BOOKS THAT ENID READ AS A GIRL

Enid loved reading. Among the books she read were Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies and Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women. She said of the characters in Little Women:

“Those were real children... ‘When I grow up I will write books about real children,’ I thought. ‘That’s the kind of book I like best. That’s the kind of book I would know how to write’.”

Enid Blyton enjoyed myths and legends too, and poetry and annuals, and magazines like Strand Magazine and Punch. She was fascinated by Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia:

“It gave me my thirst for knowledge of all kinds, and taught me as much as ever I learnt at school”.

Grimm’s fairy-tales she considered ‘cruel and frightening’ and, although she liked Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, some of them were ‘too sad’. Among her favourite books were Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’ books and R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, but the one she loved best of all, and read at least a dozen times, was The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald. What appealed to her “wasn’t so much the story as the strange ‘feel’ of the tale, the ‘atmosphere’ as we call it. It hung over me for a very long time, and gave me pleasant shivers”.

SENIOR SCHOOL

In 1907 Enid Blyton became a pupil at St. Christopher’s School for Girls in Beckenham. She was not a boarder, like so many of the characters in her books, but a day-girl. Intelligent, popular and full of fun, she threw herself wholeheartedly into school life. During her time at St. Christopher’s she organised concerts, played practical jokes, became tennis champion and captain of the lacrosse team, and was awarded prizes in various subjects, especially English composition. In her final two years she was appointed Head Girl.

Outside school she and two of her friends, Mary Attenborough and Mirabel Davis, created a magazine called Dab, for which Enid wrote short stories. The title of the magazine was formed from the initials of the contributors’ surnames.

Enid’s first holiday abroad in 1913 was to stay with one of her French teachers, Mlle. Louise Bertraine, at her home in Annecy, France.

HER PARENTS’ SEPARATION

Thomas and Theresa had little in common and grew more and more unhappy and frustrated in their marriage as the years passed. They had frequent violent rows, causing their children great distress. At night-time, Enid, Hanly and Carey would sit at the top of the stairs with their arms around one another for comfort, listening to their parents’ heated arguments. One night, when Enid was not quite thirteen, the children heard their father state angrily that he was leaving and would not be coming back. To Enid’s shock she learnt that there was another woman in his life, Florence Agnes Delattre, a secretary, and that from now on he would be living with her.

Since marital breakdown was regarded as a scandal in suburban Beckenham in 1910, Theresa forced Enid and her brothers to pretend, if asked, that their father was merely ‘away on a visit’. This pretence, which the family kept up for years, appears to have left Enid with a lifelong tendency to cover up anything unpleasant and put on a façade. In 1951 she wove this traumatic experience into a novel, The Six Bad Boys.