The Haunted Wood, page 33
Hers was a deeply conservative vision. The Second World War had shaken Britain’s social order and its secure sense of its own place and its own destiny in the world. Blyton’s work sought to reassure. Its child protagonists had freedom of action, and sometimes they would be “naughty,” but they did so in a secure and orderly social framework. Blyton herself used the bully-pulpit of her celebrity, in the post-war years, to speak out against what she saw as the corruption of childhood and the degradation of society. She hopped on, and whipped up, moral panics against bad mothers, juvenile delinquents, the popularity of comic books, and the wickedness of socialism.
In this context, incidentally, it seems a stretch to claim George, in the Famous Five books, as an avant-la-lettre trans character. “I shall only answer if you call me George,” she says in the first book (and repeats with minor variations in the ones that follow), “I hate being a girl. I won’t be.” George may be what we’d now call gender-nonconforming, and Blyton would certainly have called a “tomboy,” but it seems highly unlikely, not to say anachronistic, to suppose that Blyton would have seen her as male. George’s tomboyishness, as a defining character trait, quietly reinforces rather than subverts the normative world of the books.
Blyton herself worked to embody the stereotype of suburban middle-class respectability: first in “Old Thatch,” in the commuter town of Bourne End which was the model for the setting of her Find-Outers stories; and then as chatelaine, from 1938, of an eightbedroom mock-Tudor mansion in Beaconsfield (named “Green Hedges,” after Blyton asked her child readers to vote on the name when she moved in). Her recreations were housewifely: playing golf and bridge, arranging flowers, and planning menus. To produce books at the extraordinary rate she did, though, she had – as few of her readers now would – teams of servants to help. Her personal life, like her brand, was aggressively curated. She wasn’t as innocent, or as conventional, as all that.
The real Enid Blyton was born in 1897 in a flat above a shop in East Dulwich, and not long after her birth the family moved to the lower-middle-class area of Beckenham, “where their neighbours were a mixture of clerks, builders, cab drivers and fishmongers.”* They were a family on the rise: by the time of the 1911 census they were in a fancier street and had a live-in servant. By all accounts Enid adored her father Thomas, who kindled in her a love of reading and walks in nature. The thunderbolt came when Enid was just thirteen: Thomas abruptly abandoned his family to take up with another woman. Rather than sympathizing with her unimaginative mother Theresa – whose preoccupations were housework and respectability, and who was so mortified by Thomas’s departure she insisted that he was “away on business” – Enid, angry and ambitious, took out her rage on her and withdrew emotionally. She left home at eighteen, lodging with a friend’s aunt she called “Mums” and determining to make her own way in the world. Her father died of a heart attack in 1920. The rift with her mother never healed. When Theresa died in 1950, Enid didn’t bother going to the funeral.
Enid later expunged from the record, too, her first marriage – to a blue-eyed young publisher called Hugh Pollock, whom she met in January 1924 and whom she likened on first acquaintance to the Prince of Wales, telling her diary: “I want him for mine.” She got him. Pollock, who was already married with two children, divorced his wife and the pair were married that summer. Theirs was a professional as well as a romantic partnership. Pollock’s position at the publisher Newnes, where he also published Noel Streatfeild, is credited with helping Enid’s career along – not least in launching her as the editor of (and sole contributor to) a new weekly publication, Sunny Stories for Little Folks. Their daughters Gillian and Imogen were born in 1931 and 1935.
That relationship foundered during the Second World War. Hugh, perhaps still carrying the trauma of the First World War service that had earned him a DSO, was sinking into alcoholism. Enid, by now thoroughly launched on the world, started an affair (not her first; at least one account of her life includes a lesbian fling with one of the children’s nannies) in 1941 with a surgeon – a rather dull, squeaky-voiced fellow called Kenneth Darrell Waters. When Hugh learned of the affair, he threatened to divorce her. Enid persuaded him to let her initiate the divorce so that her adultery didn’t enter the public record and contaminate her reputation. She married Waters in 1943, and wrote Pollock out of her history altogether, making no mention of him in her autobiography The Story of My Life (1952) and cutting off his contact with their children. In later life she allowed it to be assumed that Waters was the father of her daughters. Pollock survives in the Blyton myth only in the pen-name Mary Pollock, under which she wrote some of her early work.
