But Enid also brought considerable happiness into Kenneth’s life. He was immensely proud of her achievements and grateful that she loved and appeared to need him as much as he did her.
One of the most rewarding facets of their relationship from their first meeting was that in Enid he had found someone with whom he could freely converse. His hearing aid, in those early days, was of the primitive, trumpet type and he found it difficult to follow conversations with most people, but Enid’s clearly enunciated speech – something she had acquired during her teaching days – he was able to pick up instantly. They would talk together for hours in the evenings and on those days when she had been on business trips to London he would always look forward to her return and the perceptive and hilarious accounts of her meetings there. She was a talented mimic and on these occasions would put on such a superb solo act for his benefit, impersonating the voices and actions of those she had seen, that he would invariably finish up laughing until the tears ran down his cheeks.
They shared many interests in common, including gardening – which was just as well, for during the first summer of their marriage they found themselves without a gardener and had to tackle all the work themselves. There was always a great deal to do for it was a large garden and during the months when the war-time ‘double summer-time’ gave them extra daylight hours, it was not unusual for them to be seen working out there in the evenings from eight-thirty until midnight. Such strenuous activity for Enid, however, was brought to an end in the early spring of 1945 when she discovered she was pregnant.
They were both overjoyed at the prospect of a child and were bitterly disappointed when, five months later, following a fall, she miscarried. ‘The tragedy is,’ Enid wrote later to a friend, ‘it would have been the son Kenneth wanted so badly.’
One of her happiest discoveries about her new husband was that he was genuinely interested in her work. Each evening she would read out to him what she had been writing during the day, and after a while he took to opening a bottle of champagne on the completion of each new book. He never ceased to marvel at the apparent ease with which she handled her business and private affairs but, as a doctor, he was also concerned lest she overtax her obviously active brain. In addition to her regular features she was producing during the late ‘forties and early ’fifties some twenty books a year, and he felt his worries over her were justified when she confessed to being unable to sleep each time she embarked upon a new story. While her characters were being established, she told him, they would ‘walk about’ in her head, take over her dreams and give her little rest until she had got back to her typewriter the following day.
She frequently attempted to analyse the formation of her stories and described the creative process, as far as she was able, in a protracted correspondence with psychologist Peter McKellar (see Appendix 8), during the researches for his book Imagination and Thinking (Cohen and West, 1957):
I shut my eyes for a few minutes, with my portable typewriter on my knee; I make my mind a blank and wait – and then, as clearly as I would see real children my characters stand before me in my mind’s eye ... The story is enacted almost as if I had a private cinema screen there.
She would know the names of the characters that appeared almost at once, and though she might see them beside an old house or at the seaside, she was never certain at this stage how the story would progress. Once the first sentence had been put to paper, however, the rest unfolded ‘like cotton from a reel’. But occasionally, if she had been interrupted, the thread would break and she would have to go back and begin the sequence again. Enid’s staff also knew that noise of any kind distracted her and that if her strict working routine were to be disturbed her quick temper would flare and everyone in the household would suffer. Kenneth, perhaps more than anyone, made allowances for her temperament and the pressures under which she worked and did what he could to ease the tensions, but others were not prepared to be so tolerant – as was evident by an episode, a few months after Enid’s marriage, which resulted in a ten-year break in her long and intimate friendship with Dorothy.
Although Dorothy had been upset by Enid’s divorce and remarriage and had not attended the wedding, there was still a deep bond of affection between them, and it was Enid whom she rang up, in some distress, when she and four members of her family were bombed out of their London home early in 1944. On the telephone Enid had seemed only too willing to have them all to stay at Green Hedges but when they arrived her manner towards them changed. She made little effort to disguise her annoyance over the upheaval the five extra people were causing, both to her household and her writing, and thereafter made their life so unpleasant that within two days they decided to pack their bags and leave. Enid made no apology for her behaviour and Dorothy, who had never before sought her help, could not easily forget the treatment her relatives had received, at a time when they particularly needed the sympathy and understanding that Enid always professed to have. Over the years Dorothy had never failed to come to Enid’s aid when summoned – whether to give reassurance and counsel over emotional matters or to help in moments of domestic crisis, when she would stand in for cook, maid or nanny. She was used, by this time, to her friend’s uncertain moods and understood something of the heavy burdens her writing life imposed upon her, but on this occasion she felt Enid had gone too far.
