Enid Mary Blyton (11 August 1897 – 28 November 1968)
Last night I watched the BBC4 film entitled “Enid” about Enid Blyton. If you have access to BBC I player you can watch it here (available to view for approx 2 weeks): http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nxkm8/Enid/
NB: Disclaimer: I don’t know how accurate the film Enid is, so all my comments are based on Enid as she is portrayed.
I’m sure the reviews of this film will abound and the opinions will vary widely ~ but I found it to be hugely personally nostalgic and it stirred up all sorts of memories for me, both good and bad.
It was a wonderful fast-moving nostalgic period piece (the BBC did an excellent job) and one presumes it is based on Enid’s real life biography, more or less. The lead role was convincingly played by Helena Bonham Carter:
The film showed Enid as having a complete dichotomy of personality; she could be stern, dictatorial, a liar, cruel, manipulative, selfish and self-centred, and insensitive to her mother, siblings, husbands and her own children ~ and yet to her readers she was sweetness and light itself. At first the different sides to her personality are hard to reconcile but gradually, as the storyline unravels, the viewer can begin to understand what made her tick and then come to realise that we are all what our own life experiences make us ~ and thus judge her less harshly.
I was born in the 1950s and so my early childhood was very similar to that portrayed by the children in the film. Enid’s two daughters reminded me so much of my sister and myself that I could barely take my eyes off them when they were on the screen. Their hairstyles with ribbons, the sweet little dresses (so different from the mini-me outfits the children of today often wear) ~ even the fact that they were dressed the same (my sister and I were always dressed alike even though she was two years older than me) ~ brought back all sorts of nostalgic memories of my childhood.
Yet the film stirred up other less happy memories too. The flashbacks to Enid’s childhood where she relived her parents arguing and unhappiness sadly echoed my own. Enid was supposedly devastated when her parents separated but my view is that staying together for the children can be (and was for me) disastrous. I can recall only too easily the icy atmosphere that could be cut with a knife, that hung over my rather privileged and wealthy middle class childhood home. I can remember only too well the raised voices, accusations and slammed doors. I can remember vividly the uncomfortable mealtimes when father talked at us rather than to us, while mother sulked. I can also recall praying that my parents would separate so I wouldn’t have to share their self-induced misery anymore. I’m not sure I ever got as far as working out what the alternative lifestyle would be if my wishes were granted ~ but since they didn’t separate until some 14 years (when my much younger brother was 16 years old) after I’d left, I never got to find out. (Ironically, my father never forgave me for what he viewed as “abandoning” my home and parents at such a young age ~ which is the opposite of Enid, who never forgave her mother for letting her father leave). My own father cut me out of his life for years because he wrongly felt I had rejected him. My sister and I were also dismissed to our rooms when my father felt so inclined (Enid herself did the dismissing of her own daughters to their room). Even the death of the rabbit brought back an awful memory (Enid and her second husband Kenneth cruelly eat one of the daughters’ pet rabbits due to rationing of food) ~ I tragically lost a pet rabbit in similar circumstances when a neighbour ate it ~ life can be really shit sometimes.
As a child I escaped into Enid Blyton’s books; I consumed them at a rate of knots ~ and have often thought that they set me on the track of achieving the English degree I eventually went on to get. Yet there was a darker side to my escapism, in that now as an adult I can see I too was repressing the unhappy reality of my young life and hiding in obsessive amounts of reading. It was escapism and repression for me too. I inhabited the fictional world that Blyton created, for similar yet different reasons.
Enid repressed reality ~ but she did it by writing. Throughout the film we see glimpses (sometimes a little too obvious) that Enid inhabited a fantasy World. It seems that what she couldn’t face up to she repressed ~ and she then escaped from reality by creating a wonderful childlike existence in her stories. She repressed her father’s so called ”fraternising with floozies” which was said to be the cause of her parents marriage failing and then she projected that attribute on to her innocent first husband. She was apparently haunted by what she saw as her father rejecting her ~ and yet she repeated history when she rejected her own mother, siblings, husband, children, and even betrayed her so called friends.
She continually professed to understand what children wanted, she said:
What children want is to escape to a magical world of adventure.
Well that was certainly true for me. She also said:
I know about children. I know about al the secret places they want to escape to.
Yet time after time in the film we see evidence that she failed to understand what her own children needed or wanted.
During the film there are many references to Enid’s mother being dead. When finally it is revealed that her mother died we realise that Enid has been pretending her mother was dead for years before the event actually occurred. She excuses herself by saying “She was dead to me from the moment I left home”. Enid doesn’t think she did wrong in telling this lie because to her, her mother was as good as dead anyway. We learn that she didn’t see her mother for over 30 years, from choice ~ and also that her mother suffered from dementia for the last 10 years of her life.
One of the harshest and cruelest things that Enid is shown to have done, is deliberately kill her unborn son. We are left in no doubt that conceiving her unborn son by her second husband is not a joyous or celebratory occasion for her, so it is no surprised when she manipulates a fall from a ladder to rid herself of her unwanted burden. Her husband is heartbroken and shortly afterwards (maybe from guilt) she creates the character Noddy to console him ~ a cute little boy child who will never grow up. Hence my comment in the tile for this post: I’ll never feel the same way about Noddy again.
The film also touches (lightly) on other hot historical topics of that nineteen forties and fifties ~ the defined roles of men and women, class distinction, war, child rearing views of the era (that children were to be largely seen and not heard), prejudice and ideas about women etc. The common view was that Enid could not possibly have written so many books ~ because she was a woman.
I’m sure that, like me, you are beginning to realise that Enid’s whole story writing life as an Author was fueled by her desire to escape into a world she created for herself, and by writing so prolifically she was able to spend most of her time in it. There seems little doubt that her inability or unwillingness to face reality enabled her to invent this wonderful fantasy world in her books ~ and I’m sure that many other children (not just me) escaped into her books in a similar way. Tragically, her eventual decline into dementia (following in her mother’s footsteps) ironically allowed her to escape permanently into her own world, prior to her death.
Finally, although I abhor the kind of person that Enid is shown as being, I do believe that we are all what our life experiences make us. That isn’t to say we have no options, once life has dealt our cards ~ we can still choose how we react (within reason). But without doubt, psychologically and emotionally, our past life has a huge influence on what we become and are. Therefore ultimately, I feel pity for Enid. BTW ~ I don’t blame my parents ~ they did the best they could and fortunately, I handled things differently.
Quote of the day: They fuck you up your Mom and Dad ~ Philip Larkin
(this poem appeared in the 1974 collection High Windows)
“This be the Verse”
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Alfie: Born (approximately) 1st September 2008 (from Cat's Protection rescue centre)
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