She learned how to drive during the same year, but this did not prove quite as successful. The Pollocks had bought their first car at the beginning of March – a red and white Rover with a registration number that began YE – ‘Young Enid’ as friends laughingly called it. As neither could drive they began to take lessons and Hugh, rather to Enid’s annoyance, made the quicker progress. She could not resist sarcastically noting in her diary, after their instructor had pronounced him capable of driving on his own:
Hugh went out by himself this afternoon and then took me out. Except for trying to start with the brake on twice, sticking on a hill and trying to start with the dynamo off, he was quite good.
She did manage to drive eventually, but was always the first to admit that she was not very proficient and consequently limited her range of travel to within a few miles of home. The mechanism of the car always remained a mystery to her – as evidenced by an incident ruefully recorded by her later in the year. A mystified garage mechanic had been called after Enid had made repeated, unsuccessful attempts to start the engine. She remembered four days later, after the car had been thoroughly overhauled and sparking plugs renewed, that she had ‘poured paraffin oil into the car battery instead of water’. She was, even so, very attached to the small car and made many happy excursions in it with Hugh. Most of these she wrote about in her column – without, however, mentioning the misfortunes that sometimes befell them en route. A holiday taken in Scotland gives an example of this.
She wrote in her newly-commenced Letter to Children, which replaced From my Window on 31 August 1927, that she would shortly be travelling to Scotland in her small red car, with a bunch of white heather on the front. She hoped her readers would wave to her if they spotted her on the way. ‘Here we go’, she wrote, ‘seeking adventure away on the white, high roads, up to the heather mountains away in the North!’ They met with adventures, but not of the kind Enid had envisaged. In fact the holiday became something of a disaster. Much of it was spent in heavy rain, the car developed a puncture soon after they left home, another occurred seven miles out of Edinburgh and a third close to Oban. ‘At the same time’, Enid recorded in her diary, ‘the clutch lever rod broke and we had to get a man to go to Oban and have another made.’ Later in the week, when they had arranged to meet Hugh’s family, the car again had a puncture ‘which had to be mended six times and still went flat … It has been a hell of a day!’ One can well understand this final comment and her relief on returning to Elfin Cottage two days later. Though she wrote very amusingly of this in her diary, her column gave a rather different story. According to this, the weather had stayed fine and she had done ‘all the things’ she had wanted to do – but she was also quick to add how good it was to be home again, and went on to describe her reunion with Bobs and her pleasure at seeing ‘the old familiar things’ around her once more. The minor disasters of the past two weeks were forgotten – or ignored.
But holidays, generally, were happy times for the Pollocks. Most Easters were spent by the sea in Sussex and their two weeks in the summer a little farther afield – though never outside the British Isles. Wherever they went, they were seldom away from each other for long. Neither sought the more sophisticated pleasures of the resorts. Instead they walked and swam together, lazed on the beaches or explored caves and castles – a favourite pastime of Enid, which also appealed to Hugh. Her notebook and two diaries accompanied her everywhere and she faithfully recorded in her nature diary the changes in the weather and the bird, animal and plant life around her – just as she did each day at home.
Her life at Elfin Cottage had now settled into a regular pattern. If she were not travelling to London to visit publishers, her mornings began with breakfast at around eight o’clock. After seeing Hugh off to the station, she would feed her pets, give instructions for the day to her young maid and then begin writing. She usually wrote in the garden in the summer, or beside the fire in the dining room in winter but always with her notebook or typewriter perched on her knees rather than on a table. She occasionally visited Mabel or other friends in the afternoon but more often she would continue working until it was time to meet Hugh at Shortlands Station – either on foot or in the car. After dinner, work was put away and the evening was their own, for they entertained friends very rarely, though they would sometimes have an outing to the theatre or the cinema – ‘Ben Hur,’ Enid recorded after one such occasion, ‘is the best film I’ve ever seen.’
