Last night I listened to Sue McGregor interviewing Enid Blyton for
Woman's Hour (first broadcast in 1974 according to the Archive, though the interview must obviously have been recorded considerably earlier!) I was surprised by Enid Blyton's remark that "My father was a writer and I wanted to be a writer too." I hadn't known that Thomas Blyton was a writer. Was he a published author, I wonder, or did he just write for his own amusement or to entertain family and friends, or maybe for a newsletter or something like that? Barbara Stoney mentions that he "wrote poetry" but doesn't give any further details.
Enid Blyton mistakenly referred to the Famous Five as "five children," but that's an easy enough slip-up to make. She also said that her books had been translated into 66 languages. The TV programme
Success Story (made in 1974), which I also listened to yesterday, said that Enid Blyton was the third most-translated author in the world and that her books had been translated into 128 languages. I'm not sure if either of those figures is accurate but, in our own "How Many Languages?" thread, we've only managed to list about 35 languages so far:
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The opening of
Success Story was very poignant, with the footage of Green Hedges being demolished. What a pity we didn't see any film of the house as it was before the builders started work!
It was a joy to watch art critic William Feaver talking of how he sat down with a Blyton book each evening (and a Blyton-style feast!) in an attempt to work out why the books attracted so much criticism, only to find them "beautifully written, straight off the top, breathless and artless." Later, he described collecting the books as "a buyer's market" and said he had just picked up 40 good-condition Enid Blyton books with dustwrappers, many of them first editions, for 50p at a sale. How times have changed!
Brian Alderson, children's book editor for
The Times, felt that Blyton's stories didn't have much to them – "…there is practically nothing there beyond the incidents which she constructed so well" – and claimed that children would get more out of six Rudyard Kipling books than six hundred Enid Blyton books! It's strange that he considered her handling of dialogue to be poor. The natural-sounding dialogue of her characters is one of her strengths, I think. Good for the lady quoted after Brian Alderson, who asserted that Enid was actually very skilled at capturing children's conversation!
I felt Colin Welch was exaggerating somewhat in his criticism of the Little Nodding Man when he spoke of "Noddy’s imbecility" and his "timidity, which borders on the pathological." Noddy isn't my favourite character either and I'm tired of so much emphasis being put on Noddy compared to Enid Blyton's other creations, but I wouldn't be quite
that cruel about the little fellow! I was delighted to hear Gillian Baverstock (who was in her early forties when she appeared in this programme) pointing out that, as far as Enid Blyton was concerned, Noddy was not the major part of her work and that "Noddy is given a place which he doesn't in fact deserve." Hurrah for Gillian!
I was interested in Gillian's statement that Enid Blyton used to take rough copies of her books and proofs of illustrations along when talking to children about how she wrote her stories. Apparently, she would also hold up a spool of rainbow-coloured thread and say that writing a story was like pulling the thread off the spool - she never knew what colour (i.e. what part of the story) was going to come next. Enid obviously realised (perhaps from her days as a teacher) how useful visual aids could be when giving a talk.
I noticed that when she was discussing how her mother's work came under scrutiny in the 1950s, Gillian referred to Kenneth Darrell Waters as "My father" (rather than "my stepfather" or "Uncle Kenneth") and, soon afterwards, referred to Hugh Pollock as "her [i.e. Enid's] first husband."
It made me laugh when one woman remarked that, after reading Enid Blyton, children living in inner-city areas in the 1970s would write stories full of sentences like, "I say, Jocelyn, look at all those jolly daffodils!" That reminded me of the stories I wrote as a child, which were invariably about children called Nora, Donald, Doreen and Lennie even though real-life friends were called Tracey, Wayne, Julie and Mark.
How wonderful to see bundles of Knight paperback copies of
Five Go to Billycock Hill coming off the production line at the end of the programme. And of course, copies are still being printed and bought as we speak. The "Success Story" continues...
Anita