Hugh’s boyhood had been spent in the Ayrshire countryside and he, too, longed to live out of town, so it is not surprising that later in the year she wrote that she was ‘looking for a house’. In her ‘mind’s eye’ she had a picture of the one she wanted:
It must be small and friendly-looking with at least one tree in its garden. It must get lots and lots of sun, and look out on to hills and trees, so that I shall see the spring coming and the autumn fading …
Soon afterwards she told of how she had found her ‘little house’. She had happened to be walking along a quiet, tree-lined road, when she had spotted it ‘peeping’ at her from behind a large chestnut tree. Fetching the keys from the house next door she had looked inside.
Now I have always said and thought that a new house had no personality. But this little house, new as it was, had a distinct and delightful personality of its own. The primrose- coloured walls and the big fireplaces, the dark oak cupboards and the criss-cross windows with their blue shutters, all seemed to exude cheerfulness and homeliness, kindliness and good humour … I loved it. It was just big enough and just little enough. The garden was big, but unmade, so that anyone with a little imagination could plan and plant, and grow what they would. All the main rooms faced the south and great streaks of sunshine bathed the floor and danced on the primrose walls. Soft and blue in the distance stood the Shirley Hills, and fields and woods stretched away at the bottom of the garden, where four sturdy oak trees stood sentinel …
It had everything Enid and Hugh had been hoping to find. She finished her article with:
If, in the New Year, you come across a funny little house peeping at you from behind a chestnut tree, look at the name on the gate. If it’s called ‘Elfin House’ you’ll know it’s mine.
5
Elfin Cottage, as Enid was eventually to call her first ‘real home’, was one of several newly-built, detached houses in Shortlands Road, Beckenham, less than ten minutes’ walk away from Mabel at Oakwood Avenue, and not much farther to Shortlands Station with its frequent train service to London. It was easy enough for Hugh to travel daily into the City and yet, in those days, the area was still fairly rural with fields and woods where estates of houses now stand. Although Elfin Cottage was new, Enid and Hugh both felt it had an air of solidity and maturity, with its handmade greyish-yellow bricks, its blue painted front door and shuttered windows and the fact that the garden was still unmade, being little more than an enclosed piece of meadowland, was yet another attraction for them.
Enid could not contain her excitement. She was not by nature domesticated – even the simplest cookery defeated her, and housework was usually delegated to someone else – but for a while she devoted herself wholeheartedly to the affairs of her new home. She scoured the stores to buy furniture and fittings and helped Hugh plan the layout of the garden. She busied herself making cushion covers, lampshades and curtains, frequently visited Beckenham to see how the final work on the house was progressing and planted dozens of bulbs in the garden. Hugh was caught up in her enthusiasm and happiness and looked forward as eagerly as his wife to the move into their new home. This came on 5 February 1926, and Enid recorded in her diary how she and Hugh had gone on ahead to the house, leaving Daisy, her young general maid, to see their possessions into the van at Chelsea:
All the furniture came during the day and everything went splendidly! … It’s lovely to be at ‘Elfin Cottage’ at last … to wake up and hear the birds, instead of buses and trams!
She spent the rest of that week organising her new household and did not get back to her writing until Monday the 15th, having taken what was, for her, an unusually long break of sixteen days. From then on, however, the daily stint of work at her desk continued as before and her readers were to learn much of Elfin Cottage, its occupants and garden – particularly the garden – in the months that were to follow, for she wrote about them frequently in her Teachers’ World column and they appeared, by implication, in many of her poems and stories.
From my Window of 3 March was entirely devoted to the move and the new home –
because I can’t really think of much else at present and also because I want to say that ‘Elfin Cottage’ is true, and not a place I’ve invented out of my imagination …
She wrote of how she had arranged her furniture ‘placing a window seat here, and my desk there and shelves somewhere else …’ and of how she had lit a fire in the brick fireplace and watched the firelight flicker over the primrose walls and bowls of flowers she had arranged, adding:
Flowers ‘belong’ to Elfin Cottage. They look at home there – and that confirms my secret belief that fairies and elves, brownies and gnomes have visited the house and left some of their flower-loving, sunshiny personalities behind. It’s such a happy, cheerful, elfish little house, the right place for poetry and fairy stories, dreams and laughter.
She insisted on ‘christening’ the cottage herself, by screwing the name on to the gate, but found it difficult to make the screws go in straight and keep the letters in a line and this resulted in the ‘E’ finishing up ‘a tiny bit crooked’. She explained later that her Peter Pan door knocker was to be used in a certain way – children were expected to knock four times, adults twice, and ‘the Little Folk from the woods’ seven.