Like most couples, they had their occasional disagreements and Enid’s fierce temper would flare: ‘Quarrelled with Hugh as he thinks I ought to like his mother and I can’t …’ ‘I went into the spare room [after another quarrel] but Hugh fetched me back.’ However, none of the arguments lasted for long and to all who knew them during those early years together, they appeared ideally suited. Hugh was kind, considerate, and obviously very much in love with his wife. Immensely proud of her achievements, he wrote in another passage of the Teachers’ World supplement that she was ‘a constant source of inspiration to those around her …’ and he smiled indulgently at a publisher who introduced him at a Press dinner as ‘Enid Blyton’s husband’.
Enid’s own feelings are expressed in her diary note for 28 August 1926:
This is the second anniversary of our wedding. I am glad I married Hugh and I wouldn’t be unmarried for worlds. He is such a perfect dear.
Confident in his love, she felt free at last to be herself.
With most people she was, outwardly, what they expected her to be: the imaginative, clever young teacher; the capable, prolific writer; the nature-loving woman of simple pleasures; the dutiful wife. Hugh had seen her play all these roles but knew and loved her for the far more complex person she undoubtedly was, and went along with her every mood. He was her ‘Bun’ and she his ‘Little Bunny’, nicknames Enid had given them both early in their courtship and he indulged her occasional desire to act the part of a child with a beloved father, rather than that of a wife in her early thirties. Together they built snowmen in the garden on cold winter days; played French cricket until dark on summer evenings; took part in games of ‘catch’ against the house wall and collected chestnuts from the tree in the front garden for ‘conker’ matches – ‘… mine is an eighter’ she recorded after one contest. Birthdays and Christmases were occasions for great celebration with the exchange of numerous gifts – ‘Hugh gave me 42 presents and I gave him 25’ – and Bobs and the other pets were not forgotten. She recorded on 25 December 1926:
Bobs had a stocking with two bones, two biscuits, one piece of chocolate, one comb and two clockwork mice. I also put out a little Christmas tree for the birds on the bird table, dressed with suet, fat, bread, biscuits and coconut. They loved it, especially the tits.
But these festive enjoyments were marred as year followed year, by Enid’s increasing fears that she might never be able to have a child of her own to share these happy times.
They had hoped, once they had settled in Elfin Cottage, that the baby they both longed for would be conceived. They were seemingly healthy enough, leading what appeared to be a happy and normal sexual life and there seemed no reason for the delay. Everything else she had aspired towards had eventually come her way, yet over this particular ambition she knew she had no control. It did not help that, by 1928, most acquaintances of her own age either had children already or were about to have them. Mary Attenborough was now married and had a young son and so had Phyllis and Felix. Hanly and his wife, Floss, were the parents of a baby daughter, Yvonne, and Mabel’s sisters and other relations were always bringing their latest offspring to visit her at the cottage. She wrote to and for children every day and thought of them constantly. ‘Surely,’ she confided to Phyllis, ‘no one could be better equipped than I to bring up a family.’
Eventually in the late spring of 1928, she consulted a gynaecologist. His diagnosis was that Enid had an unusually undeveloped uterus – ‘almost that of a young girl of 12 or 13,’ she told Phyllis later. (Coinci
dental, perhaps, but this diagnosis does seem to indicate once again the far-reaching effects upon the thirteen-year-old Enid of her father’s departure from home all those years before.) The specialist suggested a series of hormone injections and these she stoically underwent – daily for a week and progressively less frequently the following month. The Pollocks hoped, once the treatment had been completed, that results would quickly follow but this was not to be. She tried to satisfy her maternal yearnings by seeing as much as she could of her young niece, Yvonne, and Phyllis’s son, Barry, to whom she and Hugh were godparents. She also threw herself, with renewed effort, into her writing. This now included the preparation, with Hugh as co-editor, of a ten-volume Pictorial Knowledge, an illustrated ‘Educational Treasury’ for Newnes.