She was a bit ruthless, in other words. She was near-neighbors in Beaconsfield with another very successful, though not as successful, children’s writer of the era, Alison Uttley (1884–1976) – author of the Beatrix-Potter-inflected Little Grey Rabbit books. They did not make friends. Uttley was jealous of the woman she called “the Blyton.” In 1941 Uttley sent a friend to the Beaconsfield branch of WHSmith to try to persuade the manager to stock her work. She was furious to hear that the manager had said there was no demand for them: “Now, if it was Miss Enid Blyton’s books! They sell marvellously!” The manager, calling Enid a “charming woman,” even produced a photograph: “the awful picture,” judged Uttley, “of a vulgar, curled woman.”
Well-meaning neighbors once brought them together for lunch, assuming the two children’s writers would have much in common. Uttley affected not to have any idea who Enid was: “I know the book you wrote about a horse,” she said, “but what else have you written?” Enid – and this, given the previous incident, must have hit more of a nerve even than she realized – retorted: “Smith’s window is full of my books. You can see a few titles if you care to look.” Uttley later told another guest, in feigned mortification: “I had mixed her up with Enid Bagnold and National Velvet.” Uttley herself was a cookie full of arsenic, incidentally: she described her lifelong illustrator Margaret Tempest to her diaries as “absolutely awful” and “a humorless bore,” and was described by the editor of those diaries as “a singularly controlling and dominating person.” Some of that spilled through into her work. Cosy though the world of Little Grey Rabbit and Fuzzypeg the Hedgehog may have seemed, the first book in the series does end with Little Grey Rabbit bartering her own tail to an owl for gardening advice and roasting a weasel alive. But I digress.
The wholesome, motherly creature Enid constructed for public consumption was not, at least according to her real-life daughter, anything like the real story. Enid’s ambition, and the policing of her image, left little room for Imogen, who in A Childhood at Green Hedges (1989) recalled “the confusing mixture of beatings and pocket money handed out by ‘the woman with dark curly hair and brown eyes’ who worked on a typewriter downstairs.”* In Imogen’s account she realized only quite belatedly that the “absolute ruler of our household” was “also my mother.” “The truth is,” wrote Imogen, “Enid Blyton was arrogant, insecure, pretentious, very skilled at putting difficult or unpleasant things out of her mind, and without a trace of maternal instinct. As a child, I viewed her as a rather strict authority. As an adult, I did not hate her. I pitied her.”
Another famous children’s writer as a parent; another child on whom, like Christopher Milne, or vivian Burnett, or Alastair Grahame, the psychic fallout of that writing was to settle. Many of the greatest children’s writers, it seems, are so profoundly preoccupied with creating an ideal childhood in their work, to heal the wounds of their own childhood selves, that they don’t have room in their moral imaginations for their flesh-and-blood offspring. It’s an occupational hazard: too busy imagining children to be a parent.
After Blyton’s death in 1968, Green Hedges was demolished to make way for a new housing development. In 1997, on the centenary of her birth, a replica of Green Hedges was installed in Bekonscot model village, at a scale of one inch to a foot. Enid’s older daughter Gillian unveiled it.
If Blyton sought to remedy a rupture with the past by, effectively, ignoring it, two other writers who were to follow – Philippa Pearce and Lucy M. Boston – took a subtler and more elegiac approach. The former’s Carnegie-winning timeslip novel Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958) sees its protagonist traveling between the world of the Golden Age stories and the bleak and shabby post-war reality.
