Five friends, Hanni and Nanni: the healing world of Enid Blyton with his abyss

The lie of life dominated the entrance to his country house: Pax huic domui, "Peace in this house". Enid Blyton, to this day probably the most successful author of children's books in the world, adored these words. Because they're going as well as she said.

In her memories, she reveled in the southern realm of England, which she had baptized at the suggestion of readers of her childhood "Green Hedges" ("green hedges"). Crocuses grew in the garden, poppies danced in the wind, quince trees provided fruit for the jam. Blyton felt "rich and happy" when blackbirds jumped between tea services, hedgehogs drank milk on their plates or saved wounded birds: "There is nothing more satisfying. than to work with animals and plants. "

In this romance, she shared with her daughters Imogen and Gillian, with Cocker Spaniel Topsy and cat Bimbo, but also broke her first marriage. Here the children saw their father for the last time. Then Blyton ruthlessly smothered Hugh Pollock's memories, like a diabolical draft for one of his fictional characters. The Imogen girl later described Green Hedges as a nightmarish place. Her mother "arrogant, uncertain and dominant" loved only the children of her books – but she forgot hers.

"Emotional wreck"

Children's clubs such as "Five Friends" and the "Hanni and Nanni" twins have made Blyton world famous. Once she had a photographic memory, at the end of her life, she suffered from Alzheimer's disease and almost forgot everything. Enid Blyton died on November 28, 1968, 50 years ago. Her second husband burned almost every newspaper, probably to protect her memory.

Blyton had made an excellent market and was in England for a time more popular than Shakespeare. And yet, one wonders who was the woman behind the 753 novels sold to about 650 million copies. "An emotional wreck and a total mistake," said Helena Bonham Carter as a Blyton actress in a 2009 BBC documentary? Or a "just and loving" mother, as her daughter Gillian points out? According to her, her mother described life only as she would have loved herself.

A jump in the 1910s, in the sacred 13th year of Enid: one night she snuck in with her brother Hanley in the direction of the show, listened – and was shocked. His parents quarreled. As a severe mother, Theresa Blyton wanted to prepare her daughter early as a housewife. Poetry and Enid's stories have always been "doodles" and a "waste of time". For his part, his father Thomas, a free spirit, explained to Enid everything about animals and plants during hiking hours. For them, these days together were "sunny and warm and the sky as blue as the blueberries of my garden".

And now, the beloved father spoke to a foreign woman, her lover. Shortly after, he left. Theresa Blyton refused to divorce, hiding the scandal, officially Thomas Blyton was traveling a lot for work. The children had to stay silent.

Forgetting and moving

It's a crackdown model that Enid Blyton has perfected afterwards. Her husband, Hugh Pollock, was officially the loving father of a family in Green Hedges, while he had long since fallen into alcohol and both had become strangers. Then Blyton replaced him so completely in the tumult of World War II of surgeon Kenneth Darrel Waters, as if his first husband had never existed.

Blyton apparently made Pollock lose his job as a publisher. His daughters bore the name of his second husband and called him "father". They never saw their biological father again. This harshness even surprises George Greenfield, a friend of Blyton, his literary agent for 20 years. His hypothesis: Blyton had the habit of dividing the world into good and bad, as in his books.

In his recollections, the author said eloquently: "We are all very happy with each other, otherwise I certainly could not write books that please children." Not a word about Pollock. Nor on the housekeepers who dismissed them in series. Certainly not about his mother, who avoided her. Instead: "Everyone brings a fresh atmosphere into the house with his good mood, no one knocks and is in a bad mood." A happy world as in his novels with his always sunny school holidays and his comfortable country houses where mothers prepared cakes and poured lemonade.

When Blyton's father left in 1910, Enid unwittingly refused to grow – Blyton's biologists speculate. "She was a child, thought she was a child and wrote like a child," psychologist Michael Woods wrote after his death.

"Keep trying!"

The first of this thesis is a gynecologist Blyton visited while she could not get pregnant. Surprised, he noticed an "exceptionally small uterus" the size of a girl of 12 or 13 years old. It was only after hormonal treatment that the young woman had children.

So, did the mental trauma stop Blyton's development, so that she was so sympathetic to the thoughts of her young readers and book heroes? As critics then criticized her books, she responded coldly: "The critics of people over twelve do not interest me."

But there was more. His irrepressible ambition. And this article only! Even during his childhood, Enid Sagen read enchanted encyclopaedias about the submarine tunnel, the giant hawk, the stalagmite stuff of his later success books. She has always written poems, designed a secret code. The ideas of her stories literally "attacked" her, she said. Blyton wrote them, sent them to the publishers, rushed to the mailbox every morning – and had just received cancellations. Hundreds.

Such defeats have magically displaced them. "We take all the bad things and put them aside, just behind the head, until they disappear, paff!", She then advised her daughter Imogen. The satirical magazine "Punch" has returned to Blyton a poem: "Good idea, unfortunately false accent to verse ten, bad rhythm to verse twelve, keep trying!"

She did and put everything under her dream. She gave up her pianist training and was trained as a kindergarten teacher to test her stories directly with the younger audience. In 1922, she published her first collection of poetry. In 1923, she already sells 120 texts for children. Soon she was earning 300 pounds a year, a record income at that time.

Blyton wrote and wrote. Goblins, magic chairs, miracle trees. She has written books on nature, biblical stories, countless chronicles, even from the point of view of her terrier Bobs. The international breakthrough took place from 1942 with its first series, the series "Five Friends" and "Adventure um …". The British had found her formula for success: intelligent heroes, backed by equally intelligent pets, have always discovered something mysterious and guilty, smugglers, counterfeiters and kidnappers.

The real children of Blyton

When paper became scarce during the Second World War, Blyton continued to deliver as a factory. Sometimes she did one book a week and a record 10,000 words a day – typing with two fingers, without a secretary. Even the fan mail answered him personally.

From her point of view, it was a child's game: in the rocking chair, she closed her eyes, "after a minute or two", continued the story, "but that even seems a miracle that the stories are over ".

The chroniclers have wrinkled their noses. Some libraries refused Blyton's work, and for decades the BBC had "virtually no literary value" in his books, plus those nasty "pinky-winky-doodle-doodle-dumb-dumb-name types". The BBC no longer wants "no victims" of the "great advertising campaign" of this "secondary" author, she said in 1954.

Their success does not slow that down. Nothing more than the accusation of racist and badist clichés: their thieves often had dark skin, boys always brave. And if a girl was brave, she really wanted to be a boy.

Her heroes have never aged, Blyton already. Her agent Greenfield describes how, in 1961, despite her meticulousness, she forgot an important appointment. how she met a friend shortly before her death in one of the clearest moments. The two men were talking in front of a cupboard full of Blyton books. He added that the author was fortunate to have two adult children.

"Children?" Enid Blyton asked, opening her arms as if she wanted to kiss the shelf, "These are my kids."