But something else was to occur, early in 1929, which soon occupied her mind in other directions. She wrote in her Letter to Children in Teachers’ World:
I am rather worried lately because a great new arterial road is going to be made near Elfin Cottage. It may not come for some time, and perhaps it won’t come at all … but I am going to look for another little cottage, far away from anywhere busy, with a bigger garden than this one and where I can keep more pets than I have now … I shall be so sorry to leave Elfin Cottage that I can hardly bear to think of it.
In fact, by the time her Letter had appeared in print, she had already found her new home. It was a large, rambling, sixteenth-century thatched cottage, close to the River Thames at Bourne End in Buckinghamshire. Her readers were thanked, in subsequent columns, for passing on information about houses they knew were for sale and might be suitable and for their suggestions of names for her new cottage, after she had described it to them. These included Pixie Cottage, Ding Dong-Bell Cottage, Pet Cottage, Fairy Cottage and Brownie Cottage – but, she told them, ‘it is going to be called by the name it has had for a long, long time – ‘Old Thatch’.
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Enid and Hugh moved to Old Thatch on 2 August 1929. ‘It is perfect, both outside and in …’ she wrote in her diary, ‘just like a Fairy Tale house and three minutes from the river.’ She described it at some length in her Letter to Children. The house, she informed her readers, was approached ‘side ways on’ through an old lychgate which led into a lovely garden ‘about nine times as big’ as that of Elfin Cottage. There were several old yew trees and an orchard with apples and pears in abundance, a large, somewhat overgrown lily pond, a rosewalk, a kitchen garden, ‘with everything growing there that you could possibly want’, a small wood and a brook ‘with a little bridge of its own’. There was also an old well beside one of the two front doors. The cottage had once been an inn and years later Enid wrote of how she had always felt that people had been happy there ‘because the whole place had a lovely feel to it – friendly, happy, welcoming …’ She was to use the house and its setting many times in her stories and it also figured largely in her new complete page for children in Teachers’ World, which began a month after her arrival at Old Thatch.
The first Enid Blyton’s Children’s Page which included a photograph of Enid and her pets and a drawing of her new home, was introduced by the editor of the magazine, Mr Allen:
… We say no more about this than that the author is Enid Blyton whose enormous following among children warranted an extension of the space their favourite has hitherto been given …
Enid saw to it that this extra space was used to the fullest advantage. In addition to her letter to the children and another, purporting to come from Bobs, the page contained each week a full-column story, a photograph (usually taken by herself) and a poem or competition. It says much for her astuteness and Hugh’s careful guidance, that most of what she wrote for this page – and for Sunny Stories –was eventually reused elsewhere, for the stories, verses and puzzles were all brought out later in book form by various publishers, and even Bobs’s ‘letters’ were privately published by Hugh and Enid themselves. The extent of her readership appeal at that time is evident from the phenomenal success of the first of these small booklets, sold direct from Old Thatch in October 1933 at threepence each. Within six days of Letters from Bobs being issued, sales exceeded ten thousand and subsequent editions – in 1937, also from Old Thatch and in 1938 from Green Hedges – went on to sell at the same rate.
Her other work for Teachers’ World at that time provided another source of material for book publication. Tales from Arabian Nights, Tales of Ancient Greece, Knights of the Round Table (all published by Newnes) and Stories from World History and Round the Year with Enid Blyton (Evans Brothers) were all written initially as weekly or monthly series for the magazine. But by far the most popular was her ‘weekly course of seasonal nature study’ – Round the Year with Enid Blyton.
This course of forty-eight lessons covered every conceivable facet of nature study from such things as weather observation to pond and insect life. Pupils were shown how to plant bulbs, stock aquaria, make school gardens and bird-tables and each lesson ended with Things to Do, Things to Write, Questions to Answer, Things to Find or Things to Learn. Throughout, Enid used some of the imaginative teaching methods that she had once applied to her own classes at Southernhay and the series, which was followed by children in classrooms all over the country and overseas, proved a resounding success. The editor received glowing letters from teachers, including one from a headmaster in Loughborough, who declared the course had been ‘quite the most practical and finest’ he had yet encountered throughout many years of teaching.
