Enid Blyton (8 page)

Three days later came the end of the school term:

These few lines were all she was to write about her leave-taking and the closing of her small ‘school’, for there had previously been no other hint in her diary that this was impending.

David and Brian were already away at boarding school by this time and neither they nor the twins were told exactly why Enid should have left them before the usual school year was completed but assumed that her leave-taking was due to her impending marriage. She may have found, with her increased writing commitments, that the teaching was becoming too much for her and certainly her literary commissions were providing her with a more than adequate living. But whatever the reasons for her departure, it is surprising that she could dismiss so lightly, if her diary entries are any criteria, her parting from the children she had grown to love and the closure of the school she had built up. Little mention is made from then on of her former pupils, though she did write to them from time to time and occasional visits were exchanged – but even these came to an end in the early ’thirties. After that she was never to refer to the Thompson family by name, nor her years as a nursery governess, though she sometimes spoke of the children she once taught in her ‘experimental school’ – her own description of Southernhay in a 1938 edition of
Who’s Who. Yet
an unexpected letter from Brian Thompson in October 1962 evoked some of the memories she had apparently buried in the intervening years, for she replied:

Although her teaching days were over, her writing kept her busier than ever before. Even with Hugh as a distraction during those first four months of 1924, she had earned well over £90 from her work for the periodicals alone, and this was in addition to the quarterly payments of royalties on her various books.

The success of her writings for
Teachers’ World
and the other educational journals resulted in her now getting a large postbag from schools both in the British Isles and overseas. Teachers thanked her for the stories, plays and songs, which they used for their lessons and complimented her on
From my Window,
which many of them now read out weekly to their pupils. The children commented frankly. ‘I like your “days of the week” poems,’ wrote one small girl, early in 1924, ‘but “Thursday” is quite wrong. Couldn’t you write another for Thursday?’ ‘I should think,’ was the rather prophetic comment of another, ‘that if you go on writing nice poems you will be quite famous one day.’ A boy wanted to know all about fairies because, ’ … when I asked the School Inspector what he knew about them, he didn’t really seem to know much more than I did.’ She answered most of these letters herself, either direct to the child or through the school concerned. The fact that her name was now becoming well known to hundreds of readers of these journals helped towards the sale of her books and this did not go unnoticed in other publishing circles, which again resulted in further commissions.

The Easter of 1924 was spent with Mabel and Hugh at Seaford on the Sussex coast – ‘the loveliest Easter that ever was.’ The happiness of the weekend was marred, however, by ‘a beastly letter from Grandpa’ – again the contents were not divulged, even in her diary, but on her return home:

Evidently Grandpa Attenborough, a religious man of high moral principles, approved neither of Enid’s association with Hugh, nor of the late hours she was now keeping. Like many others of his generation and background, he frowned upon the newly-found freedom of the young women of that time and even rebuked Enid on one occasion for holding hands with Hugh ‘in public’. Twenty-six years of age she might be, but while she was still under his roof, he no doubt felt a certain responsibility towards her.

Hugh’s divorce case was evidently heard at Easter as planned, for in May the pair started looking for a flat and Enid began gathering a trousseau together. From 17 May to 4 June, she made no entries in her diary, but she recommenced on the 5th with:

The following day her pencil appeared to have been almost out of control as she ecstatically wrote:

The following Wednesday,
Teachers’ World
announced the engagement. Mr Allen wrote in his ‘News and Views of the Week’:

The cartoon referred to was one showing how some of the regular contributors to the magazine spent their holidays; Enid is depicted carrying a small suitcase in one hand and a large window in the other over the caption ‘Miss Enid Blyton took her window with her.’

On 16 June, Hugh decided to lodge at a small private hotel in Oakwood Avenue until the wedding and from then on the couple saw each other every day. Meanwhile, Enid was writing more than ever. Her first series of
Readers,
commissioned by Thomas Nelson and Sons earlier in the year, had been accepted without alteration and she had been asked to write a second – as well as a poetry book. She had prepared a book of fairy stories and poems which had been accepted by Newnes at the beginning of June and finished
The Zoo Book,
commissioned by Hugh for Newnes, on 3 July. In celebration of the occasion she joined Mabel on a seaside holiday at Felpham in Sussex. Hugh stayed over the weekend and, according to her diary ‘spoilt things by being upset because a man is coming to our boarding house next week …’ Hugh’s jealousy understandably annoyed Enid and the quarrel continued the next day, until ‘we began to laugh … and then Hugh was sweet to me’. But despite their quarrels, they were obviously very much in love.

Enid records having found ‘a ripping flat at Chelsea’ and of how they both went to look at it on her return from holiday. She made no further entries in her diary for 1924, but her account book shows that she had been busy preparing several columns and regular features in advance, so as to leave the following weeks free for a most important event in her life – though even this went unrecorded in her diary – her wedding on 28 August at Bromley Register Office.