As it opens, Tom’s brother Peter has been quarantined with measles, and Tom is sent away from the family house in London to stay with his childless uncle and aunt in the fens:
They drove on through Ely and the Fens, and then through Castleford and beyond, to where the Kitsons lived, in a big house now converted into flats. The house was crowded round with newer, smaller houses that beat up to its very confines in a broken sea of bay-windows and gable-ends and pinnacles. It was the only big house among them: oblong, plain, grave.
“Converted into flats” is not a phrase I’ve noticed in any pre-war children’s stories. The high-ceilinged, servant-tenanted west London townhouses inhabited by E. Nesbit’s characters were disappearing into the past. Tom is billeted in a poky room – space has been carved out of it with a thin wall to make a bathroom – whose barred window is the only indication that it was once a victorian nursery. The MacGuffin – the pivot around which the story’s timetraveling plot revolves, the contact between present and past, the anchor in time – is an ancient grandfather clock in the hallway on the ground floor, the screws that hold it to the wall rusted and immovable.
Tom discovers that when the malfunctioning clock strikes thirteen, in the unreal extra hour after midnight, the house slips in time: he is able to sneak out of the back door and in place of the scrubby backyard – a creosote-smelling “strip of pavement where dustbins were kept” – he finds the titular midnight garden. The hallway becomes as it once was – broad, luxurious, peopled by uniformed housemaids and glass cases of stuffed birds – and the garden outside is a vast and well-tended collation of alcoves, archways and “beetle-browed yews.”
Night after night, Tom slips out into the garden, where – mostly invisible to the human inhabitants, except for an unhappy young girl, Hatty, whom he befriends – he explores and pieces together the house’s past. He thinks Hatty is a ghost; Hatty thinks he is a ghost. They argue fiercely about it. (It doesn’t occur to either of them, thankfully for the story’s delicious sense of mystery and wistfulness, to ask the other what year it is.) Time, here, is hinky: Tom can spend hours in the past and return to the present moments after he has left; but when he returns to the midnight garden months or maybe years will have passed. Hatty, unlike a ghost, is growing up (at their last encounter, she is a young woman); Tom, like a ghost, is not. Tom thins and disappears; he passes, in the past, through solid objects; his footsteps leave no trace on the grass. In some sense Tom is a ghost of the twentieth century haunting the nineteenth.
The midnight garden represents a refuge from Tom’s loneliness, and a refuge from modernity itself. From the garden wall, Tom is able to look out
beyond the garden and the house, to a lane, down which a horse and cart were plodding. Beyond the lane was a meadow, and then a meandering line that he knew must be the river.
But in the tawdry present, when he walks with Aunt Gwen down to the same river, it is polluted:
‘I know it means that the river isn’t pure and healthy any more,’ said Aunt Gwen. ‘It’s something to do with all the houses that have been built, and the factories. Dreadful stuff gets into rivers from factories, I believe.’
Tom looked at the river-water: it did not look foul, but he saw that the weeds below the surface of the water, instead of being slim and green and shining, were clothed in a kind of dingy, brown fur.
As Tom’s stay with his uncle and aunt nears an end, he becomes distraught at the thought of losing his access to the midnight garden. Every moment that passes brings him closer to the moment when he can step out into timelessness; and every moment that passes brings him closer to the day he must go home to the city and be shut out of timelessness for good:
As they came in through the front-door of the big house, the first thing Tom heard was the ticking of the grandfather clock. It would tick on to bedtime, and in that way Time was Tom’s friend; but, after that, it would tick on to Saturday, and in that way Time was Tom’s enemy.
It’s a powerful way of giving life to the experience of childhood itself. That the book’s denouement has Tom discover that Hatty is still alive – that, as an old woman, she’s living in the very same house (she’s the elderly landlady), and that she remembers him. It’s a masterly and moving coup de thêatre. It’s also a reminder, strange to think of now, that there would have been some people who read the then-new Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as children still, just about, alive at the end of the Second World War. Hatty, aka Mrs Bartholomew, isn’t quite that old – she is, as she says, “a late victorian” – but she has been living, quietly, through all the years across which Tom steps by magic.