He went on to pay tribute to Enid’s weekly page and wrote of revisiting a rural school in the east of England, which had long been a by-word for the poor quality of its work – due, he explained, to the extreme poverty of the surrounding area and the lack of interest and discipline among its pupils. This school had now undergone a ‘miraculous change’, brought about almost entirely through the regular reading of Enid’s columns. All her suggestions had been followed through and the pupils now had their own flower garden, planted with the thirty-two different blooms she had recommended, a bird-table had been installed and a well-cared-for aquarium now stood in the classroom. The whole atmosphere among the pupils, claimed the headmaster, had been changed ‘to one of happiness and an interested awareness of the things around them.’
There were certainly thousands of children and their teachers who knew that Enid had moved and that the name of her new cottage was Old Thatch. Most could describe the trees and flowers that grew in her garden and the birds and animals that frequented it – just as they had been able to do when she had been at Elfin Cottage. Many children living in industrial towns enjoyed a vicarious pleasure, through her pages, in the delights of rural life, for too often in those hungry ‘thirties fathers were on the dole and there was barely enough money coming in to feed their families, let alone provide for visits to the country. From her correspondence she was well aware of their yearnings and on one occasion suggested that country readers might like to send such things as budding twigs and wild flowers to their counterparts in the towns, and this suggestion met with such enthusiasm that she eventually had to recruit a ‘go-between’ to deal with the scheme. Children without pets gained the same kind of enjoyment from hearing about Enid’s own collection, which yearly increased in number with more pigeons, another tortoise, a pair of Siamese cats, their kittens, and Sandy, a mate for Bobs, who in turn also produced several puppies. But it was Bobs, the little black and white terrier, who always remained the favourite.
A personality in his own right, this much-photographed dog received a hefty mail and hundreds of presents from young admirers. There was great concern about him when Enid told her readers of the floods that had swept through Old Thatch during her first winter and of how he and Patabang (the first of the Siamese kittens) had had to walk across planks in the dining room ‘with seven inches of water below’. The children feared he might have caught cold as he had signed off his letter that week ‘with a shiver and a splash’. They sympathised with him when he was in di
sgrace over his misdeeds, particularly on the occasion when he and Sandy were in trouble over ‘a dirty little dog we often meet on our walks.’ Enid had warned them, ‘wrote’ Bobs, not to go near this dog but they had disobeyed her and had picked up ‘some nasty insects’ which had meant a dusting with some ‘very strong-smelling powder’, isolation from the other pets and the fumigating of their kennel. Enid recorded this incident in her diary and it is interesting to see how she was able to turn it into a vehicle for a lesson on animal care, for Bobs’ letter ended:
I’m very sorry for that little dog. He told me that he had never had a bath in his life, that no one ever puts him out fresh water to drink, and he is never brushed or combed. Isn’t it a shame? I don’t know why people keep dogs if they can’t look after them and love them, do you? Please do see that all your dogs are nice and clean, because if they’re dirty and we meet them, good little dogs like us get into trouble.
When Bobs ‘joined’ the Tail Waggers Club, he urged other dogs to follow suit and hundreds of applications were received by the Club, resulting in a presentation to him of a silver medal in recognition of his ‘splendid recruiting effort’.
With so many letters and packages to Bobs and his mistress, it was not surprising that the small village post office at Bourne End soon found that the mail to Old Thatch warranted a special delivery. The children enclosed all manner of items in their post. They sent posies of wild flowers or small insects in match boxes and, on one occasion, even a dead bird was sent along for Enid to identify. She nevertheless took a delight in opening every package herself – even if it was, at times, with a certain amount of apprehension.
Enid Blyton Page 8