There were no further meetings after that until 1954, when some bonds for Gillian and Imogen, over which Dorothy had acted as trustee, matured and having re-established contact they took up their friendship again, but it was never to return to its previous intimacy. A curious aspect of this affair is that Enid should have thought the ill-starred visit of Dorothy and her family worthy of a mention in her Teachers’ World column. Apologising for not answering her correspondence that week she wrote:
I have had such a busy week. Five people who had been bombed out of their house suddenly came to me with their kitten, so, as you can imagine, I have not had much time to do anything beyond getting beds for them and looking after them …
As she was unlikely to have done much of either – for her household staff would have coped with such an emergency – perhaps Bobs’ letter of the same date was nearer the truth of the matter:
We have had a houseful of people this week and everywhere I went I bumped into somebody …
Enid could be very convincing in explaining away actions which she knew did not show her to advantage and Kenneth seemingly accepted whatever explanation she gave for the family’s sudden departure. As far as he was concerned, his wife could do no wrong and he brooked no criticism of her or jokes at her expense – as many recipients of solicitors’ letters in the years that followed were to discover.
A notable example of this was his strong complaint to the BBC in January 1952 over some lines in the comedy series Take It From Here. Actress Joy Nichols had observed that her little boy was never happier than when he was ‘curled up in front of the fire with Enid Blyton’ and Dick Bentley, as a schoolboy, had retorted: ‘Ah, now that whacks reading any day. We got a kitchen maid here who always …’ School master Jimmy Edwards had interrupted: ‘Hey, you’re not supposed to know about the kitchen maid …’ Kenneth subsequently received an apology and the offending lines were deleted from the script. But his remarks at the time that he and his wife had been ‘disgusted’ to hear her name mentioned in such a context when she was, after all, a ‘world famous children’s author’, were quickly taken up and widely quoted by the national and overseas Press.
Throughout his life he continued to be as protective of her as Hugh had been, shielding her from much that was unpleasant and placing her wishes – and welfare – above that of his own. When he retired in 1957, he would have preferred to live in a warmer climate for health reasons, but Enid did not like the idea of leaving England and her publishers, even for holidays, and the couple remained at Green Hedges. Only once did they travel abroad together and that was in the late autumn of 1948, when they joined friends for a thre
e-week semi-business holiday in New York, sailing out on the Queen Elizabeth and back on the Queen Mary – an experience which Enid, as usual, put to good use as background material for stories.
The Mystery Island – the American version of her Island of Adventure (published by Macmillan in 1944) – had won a Boys’ Club of America award for one of the six most popular junior books published in that country during 1947, and her New York publishers used the occasion of her visit to introduce her to booksellers, librarians and reviewers at a large cocktail party given in her honour. The New York Times of 14 November described her as ‘a bright-eyed, breathless Englishwoman’ who, ‘between gasps at the reckless speed of the Manhattan taxicabs’, had explained how she managed to turn out fifteen to twenty children’s books a year: ‘All it takes, really, is imagination.’ The American Press, generally, was not as tactful or as kind to Enid as their British counterparts had been up to then and the holiday was not altogether a success. In a letter to a publisher friend shortly after her return, she had nothing but praise for American business efficiency:
I learnt more in ten days over there than I would have learnt in ten years here …
But she had not been so impressed by her agent in New York, whose services she had dispensed with on the spot:
I walked out and he was very angry. But I could place my books far better in America myself, now I know the ropes, if only I were there long enough …
She told her daughters later that, although she had enjoyed certain aspects of her visit, she had been ‘deeply shocked’ by the pace and toughness of the American scene generally. She never again ventured overseas for business or pleasure, and holidays from then on were usually spent playing golf with Kenneth in Dorset.
Kenneth had always encouraged her to join him in a variety of outdoor activities for he felt that, whether working in the garden together or playing tennis on the court at Green Hedges, she was away for a while from the pressures of her writing life. A year or so after their marriage he had introduced her to golf – his own favourite method of relaxation – and she had taken up the game with characteristic enthusiasm. Under Kenneth’s expert tuition, for he had at one time been a scratch player, she soon achieved a handicap of twenty-six and later managed to reduce this to eighteen. They played regularly once or twice a week at the Wentworth Club in Surrey until 1951, when they decided to acquire their own eighteen-hole course at Studland Bay, close to the sea and set among the Purbeck Hills in Dorset. This was an area in which they had spent many happy holidays together and something of her feeling for this beautiful part of Dorset is expressed in a poem written during one of her spring holidays in later years (see Appendix 1). Kenneth no doubt saw the investment in this club as yet another means of getting Enid to relax. To a certain extent he succeeded, for although she usually allotted some part of each day to her writing, she always enjoyed her thrice-yearly golfing holidays and returned to Green Hedges feeling refreshed.