‘We had two children – boys. They were both killed in the Great War – the First World War they call it now.’ Mrs Bartholomew did not cry, because she had done all her crying for that so long ago. ‘Then, many years later, Barty died, and I was left quite alone. That was when I came here; and I’ve lived here ever since.’
We all, Tom’s Midnight Garden tells its readers, travel through time. The child lives on in the adult. Lonely childhood, in this story, is able to call to lonely childhood and share the experience in a dream, or a fantasy – or in a story.
He had longed for someone to play with and for somewhere to play; and that great longing, beating about unhappily in the big house, must have made its entry into Mrs Bartholomew’s dreaming mind and had brought back to her the little Hatty of long ago. Mrs Bartholomew had gone back in Time to when she was a girl, wanting to play in the garden; and Tom had been able to go back with her, to that same garden.
The closing words of the book are a proper three-hanky tear-jerker.
‘Good-bye, Mrs Bartholomew,’ said Tom, shaking hands with stiff politeness; ‘and thank you very much for having me.’
‘I shall look forward to our meeting again,’ said Mrs Bartholomew, equally primly.
Tom went slowly down the attic stairs. Then, at the bottom, he hesitated: he turned impulsively and ran up again – two at a time – to where Hatty Bartholomew still stood …
Afterwards, Aunt Gwen tried to describe to her husband that second parting between them. ‘He ran up to her, and they hugged each other as if they had known each other for years and years, instead of only having met for the first time this morning. There was something else, too, Alan, although I know you’ll say it sounds even more absurd … Of course, Mrs Bartholomew’s such a shrunken little old woman, she’s hardly bigger than Tom, anyway: but, you know, he put his arms right round her and he hugged her good-bye as if she were a little girl.’
* * *
Timeslip stories satisfy a very particular yearning. That same spooky yet consoling sense of how a house can travel through time was present in Lucy M. Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe (1958), the first in a series of six books about an ancient manor house, dating back to the Norman Conquest, which turns out to be extremely haunted. Again, the protagonist is a lonely boy.
When we first meet Toseland Oldknow, he is sitting in a railway carriage, “looking out at the rain, which was splashing against the windows and blotching downward in an ugly, dirty way. He was not the only person in the carriage, but the others were strangers to him. He was alone as usual.” His mother is dead. His father is away, and he is “miserably shy” of his stepmother. He’s on his way to Green Knowe to stay for the school holidays with his greatgrandmother, Linnet. When he arrives he finds a house literally cut off from the outside world by flooding. He makes the last stage of his journey by dinghy.
When he greets his great-grandmother, her first words to him are:
‘So you’ve come back!’ she said, smiling, as he came forward, and he found himself leaning against her shoulder as if he knew her quite well. ‘Why do you say “come back”?’ he asked, not at all shy. ‘I wondered whose face it would be of all the faces I knew,’ she said. ‘They always come back.’
That is a little unnerving – “they always come back,” in another context, could be a horror-movie line – yet it’s tempered by the instant connection: “he found himself leaning against her shoulder as if he knew her quite well.”
As Tolly (the nickname his great-grandmother gives him) comes to discover, Green Knowe has been inhabited by generations of his ancestors – a whole series of Toselands and Linnets, whose groundskeepers are a whole series of Boggises – and it still is. Tolly tunes in, as it were, to three children who lived and died in the seventeenth century. They are shadows and glimpses at first: an image in a mirror, a sense of being watched, a shadow that’s the wrong shape, the whinnying of a long-dead horse in a stall. But bit by bit, the past and present come together.
The house and its grounds are a sort of temporal palimpsest. Time is behaving strangely here, too. Granny (as Tolly calls her – what’s a generation when time past and time present coexist?) lives among the ghosts. The house reduplicates itself: “Everything is twice here,” exclaims Tolly, not knowing how true he speaks. A painting of the three children with their mother contains objects still in the house. His room has a doll’s house in it:
