Enid Blyton was born in August, 1897, the eldest daughter of an adoring father and humourless, resentful mother. Her early years she remembered as being idyllic, filled with rambling walks with her nature-loving father, who lovingly encouraged her creative instincts and protected her from a mother who thought a daughter’s place was in the kitchen, learning the domestic skills required of a ‘proper woman’.

Unsurprisingly her parent’s marriage eventually broke down, and, as is often the case, the years leading up to the split were filled with brutal arguments. Hanly Blyton, Enid’s younger brother, remembers sitting on the stairs with Enid, clutching each other in terror as their parents argued violently downstairs. Eventually, when Enid was 13, her father left and she had little contact with him after that.

Quite unable to deal with her grief, Enid kept her father’s departure a secret from everyone she knew; her teachers, her school, even closest friends had no idea that Enid’s was anything other than perfectly contented at home.

For the rest of her life Enid responded to any difficult or painful events by refusing to acknowledge that they existed. From a very young age she was able to retreat to a rich fantasy world, peopled by happy, self-sufficient children who rarely had to suffer the intrusion of adults.

Enid was a popular and successful student who thoroughly enjoyed her time at school. She was the captain of the school lacrosse team and Head Girl for her final two years, as well as earning several prizes for her schoolwork. The tricks played on teachers, the value of games and the strong feelings of pride and gratitude for her school that so permeated all her boarding school novels were very much based on the feelings Enid herself had about school.

She was also a prolific, but unsuccessful, writer in her teens, sending many poems and stories to magazines. The stream of reject letters arriving at her house was the source of more conflict with her mother, who was deeply resentful that Enid thought her future could hold anything but a life of grinding domesticity.

Much has been made in recent years of the so called sexist nature of Enid’s books. Her female characters were often weak creatures, always being sent off to do dishes or prepare meals, while boys planned adventures and protected their weaker sisters. Calling this sexist is an anachronistic imposition of modern social mores upon books that were written more than 50 years ago.

Women of Enid’s class and era could rail against their shackles, as indeed she did, but there few alternatives available to them.

One of Enid’s best-loved and most well-drawn characters, George from the Famous Five novels, was based largely on Enid herself. All the frustration of her longing to be free of the female role her mother tried so hard to force upon her were poured into fierce little George and her stubborn refusal to submit to the restrictions of proper girl-like behaviour. Constantly being told that she was not as good as a boy, no matter how hard she tried, did nothing more than fuel George’s rage and refusal to bow to expectations. While George was never able to win the battle against her gender, Enid gave her the greatest comfort she could think of - a loyal, loving dog who never left her side, something Enid herself had longed for during her stormy childhood.

Enid’s phenomenal success as an adult was also atypical for a woman of her time. In addition to her prolific writings, she managed all her business affairs herself, dealing directly with more than twenty different publishing companies and negotiating all her contracts herself. Her shrewd negotiating and her almost photographic memory earned the respect of everyone who dealt with her. George Greenfield, who eventually became one of her literary agents described Enid as having a ‘card index’ memory, he could ring her to discuss a contract she had signed months earlier and she would instantly recall the terms and date of the contract and be able to discuss specifics without the slightest inaccuracy or need to refer back to the actual paperwork.

Enid finished school in 1916 and left home immediately to train as a teacher. Hard as it is to understand these days, this was a quite shocking thing for a girl of her age and class to do; girls who left home before they got married only did so because they had “something to hide.” Her mother, furious at Enid’s stubborn unwillingness to bow down to social dictates for her gender, told all her neighbours that Enid had left to join the Women’s Land Army and that when she found life outside home too harsh, she had been “too frightened to return home and admit her mistake”. So bitter was the resentment between Enid and her mother, that they never spoke again and, as she always did with people who caused her emotional conflict, Enid simply put all thoughts of her mother aside and refused to even mention her name.

Enid finished her training in 1919 and took up her first teaching post at a small boy’s school in Bickley. She was an excellent teacher, creative and enthusiastic, and much loved by all her pupils. She was also still trying to find success as a writer, mostly for the adult market, with short stories and poems. Eventually she realised that writing for children came far easier to her, and the success that had eluded her in the adult market came quickly with her children’s stories.

