, she confided to her workbook after meeting one publisher: “It’s definitely decided I’m to do 36 books for them!” She created franchise after franchise. She was the first children’s writer who, during her own lifetime, was a brand. The bibliography of her works numbers well over 700 volumes, and in her 1950s heyday she was banging out several dozen books a year. She has sold more than 600 million books, at the last count. She described her creative process as something like automatic writing: “The story comes out complete and whole from beginning to end. I do not have to stop and think for one moment.” You don’t so much analyze Enid Blyton’s work, as weigh it.
The forgotten ones seem to tell the story of her popularity as much as do those that remain in print. There were great series of Enid Blyton Annuals, Enid Blyton’s Bedside Books, The Enid Blyton Holiday Book, Enid Blyton’s Jolly Story Book, Enid Blyton’s Sunny Stories, Enid Blyton’s Treasury, My First Enid Blyton Book, My Second Enid Blyton Book, and so on. She even edited – which points to her status as the metropolitan power in middle-class children’s writing – a series of Daily Mail annuals for children. She marked her territory with self-branded versions of established stories, retelling the Brer Rabbit story and La Fontaine’s fables, and producing Tales of the Ancient Greeks and Persians, Tales of the Romans, The Knights of the Round Table, Tales from the Arabian Nights, The Adventures of Odysseus… even, which some will think a bit of a cheek, Enid Blyton Bible Stories.
She treated her writing as an industry, consciously adapting popular genres in adult fiction to juvenile audiences: the Famous Five stories were thrillers for kids; The Secret Seven and the FindOuters were essentially golden-age crime capers. Here too were animal stories after Potter or Sewell, circus stories, desert-island Robinsonades (The Secret Island), myths and fairytales, fantasy quests, and school-hols adventures after the pattern of Arthur Ransome. When Blyton embarked on her Malory Towers series about high-spirited boarding-school girls, for instance, she was adding the merest dribble to a great torrent of popular children’s literature in the boarding-school genre; catching it, as it happens, as post-war social change saw its popularity start to fade away. Originality wasn’t the point: and why, in a literary tradition that recycles and adapts ceaselessly, does it need to be?
Blyton didn’t just take advantage of the panoply of children’s periodicals that offered publishing outlets: from 1953 onward she published her own, Enid Blyton’s Magazine. Throughout her life, she was attentive to her relationship with her child readers, answering fan-mail, encouraging them to join clubs (the Famous Five Club had 30,000 members within a year of its inception) and cultivating her family of what she called in the dedication to her memoir “my friends, the children, everywhere” – as we’ll see, somewhat to the exclusion of her own real-life children. She was at the peak of her powers just as children’s publishing – the post-war baby-boom having produced a welcome bump in new readers – was coming into its own maturity.
In 1962 a publishers’ association called the Children’s Book Circle was founded (it survives to this day), and by the 1970s every mainstream publisher in the UK had a children’s division. The expansion of children’s publishing in the decades after the war wasn’t a steady rise so much as an explosion. The influential editor Kaye Webb (1914–1996), who helmed Penguin’s Puffin imprint from 1961 to 1979, deserves mention here as its presiding genius. She increased Puffin’s list more than twenty-fold in under a decade, introduced the promotional Puffin Club in 1967, and edited its quarterly newsletter Puffin Post.
Blyton wasn’t an ambitious stylist, or a stylist at all. She dismissed “highbrow culture” early on, with excellent high-handedness, as “doleful, morbid or sad”: “I’m young and normal, and I prefer something more wholesome.” Her main stylistic distinction is the excitable use of exclamation marks and a weakness for bolt-on adverbial qualifiers: “said her aunt, laughing”; “said George, going rather red”; “‘Woof,’ said Tim, in his deep voice.” She insists, sometimes in the narrative itself, and sometimes in the dialogue, on reminding the reader that something exciting has happened, noting that something exciting is happening, or preparing the reader for something exciting to happen.
The girls laughed. They felt happy and excited. Holidays were fun. Going back to Kirrin was lovely. Tomorrow the boys would come – and then Christmas would be there!
But as much as that may seem bland or annoying to the adult reader, it was absolutely part of Blyton’s design. Unlike so many of the more sophisticated children’s stories we’ve touched on in previous chapters – books that are at least half designed to enchant the grown-ups – Blyton was interested in speaking very directly, and in very simple language, to children themselves. Short sentences, words of one or two syllables, excitable prose, snappy pacing, and fast-moving plots were all. The adult gatekeepers, meanwhile, would be satisfied by the certain knowledge that there was nothing in these books to challenge or disturb. Blyton was safe; there wasn’t a hint of sex and violence in her books.
Nevertheless, even in her lifetime her work attracted the disapproval of high-minded librarians who imagined that its simplicity and its popularity were rotting young minds. Her literary agent, George Greenfield, observed in 1964 that “It is easy to sneer at the Enid Blyton stories with their soft padded bourgeois backgrounds and their simple vocabulary”*. The counter-argument – that she “got children reading” – is the same one we see mounted today against those who affect to disapprove of the success of J.K. Rowling.
She wasn’t, despite what her critics thought, writing for children just as entertainment: she came at her work from a background in education. Her first successes as she started to build her career in the 1920s were while she was working as a teacher in Surbiton, and she was trained in the “Froebel system” – which emphasized play, and time in nature, as “the highest expression of human development in childhood.” At the time there were a number of periodicals, called things like the Teacher’s Times and the Schoolmistress, which carried articles about the latest ideas in education and pedagogy alongside poems and stories for children, intended for classroom use.
In 1923, having contributed occasional pieces to Teacher’s World, Enid snagged a regular column, which ran for four years. In 1926, Teacher’s World sent her to interview A.A. Milne and (of course) Christopher Robin. She presented Christopher Robin with a copy of her Book of Bunnies. Her presence in Teacher’s World was a networking opportunity, a chance to hone her craft, a chance to think in public about education and childhood – and a venue for self-invention.
Blyton went on in her writing to present a model-village version of England: one in which the wartime and post-war privations that afflicted almost every child in the country were absent, in which poverty and urban decay were invisible, and good health and high spirits came as standard. For much if not most of her audience, that was not the world they saw around them. Blyton, then, set out – as if her name itself was a hopeful play on words – to reinvent Blighty.
The world of her most successful books is a world of peppy, white, middle-class children roaming an idealized Home Counties countryside in endless school holidays or getting up to hijinks in boarding schools during term-time. The feasts and picnics and cream teas for which she is now so mocked, with their “lashings and lashings of ginger beer,” were a potent fantasy. Hers is a world in which everything turns out all right in the end. Blyton has become a byword for a particular rosy vision of post-war English childhood – one that existed more in the imagination than in reality. And it’s a very partial, very insular, very little-England world. Over the years the overtly racist and xenophobic aspects of her work – the wicked golliwogs in Noddy; the “ugly black face” of the doll in The Little Black Doll (1937) – have been noted and, in modern editions, expunged.