Enthusiastic as she appeared to be about the house itself, the pleasure this gave her was small compared with the happiness she derived from having her first real garden. From her childhood days, when she had so lovingly tended her small plot at Clockhouse Road, she had dreamed of designing and building a complete garden from its very beginning. She and Hugh had started planning its layout long before they moved into Elfin Cottage. With paper, pencils and rulers they had charted out the position of the various paths and had then got to work selecting the best places for flower beds, lawns and hedges. They were agreed that there should be a wild, raised garden in one corner at the back of the house, where such things as heather, foxgloves and bluebells could grow undisturbed and – set in its midst, with an edging of crazy paving – should be a round pond for waterlilies and goldfish. Enid was determined, she wrote to a friend, to have plenty of shrubs and beds of ‘old-fashioned flowers like lupins, pansies, hollyhocks and roses’ and Hugh wanted a space reserved for fruit and vegetables. The layout of each of Enid’s future and larger gardens followed this same pattern but it is doubtful whether she derived the same pleasure over the planning of these as she did from that quarter-acre plot at Elfin Cottage.
Once their plans were complete they lost no time in getting down to work. With Barker, a jobbing gardener to help, they set about sowing seeds, making lawns, digging and planting and hardly an evening or weekend passed during their first spring and summer at the cottage without one or both of the Pollocks being hard at work outside. Their small garden was soon well stocked for, besides the many plants and shrubs bought by Enid and Hugh, Mabel and other friends provided plenty of seedlings and cuttings and readers of From my Window also sent their contributions from all over the world. Enid was particularly pleased with some marigold and sunflower seeds from Tasmania and told her readers:
I planted them myself and lo and behold! great sunflowers have sprung up and gay marigolds flaunt in the sun and ask to be picked …
On 4 August she wrote in her column that she had received so many letters asking about the garden at Elfin Cottage, that she had decided to write about it in full when she had received her hundredth request. As this had now come, she would tell her readers something of this place, which five months ago had been a buttercup field and was now ‘full of flowers and sunshine, cool greenness and little breezes’. Hollyhocks, mignonettes, poppies, fuchsias, foxgloves and roses were all growing there now and although it was not very large she loved everything about it.
Enid’s ‘Nature’ diary, which she started to keep in 1926, was no doubt intended originally to help over the compiling of her twice-monthly Nature Notes for Teachers’ World, but it gives an interesting insight in
to the progress of the new garden. Just as the eager child at Clockhouse Road had counted each seed that came up and flowered, so did the adult Enid record the first green shoot or bud to appear. She also noted each day’s weather and the animal and bird life she saw around her. A typical early entry in this nature diary is that for 6 March 1926:
A sunny mild day. Hugh began cementing pond. I planted some bluebells Barker gave me, also mint roots. Our chestnut tree is beginning to open some of its sticky buds. There are five violets and a celandine out in wild garden. The owls are hooting every night.
This close observance of the wildlife in her garden provided constant material for her writings. Soon after her arrival at Elfin Cottage she put up a bird table on which she daily put out food, and outside her bedroom window she hung a coconut and pieces of fat for the bluetits. She noted the progress of some nesting robins in the garage and a pair of chaffinches in the chestnut tree, counting the eggs when they appeared and charting the young fledglings’ growth. A great variety of birds bathed in the new pool (the ‘twinkling eye’ of her garden) and each day in her diary she would enter those she had seen. By the end of her first year she had acquired a tame jackdaw, ‘Jackie’, and magpie, ‘Maggie’, and Hugh later gave her a dovecote and two pairs of fantail pigeons – ‘Bill’ and ‘Coo’, ‘Pretty Boy’ and ‘Ladybird’ – all of which soon became well known to her readers. Her Bird Book for Newnes, published in the autumn of 1926, contained fifteen chapters on every aspect of bird life and showed how well she had researched her subject – helped, no doubt, by her daily jottings.
Animal life at Elfin Cottage provided yet another topic for her weekly column. She wrote at length on the toads, rabbits, hedgehogs, stoats and mice that passed through her garden but in October 1926 she bought, for five guineas, the first of the domestic pets that from then on were to become such an integral part of her life and writings.
‘Bobs’, a four-month-old black and white smooth-haired fox terrier was introduced to readers of From my Window on 10 November:
he takes cinders from the cinder box, has eaten a dozen staples, one curtain pin, a ball of silver paper, dead matches, a button from my coat and the manuscript of a Christmas story for Teachers’ World …and I shan’t be able to help loving him as long as ever he lives.
Thereafter his adventures and misdeeds were regularly recorded. He appeared in numerous photographs with his mistress and when she began to write a complete weekly page for children in September 1929 the Letters from Bobs proved a popular feature and were eventually brought out in book form.
If Enid’s contributions to Teachers’ World and the other educational journals did much towards bringing her name before the staff and pupils of schools all over the world, her three-volume Teachers’ Treasury and the six volumes that comprised Modern Teaching – published by Newnes in 1926 and 1928 respectively – established her still further in educational circles.
‘Let Enid Blyton help you in your work’ ran the advertisement for Teachers’ Treasury in Teachers’ World and the editor, Mr Allen, himself wrote the review of the book under the heading ‘Classroom Riches’ – despite, according to Enid’s diary, showing some initial protest that she had undertaken such a work for a rival company. She had evidently smoothed over this disapproval for the review was couched in glowing terms. Readers, he claimed, would need ‘ … no elaborate analysis of Enid Blyton’s gifts as a writer …’ They had been able for some years to watch these developing –
… branching out in new directions, in the story, in the verse, in the play, in Nature Study, and through all there has been the expression of a personality of great charm, one to which children turn as eagerly and expectantly as the flowers to the sun …
He ended his review by quoting some of the introduction to the book by T.P. Nunn, Professor of Education at London University:
In the training of the young there will always be a place, not only for tasks and enterprises which the little worker must face alone, under the watchful eye of the teacher, but also for activities whose educative value lies in the very fact that they are social … Miss Blyton offers to the right kind of teacher just the right kind of help in using these fundamental means of civilisation …
With the exception of the part dealing with handwork, written by Misses R.K. and M.I.R. Polkinghorne, Enid was responsible for every section. The first was devoted to six stories for the spring term, six each for summer and winter, and twelve ‘for any old time’. Section II contained a graded series of preparatory rhythmic movements and dances for young children and the third consisted of ‘Nature Notes’, which supplied material for twenty-six complete lessons ‘on simple things which the children know and can bring to class’. There were six of Enid’s plays for the children to perform in section IV and twelve singing games and twenty songs, composed by Enid, appeared in V and VI. An anthology of thirty poems and twenty-one ‘unfinished’ stories for the children to complete, made up VII and VIII. Later in the year, Enid added two more chapters on geography and history and the Treasury became so popular that it was reprinted annually for the next three years.
Modern Teaching, of which she was general editor, offered ‘… practical suggestions for junior and senior schools’ and included volumes on junior and senior history; geography; junior and senior English; nature study and science, art, handwork, housecraft and needlework – all written by experts in their field, commissioned by Enid. Sales of this work also resulted in several reprints and a four-volume ‘Infant School’ edition was brought out in 1932.
But these educational books provided only a part of Enid’s published work during her early years at Elfin Cottage. In 1926 she took on the editing of a new twopenny magazine for children – Sunny Stories – published by George Newnes, which was to grow considerably in popularity over the years and to be forever associated with her name. The Play’s the Thing (Home Library Company), a series of musical plays for children with music by Alec Rowley, and a book about animals for Newnes were both published in 1927. Let’s Pretend, a story book for Thomas Nelson, which Enid thought ‘beautifully produced and very artistic’ came out the following year. Her verses continued to be accepted by national periodicals and she maintained her flow of contributions to Teachers’ World, many of which eventually found their way into book form. Among several full-page features for this magazine were accounts of her meetings with A.A. Milne and Marion St. John Webb, published in a special October 1926 supplement on The Children’s Poets.
Enid greatly enjoyed these two commissioned interviews. She was charmed by Mr Milne: ‘this writer of exquisite child poems and lighthearted lyrics’. She wrote:
He is just like you would expect him to be. Tall, good-looking, with friendly eyes and a whimsical mouth that often smiles. He is natural and unaffected, and is diffident to an astonishing degree, considering how suddenly and generously fame has come to him …
His son, Christopher Robin, she thought, looked ‘just like the pictures by Ernest Shepard, except that he has much more hair’. When the interview ended the poet presented her with an advance copy of his latest book ‘… which has the most exciting title of Winnie the Pooh’. She was equally impressed by Marion St. John Webb, whom she described as a ‘small and pixie-like woman’.
Enid was also featured in the supplement in a full-page article written by Hugh, under the initials ‘H.A.’. He had, he wrote, found his ‘hostess’ in the garden of Elfin Cottage:
Imagine to yourself a slim, graceful, childish figure with a head of closely cropped hair framing a face over which smiles and mischief seem to play an endless game. A pair of merry brown eyes peep out at you … clever eyes, quick to appreciate all that is passing before them …
His final question was one he had been ‘meaning to ask for a long time: why must she work so hard when she had a husband, home, happiness and peace?’ Enid had replied that ‘so long as one child tells me that my work brings him pleasure, just so long shall I go on writing.’ But she admitted,
also, to another reason: ‘and this is a secret – I’d love to write a novel about children, and the jolly, happy things of life.’ ‘If the book should ever be written,’ commented ‘H.A.’, ‘we shall have something worthwhile from this young understander of that which is in the hearts of all helpless things, be they children, animals, birds, or flowers.’
Hugh’s article on his wife was read out in classrooms all over the country and this evidently endeared her still further to her readers for, from then on, her mail increased at an alarming rate. By 1927 she was replying to an average of about a hundred letters each week and her Christmas post contained five hundred letters, two hundred cards and a hundred or more presents from teachers and children all over the world. Although by this time Hugh had persuaded her to use a typewriter for her manuscripts, she continued to answer all her correspondence by hand – a practice she was never to relinquish.
She had at first been reluctant to follow up Hugh’s suggestion that she should learn how to type but early in 1927 she decided to give it a try, though she recorded in her diary that at the beginning the method seemed to take her ‘twice as long’. However, with typical determination and Hugh’s encouragement, she persevered and within two months, using only her forefingers, was typing as quickly as she could write in long hand. By the end of the year she was able to record: ‘Worked till 4.30 and did 6,000 words – a record for me.’
Enid Blyton Page 7
