Bookworm Read online

  It was an older girl that got me into the stuff. Becky-next-door lent me her copy of something called Five on a Secret Trail. It was a floppy, late 1970s Knight Books edition with, I believe, the original 1950s illustrations inside. I read it. It was good. Very good. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it very much. I asked Becky if she had any more. She did. It was called Five Run Away Together. I read it. It was good. Very good. Possibly even better than Five on a Secret Trail. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it very much. I noticed it had a number ‘3’ on the spine. Five on a Secret Trail had a ‘15’. What did that mean? I decided to look for clues. Even without a loyal canine companion to help me, it didn’t take long. The endpapers carried a list. Apparently Enid Blyton had written twenty-one books! What excellent news! What riches! What vital, absolutely essential riches!

  I took the news and the list to my parents. ‘I’m going to need all of these,’ I said, gently.

  And so it began.

  Looking back, Blyton’s blissful reign over my life seems to have lasted both forever and no time at all. In fact it was about two years. Because of course the former schoolteacher-turned-publishing phenomenon hadn’t just written twenty-one books. She had written around 760 in the course of her fifty-year career. It was so hard to keep up with her (and publishers weren’t as punctilious about record-keeping then as now) that it is impossible to say exactly. At her peak she was writing 10,000 words a day – on a typewriter perched on her knee – and had thirty-seven books published in a single year.

  She once explained in correspondence with a psychologist who was researching writers’ creative processes how it was that she could produce such astonishing amounts of material. She described having her characters always walking and talking in her head, and needing only to look in on their dialogue and actions for her next story. It was, she said, ‘simply a matter of opening the sluice gates and out it all pours with no effort or labour of my own. This is why I can write so much and so quickly – it’s all I can do to keep up with it, even typing at top speed.’

  All of which meant that I had the fruits of half a century’s diligent dictation-taking at my disposal. Even allowing for my disdain for the series for very young readers (I had my six- to eight-year-old pride), involving Amelia Jane, Wishing Chairs, Faraway Trees and something called Noddy, there was still enough to let me gorge unceasingly. She wasn’t my sole sustenance (though when not with her I was still more likely to be found rereading old favourites like Lucy Runs Away and The Worst Witch than trying new things) but she was unquestionably my staple diet. I was in thrall to alpha-male Julian, dickless Dick, poor Anne, proto-feminist/Sapphic role model George and her loyal, rabbit-loving dog Timmy, a character only marginally simpler than the rest. And then to the Secret Seven, the girls of Malory Towers and St Clare’s, the Five Find-Outers and Dog, and the children (and parrot Kiki) in the Island/Castle/Valley/Sea/Any Other Concrete Noun adventure series. They went down whole and never touched the sides. I snacked on stand-alones (or near stand-alones) like Come to the Circus!, Six Cousins at Mistletoe Farm, Children of Willow Farm and the Adventurous Four in between. I read and reread the captivating stories that I didn’t know had long ago become cultural clichés. I thrilled wholeheartedly to the thought of finding smugglers in coves, camping on moors, stuffing my face with the home-grown produce that was apparently handed out gladly and for free by apple-cheeked farmers’ wives, and asked for nothing more out of life than that one day I, too, would get to sleep on a bracken bed under a starlit sky, next to the picturesque ruins of a castle on an island owned by a gender-busting friend of mine as unswervingly loyal and good-hearted as her dog. The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark, Milly-Molly-Mandy, The Worst Witch, Teddy Robinson, Maggie Gumption, Ramona and Beezus – they had been good. Blyton was better.