It was through her first publishing company that she met Hugh Pollock. Nearly 10 years her senior, Hugh was technically married when they met, but had separated from his first wife when he returned home from the war to find that she had been unfaithful.

Enid and Hugh’s courtship progressed rapidly and they were married within a few days of his divorce becoming final. Married women were not allowed to teach back then, so Enid gave up her teaching job but was kept very busy with her rapidly expanding writing career.

Enid and Hugh were very happy for the first few years, although Enid’s inability to have children caused them some concern. She was eventually diagnosed with an undeveloped uterus and after a series of hormone injections gave birth to her first daughter, Gillian, at the age of 34.

Things started to deteriorate for Enid and Hugh not long after Gillian’s birth, brought on, in part, by Hugh overseeing the publication of Winston Churchill’s book, The World Crisis, which involved long discussions with Churchill about the First World War. This recollection of earlier traumas seems to have pushed Hugh towards something like a nervous breakdown. He became a heavy and secretive drinker, and in trying to hide both his pain and his chosen means of deadening it, became increasingly withdrawn from his family. Their second daughter, Imogen, born in 1935, arrived into a far different home than the one her elder sister had experienced.

It is unlikely that the naive and emotionally immature Enid was able to recognise the damage that the horrors of the first world war and a failed marriage had inflicted on Hugh, but her abhorrence of facing any painful emotions made Hugh’s breakdown intolerable. Hugh’s eventual departure was preceded by the same sort of violent arguments that signified the end of Enid’s parent’s marriage, another painful fact that Enid refused to acknowledge.

Both Enid and Hugh re-married almost immediately after their divorce. Her continuing refusal to acknowledge painful facts led to a quick and harsh disposal of any place Hugh may have had in her life. Back in the days before no-fault divorce a woman being sued for divorce on the grounds of adultery could be utterly ruined, particularly if that woman had built a career around a persona of “woman at the heart of a happy home”. Enid persuaded Hugh to allow her to sue him for divorce in exchange for a promise that she would not exclude him from their children’s lives. He agreed to this and was subsequently devastated when she ruthlessly barred him, not only from their daughters, but also from his beloved career in publishing. No publishing house was willing to sacrifice an immensely lucrative contract with Enid Blyton for his sake and Enid wanted all reminders of him excised from her life. Eventually Hugh and his new wife emigrated to America, and he never saw his daughters again.

Enid understood, long before it became a popular notion, the importance of branding and public perception. In 1926 she started editing a weekly magazine Sunny Stories, as well as publishing her regular letters to the Teachers Weekly. All these writings described a sunny existence in the country with her happy, loving family and menagerie of pets. She knew how much the children who read her books wanted to catch a glimpse of the life she led outside her novels. The life she created for them was a sunlit fantasy world - as was all her writing.

Enid’s actions towards Hugh and her daughters have been much deprecated over the years, but she had been trained since childhood to deny and avoid any painful facts or feelings. Her actions were not vindictive, they were protective. The only way she had ever learned to respond to pain was to deny that it, or any people involved in it, had ever existed.

Enid’s second husband, Kenneth Darrell Waters, was again, far older than her and already married when she met him. However, once all the drama of the respective divorces had settled, they were very happy together. He was a far more stable and indulgent husband than Hugh, and was immensely proud of his wife’s achievements rather than threatened by them. He cared very gently for her and did as much as he could to protect her from the harsh realities of the slowly deteriorating health they both experienced in their later years. They were happily married for over twenty years, until his death in 1967.

The last few years of Enid’s life were quite sad. The depredations of Alzheimer’s put an end not only to her independence, but far worse, her writing. With no fantasy world to escape to she found it impossible to escape the pain of Kenneth’s death, and she deteriorated rapidly after his death. She was cared for at home by her housekeeper, but her illness grew progressively worse and, three months after being admitted to a nursing home in 1967, she died peacefully in her sleep.

She left a legacy unmatched by any children’s author before or since, and a vast library of books that have provided comfort, entertainment and solace to millions of children the world over. Everyone has their way of escaping or denying pain, especially the pain we carry from childhood. Enid’s escape was to create for herself, and everyone else, a happy sunny world, where bad things never happened and no-one was ever lonely. Her language and social standards may date, but the needs she fulfilled never ever will.

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