Purchasing the lease of this club was one of the first business transactions to be dealt with under the name of Enid’s own company – Darrell Waters Limited – formed the previous year to help co-ordinate her increasingly complex publishing and financial interests. At the time of her marriage, she had employed neither agent nor secretary, preferring to deal direct with publishers, and she handled her affairs shrewdly and competently. She insisted – even when the paper shortage was still acute after the war – that most contracts should contain a clause guaranteeing a minimum first printing of twenty-five thousand copies, and quoting her own terms with regard to rights. By the late 1940s, however, she was contracted to more than twenty British publishing houses, apart from those overseas, and it was apparent that some other arrangements would have to be made to help her over the intricacies of her business affairs. She was advised to form a limited company specifically for this purpose and the inaugural meeting of Darrell Waters Limited subsequently took place at her solicitor’s office in Bolton Street, London, on 31 March 1950. Enid was in the chair and her board of directors consisted of Kenneth, their financial and business adviser, Eric Rogers, accountant John Basden and solicitor Arnold Thirlby. The formation of this company did much to lessen the strain of managing her already very considerable monetary assets, but she insisted that she herself should continue to handle the actual manuscripts with the publishers.
She had learnt much over the years, from both Hugh and her other editors, about book production and was by this time treated with enough respect by the majority of her publishers for her to be granted a say over the illustrators for her stories and the layout of her books. She insisted always on wide margins, good line spacing, large, clear print and plenty of pictures. She particularly favoured all-round jackets for, as she wrote to one of her publishers: ‘It does give an artist a chance to get at the heart of a book and display it on his jacket.’
The appearance of the spine she also felt was important: ‘If you have an attractive picture underneath the title the book will immediately catch the eye of the child for, after all, that is what is usually seen first …’
Of Eileen Soper, who illustrated many of her books over a period of some twenty years, she wrote to Noel Evans, of Evans Brothers in 1949:
I don’t need to see roughs of any of her sketches. She and I have worked together for so long now and I have always found her accurate and most dependable – in fact excellent in every way …
This credit where she felt credit was due was typical of Enid at all levels, for publishers were surprised and pleased when she thanked them for their part in a ‘good production’.
All her business matters with her publishers were discussed either in person or through her distinctive, hand-written letters – by now very well known to all who had regular dealings with her. The recipients never failed to be astonished when they discovered that she kept no copies of these letters, but could usually rely on her extraordinarily retentive memory should she have to refer to the contents again. George Greenfield, who eventually became one of her literary agents in 1954, described Enid at that time as having a ‘card index’ mind, for he had known her to ring up and refer to certain paragraphs of letters she had written six or even twelve months previously – and she could always remember the terms under which she had signed contracts with editors and publishers.
Enid realised that she had been fortunate in being able to establish herself as a best-selling writer during the war years, despite the obvious publishing difficulties, and that this was in no small measure due to the links with her readers of Sunny Stories and Teachers’ World and the faith of her publishers in her eventual sales. Even at the most desperate period of shortage it was rumoured that one house allotted sufficient paper for the printing of some hundred and fifty thousand copies of a single title in a popular series and others set aside enough to print between twenty-five and a hundred thousand copies of each of her new books. This certainty over her selling powers was evidently justified for no sooner were most of these on the market than they were out of stock – as her readers would continually inform her. She commented on this in several wartime editorial letters in Sunny Stories and went on to suggest that if the children could not obtain the books they wanted, they should either try the public libraries for other titles or borrow from their friends: ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you more,’ she wrote in March 1944, ‘but I can’t get the books myself, sometimes! You shall have as many as you like after the war.’ Once the restrictions were over, she soon set about keeping this promise and the relinquishing, in the autumn of 1945, of the column she had written for Teachers’ World for almost twenty-three years gave her the opportunity she needed to widen still further the range of her writing activities.
She decided to wind up her column on the retirement of Mr E.H. Allen, who had taken her first contribution to the magazine and had continued to follow her career with friendly interest throughout his editorship. Enid disliked changes not of her own making, and did not feel inclined to fall in with any fresh
ideas that a new editor might bring, and her last ‘Letter from Green Hedges’ appeared on 14 November 1945:
I think the time has now come for me to stop writing these long letters to you each week. We have had some lovely times together, and I have made thousands of boy and girl friends, and hundreds of teacher friends too. We have hunted for flowers together, watched the birds, looked for twigs and berries, collected all kinds of things. You have learnt all about my many, many pets and I have heard about yours. We have been very good friends, and we always shall be. Although I shall not be writing to you any more, you know that I shall be writing for you! I shall write you many books, you will have your Sunny Stories and some of you will read my tales in many papers. You can always write to me if you want to. Go on doing all the things we have done together, won’t you, work hard, be kind and just, be my friend as much as ever. I shall be here at Green Hedges just the same, with my children, my pets and my garden – writing books for you all as hard as ever I can …
Seven years later Enid also withdrew from Sunny Stories after twenty-six years as its editor – though this time there was no letter of farewell. She had already circulated teachers, librarians and educationalists and advertised widely in newspapers and other periodicals that she would soon be starting up her own fortnightly magazine. It would be, she told them, the only one from then on to be written entirely by herself and to contain ‘all the stories the children love best’.
Enid Blyton Page 14