  Love, of course, blinds us to all faults. While child readers had been consuming her unstoppably and en masse since she started writing in the 1920s, and her popularity amongst them had only grown as the decades wore on, there had always been adult critics on hand to adumbrate and condemn her limitations. In the 1930s the BBC effectively banned her from the airwaves because they deemed her output to be of an insufficiently high literary quality. In the mid-1950s, the stricture was only reluctantly lifted. The head of the BBC’s schools broadcasting department at the time, Jean Sutcliffe, explained the lifting (and possibly, inadvertently, much else about the BBC at the time) thus: ‘No writer of real merit could possibly go on believing that this mediocre material is of the highest quality and turn it out in such incredible quantities. Her capacity to do so amounts to genius and it is here that she has beaten everyone to a standstill. Anyone else would have died of boredom long ago.’ Several libraries still refused to stock her, again on the grounds of (lack of) merit. The pioneering librarian Eileen Colwell (who was a gifted storyteller in her own right and possibly a little frustrated by Blyton’s output, whose sheer volume did tend to crowd other writers out of the marketplace) summed up the literary world and many ‘smart’ parents’ feelings about Blyton’s relentlessly formulaic resolutions of fantastical plots when she mockingly reviewed The Sea of Adventure in 1948. ‘But what hope’, she asked rhetorically, ‘has a band of desperate men against four children?’

  It pains me more than I can say to admit the truth of such criticisms, but I must. It ranks as one of the greatest disappointments of my adult life to discover on returning to the serried ranks of Blytonian tomes that line the far wall of my study that they have become in the cruelly intervening years, unreadable.

  That I never even contemplated such a possibility, even though a moment’s reflection on her work-rate alone should have told me it was not one that lent itself to the refining of prosaic ore into literary gold, is a testament to the strength of her hold over me during those obsessive years. But of course it is true. She was a one-woman mass production line, turning out workmanlike units that perfectly serve a particular need at a particular time in a child’s life, not finely wrought pieces of art destined to have their secrets delicately unpicked over the years by a gradually maturing sensibility. That cinemascopic mind was of course a unique gift in itself, but not one of the same order as the subtle, layered genius of Rumer Godden, the light, delicate evocations and humour of Teddy R’s creator Joan G. Robinson, or the darkly flashing visions of Maurice Sendak, all of whose works – along with those of a million other children’s authors I was yet to meet – would turn out to provide countless rewarding rereads at any age.

  So what was her secret? What did she do for me and innumerable thousands of other children to cause us to count her amongst our greatest loves and most important formative reading experiences?

  Blyton gained her greatest popularity during the Second World War and its aftermath, when readily identifiable villains and the neat resolution of tangible, finite problems doubtless fed a heightened need in children for reassurance that justice can, will and should prevail. She was national comfort reading at a time when mental and emotional resources were too depleted to deal with anything more complex. The need for books that functioned amongst anxious, insecure and often fatherless (temporarily, as men were called up, permanently if the worst happened) children as a refuge was wider and deeper than it had ever been.

  Now, her success still depends on such feelings, but on a smaller, more individual scale. When you’re young, even if you like it and are good at it, reading is hard. It is important to have somewhere you can go and know that your efforts are guaranteed to be rewarded. You need a satisfying story and an unbroken contract of delivery from your author. And you know – you know as surely as there are Findus Crispy Pancakes for tea and Wonder Woman on at seven – Enid Blyton will provide. It is exactly the same instinct that will, when you are an adult and knackered, lead you to Lee Child and reruns of Law & Order: SVU instead of Trollope and the BBC2 documentary about Ugandan politics. Like a good thriller or police procedural she is a great de-baffler and balm to the soul. Her characters, male or female (or canine or psitta
cine) have, like Jack Reacher or Eliot Stabler, only the barest, simplest of psychologies. With Julian, the O’Sullivan twins, Fatty, Peter or any of the rest, to think is to act. To feel is to express, in thunderously straightforward manner. ‘I say Gwen/Peter/Margery – you are the most tremendous sneak/ass/rescuer of Erica from the burning sanatorium! Jolly bad/good show!’ No misdirection, no circuitous calculations, no contrary thoughts held in the same head, no messy, true humanity of any kind. Restful. Sometimes you’ve just gotta take a break from it all, y’know?

  More positively, Blyton lays down a great base for future reading. Her formulaic stories build an unyielding confidence within the young consumer. One expert in children’s literature, Victor Watson, called Blyton ‘the great nanny-narrator’. She leads her charges slowly and carefully by the hand through plots that may make the Beano look like Tolstoy – and in prose that definitely makes the Beano look like Tolstoy – but nannies are there to keep you safe, to make you feel secure. Real ones do it by not letting you roam too far in the park and not leaving you alone in the bath. Writerly ones do it by keeping their descriptions simple (Blyton uses only a handful of adjectives, the main two of which – ‘queer!’ and ‘rather queer!’ – weren’t even as interesting then as they are now) and their characters simpler still as they march them towards their neat conclusions and happy endings. All is literal. Nothing is evoked. All is illuminated. No dark shadows lurk. She sweeps and tidies as she goes. The band of desperate men have no hope against four children.