It was a very quiet ceremony, no member of either Enid’s or Hugh’s family being present. Hanly had had a similarly quiet wedding two months before, but although he, his wife Floss and his mother were still living in Beckenham, they were not invited – nor was Phyllis Chase, that friend of many years standing. Only Mabel and her parents – ‘Grandpa’ and ‘Grandma’ Attenborough – were at the register office and there was no announcement of the marriage in any of the local or national newspapers.

Enid later explained to her friends that this was because ‘Hugh didn’t want the people at Newnes to know at the beginning that we were married because of the work he has commissioned me to do. They might not have liked it.’

Her honeymoon appears to have been spent in Jersey, for shortly afterwards she wrote two articles for
Teachers’ World
– ‘La Corbière’ and ‘Dawn at Sea’ – which described incidents on holiday, though she made no mention of having recently married. Regular readers no doubt spotted after a while that there had been some changes in the domestic life of their columnist, for her
Window
of 8 October mentioned ‘my husband’ and placed her home as now being near the River Thames and Battersea Bridge – though these facts were only referred to obliquely in an article about ‘Fire Engines’. The engines had thundered one by one over the bridge until Enid’s curiosity had made her persuade her ‘reluctant husband’ to join her in chasing after them. Despite the fifteen or more engines involved, it proved to be a false alarm and she was about to question one of the drivers about his job and ‘whether he was disappointed to see no fire’ when a detaining hand pulled her back. ‘Alas! Before I could find out what I longed to know, my scandalised husband was hurrying me home.’ The diary for 1925 is missing and no further mention of Hugh is made in her columns to help in assessing how the new Mrs Pollock settled down to her first year of marriage, but that she was happy there is no doubt. She devoted two complete columns at the beginning of the year to ‘Happiness’. After writing on 28 January that she thought happy people were the best in the world because they inspired others to be likewise, she received a shoal of correspondence from both children and adults who found ‘happiness always tantalisingly round the corner’. Her reply to them on 18 February was:

In a further article on ‘Humour’, a few weeks later, she wrote that she thought Punch’s advice on those about to marry – ‘don’t’ – was ‘very silly’, which certainly indicates that she found the state satisfactory.

The Pollocks’ first home together was a small, furnished top-floor apartment at 32 Beaufort Mansions, Chelsea – a red-brick block of Victorian mansion flats, between the Embankment and the King’s Road. Enid described her flat to a friend as being ‘in a quiet residential area, which contains a good class of people who keep themselves to themselves.’ If she had not been busy with her writing, with Hugh away all day, she would doubtless have felt lonely but, as it was, she had more than enough work to occupy her.

As royalties began to come in on her major books, her income increased yearly. Both the
Enid Blyton Book of Fairies
and
The Zoo Book,
published together in October 1924 by Newnes, sold well – as did another set of six small story books for Birn Brothers, which came out about the same time. She earned over £500 from her writing in that year but by the end of 1925 had increased this to £1,200 for twelve months’ work – £500 of that amount being an advance sum for her editorial work on the first volumes of a
Teachers’ Treasury,
published eventually by Newnes in 1926.

Her marriage made no difference to her prolific writing output for in 1925, according to her account book, she wrote thirty-five poems (mostly about fairies and animals) for
The Morning Post;
a song – ‘The Singer in the Night’ – published by Novello; other poems and stories for
Child Education, Punch, My Magazine, Woman’s Life
and, of course, her regular features for
Teachers’ World.
These now included, from 15 April, a twice-monthly full-page Nature Notes, illustrated with fine pen and ink drawings by Enid herself. This was later to be brought out in book form by Evans Brothers and was selected five years later as one of the four hundred best books for children in a list prepared for the National Book Council. In addition to those shorter items, she produced four more Readers and a seventy-one page book of poems,
Silver and Gold for Thomas Nelson
(see Appendix 1), and an
Enid Blyton Book of Bunnies
was published by Newnes. Enid must have enjoyed writing about ‘the amusing adventures of Binkle and Flip, the Bad Bunnies’ for she had always liked rabbits and brought them into many of her stories and poems. She once described them as:

Her weekly column was proving as popular as ever, as evidenced by the increasing amount of mail she was receiving daily. She continued to reply conscientiously to every letter and turn out her usual average of four or five thousand words of writing a day – in longhand, for she had no typewriter at that time.

She went for walks in the early morning, by the river or through one or another of the London parks, but always she longed for the country and the early spring days made her feel restless, cooped up in a city flat, writing.
From my Window
of 1 April 1925 told of how the sun had made her throw down her pencil, pull on her coat and hat and catch the first train she could out of London. Arriving in the country, she had walked in the lanes and woods, revelling in the bursting buds and the freshness of the spring colours around her. Seated beneath an oak tree, with daisies round her feet, she had listened to a blackbird ‘talking to himself in a hazel bush’. She had returned, refreshed, to her work but not entirely happy to be back in the city.