  So. Blyton is not demanding. She is not an expander of minds like any one of the imaginatively and linguistically gifted authors already mentioned or still to be discussed. Her great gift lies in proving beyond doubt to children that reading can be fun, and reliably so. That the marks on the page will translate into life and colour and movement with ease. This is a thing you can master, a foundation upon which you can build, and also a retreat into which you can escape. She makes it all possible, time and time again. It was for this reason that Roald Dahl – whose own professed primary aim in writing for children was always to entertain them and thus induct them into the world of books – went to bat for her when he was on the 1988 Committee on English in the National Curriculum. He fell out with the rest of the board on the issue of whether her books should be welcomed in schools. Despite being no fan of either the work or the woman (he played bridge with her once and said afterwards that she had the mind of a child) he thought they should be embraced because they got children reading. The rest of the board disagreed and Dahl resigned his place.

  Books were already my delight but I came to believe in both their power and in myself as a reader through Blyton. For others – later starters than me, perhaps, off making friends and developing early social skills instead of communing with baby owls and noting down old words for marzipan, or for children with less support at home or school – the Blyton effect was more dramatic. If you don’t have a father on hand to walk you through, supplying you with synonyms and explaining turns of phrase, or able to delve deeper with you into quirks of human nature you’ve found on the page but not yet experienced in real life, then a nanny-narrator is a very good substitute. Blyton becomes the wedge that first cracks open the pleasure-filled world of reading; Kirrin Island the promontory from which you catch your first glimpse of the promised land.

  Beyond what she offers children as readers lies what she offers to them as negotiators of the real world. If she does not explain it, she at least offers refuge from its growing emotional complexities. Blytonmania tends to hit just as the halcyon days of early childhood are beginning to retreat. Life was beginning to tell on me a bit. As well as the growing cliquery of school, where the girls had taken to forming and reforming into tiny splinter groups in accordance with a logic as convoluted as it was unspoken, work was becoming harder. Maths, for example, had stopped being about adding up tens or taking away units and become about dividing and multiplying and occasionally even about drawing graphs. Worst of all, a teacher had introduced the concept of nuclear war in some lesson or other, which dreadful information burrowed deeply into my brain and festered there for months. I felt doomed mathematically, actually and socially. When the mental ulcer caused by my nuclear-war worries finally burst (the promise of post-apocalyptic solitude could not salve it forever), I spent nights convulsed with fear and hacking sobs under the bedclothes until my mother heard me, held me and once again placed unbreachable maternal barriers between me and my demons. She promised, above all, that the four-minute warning would never go off while I was at school. ‘There’ll be a lot of fuss before then,’ she promised. ‘So we’ll know if it’s likely and we’ll keep you and your sister off school and all die together.’ This, I thought, would be fine.

  What people forget about pessimists is that although we’re often anxious, we’re also very easily pleased.

  *

  Concerns about quality and literary merit, however, gave way in the 1960s and 70s to more troubling questions about prejudice in Blyton. She and her books were a product of their time (and again, that work rate and that temperament did not lend themselves to a detached consideration or critical analysis of her books’ contents or possible effects) and the unholy trinity of sexism, class snobbery and racism could all be found therein. She was removed from many libraries (slightly bowdlerised editions started returning in the 1980s, but I don’t remember any at all in my local or school library) and – if your parents had any pretentions to liberalism or to what was not yet called political correctness but which amounted to the same thing – from homes.

  At the time, of course, I noticed none of this. I noticed that Anne was always the one set to work making bracken beds and cooking meals for five on a tiny oil stove, but I thought this was because she was a drip rather than because she was a girl.

  But perhaps she was (too) a drip into the ocean of assumptions about what boys were and did and what girls were and did, in which I swam unknowing, as we all do. I can’t deny the possibility – even the likelihood – that she was, with every fresh-laid egg she boiled for Dick and Ju, undoing the good Annabelle in Sugarpink Rose had wrought and crippling what would otherwise have been my flourishing sense of the unfettered possibilities of womanhood. At least, not without effectively claiming that I alone amongst humanity am impervious to all external influences. This seems a bit of a reach.

  Class snobbery, I must confess, I missed altogether. If my fellow or today’s readers recognise(d) the Secret Seven’s cheery politeness to coalmen and groundskeepers as condescension to the working classes, they are better social historians than I ever was. And if readers of her own time recognised it, then they should have become Marxist revolutionaries and overthrown the whole system by the time I got there forty years later. I would still have enjoyed the stories but cursed the dialectic, comrade.

  But again, you don’t have to notice these things to be affected by them. In fact, it’s probably better for an ideology’s propagation if you don’t, which is why the question of her attitude to race is a particularly difficult one for a fan (or erstwhile fan) to face. As I learned the word ‘swarthy’ for the first time, it’s hard not to suspect that I was – less directly, more insidiously – also learning that it was shorthand for ‘foreigner’, ‘gypsy’ and ‘criminal’, and that the three were virtually interchangeable. I had more overt rebuttals of these messages, at home and at school – especially the latter, where in a 1980s multi-ethnic institution the need was rightly felt to be increasingly pressing – than I did of the notion that girls were generally more useless than boys at anything but domestic tasks. But if I was internalising the latter to any degree, I must also have been doing so with other, even less savoury messages.

  For young readers today, I wonder whether the protections have reversed. As the fine spray of fourth-wave feminism begins to permeate everything around her, I can imagine eight-year-old Jemima iPad being puzzled or infuriated by Anne’s role – or perhaps simply pitying it – but Blyton’s di
staste for anyone not dazzlingly white can more easily be imagined as playing into the prejudices that are an ever more live issue today.

  Many of Blyton’s most egregious examples of racism have been quietly removed. The Little Black Doll (an Enid Blyton Sunshine Picture Book, first published in 1965), about a gollywog who had his blackness gloriously washed away by ‘magic rain’ by a helpful pixie (‘No wonder he’s happy – little pink Sambo’), was – surprisingly – reprinted in 1976 but has not been seen since. This, and the expunging of troubling adjectives, is a level of censorship I can accept. To leave them in, in order to maintain a sense of period or cleave to the author’s vision, risks too much harm – especially in view of this author’s vision being more akin to dictation – for too little good. What you find, at best, amongst supporters of leaving things unaltered is a presupposition that all children have on hand a watchful adult who can inoculate them against any unbeneficial effects via lively, contextualising lit-crit debate whenever a ‘dirty caravanner’ pops up. And this is, of course, not so.

  In more recent years, the debate has been over how much to update the rest of Blyton’s language. A few years ago the Famous Five were brought out in new editions, to be sold alongside the previous ones, that had had their vocabularies ‘subtly’ updated by the publisher so that they did not alienate readers – as, in the publisher’s view they were now at risk of doing. ‘Mother and father’ became ‘Mum and Dad’, ‘school tunic’ became ‘school uniform’, ‘She must be jolly lonely all by herself’ was changed to ‘She must get lonely all by herself’ and so on.

  The cost/benefit analysis of this works out very differently from that of excising racist terms and attitudes. The benefits amount to a short-term gain in immediate comprehensibility but amongst the costs we can count the fact that a constant updating of books decreases the opportunities for making those little intellectual leaps that make reading both fun and valuable. If ‘straw boaters’ had been replaced by ‘hats’ or excised entirely in Dorita Fairlie Bruce’s Dimsie adventures, I probably still wouldn’t know what they were. A few years later I would feel the rush of triumph when I worked out what ‘colours’ were in Antonia Forest’s Autumn Term, although it took me most of the book and the end-of-term prize-giving scene to be sure that they were indeed a kind of sporting award. Children can and should be left with these little leaps to make. No harm will come to them. If a child reader cannot discern the meaning of ‘school tunic’ from its context, said child reader shouldn’t be left unsupervised on the sofa with a book anyway, lest they accidentally suffocate themselves in the cushions or blind themselves with their own thumbs.