The Two Faces of Enid Blyton published by The Australian Women's Weekly, October 1974 have a nice hi resolution portairt of Enid Blyton
Enid Blyton Portrait
The Two Faces of Enid Blyton
Enid Blyton, who died six years ago,remains
one of the world's best known and most popular writers of children's stories. But
what was the real person like behind the name on
the book-jacket?
By CATHERINE STOTT,
in London
To MOST people.
Enid Blyton was the outwardly kindly, twinkling, industrious creator of lovable
little Noddy, who devoted her life to
the world's children through her 600 books. But to some of those closer to her.
she was an extremely unsentimental, embittered egocentric who lived out her
life in a fantasy world of her own making because she couldn't stand the
harshness of the real world. Both these faces of Enid Blyton are revealed in a startling
biography of one of the world's most successful and most controversial authors,
recentlv published in London. So secretive was she about parts of her early
life (she was born over a shop in South East London, daughter of a Sheffield
cutlery salesman) that even Enid Blyton's elder daughter, (Gillian Baverstock,
was fascinated when she read the book to discover a lot she didn't previously
know.
Gillian, who is married to television executive Donald Baverstock. and
lives in a Tudor manor in Yorkshire, is a warm, outgoing woman of immense
charm. She talked to me with great candor about her mother and their
relationship. How. as a young girl, she dared not interrupt her mother when she
was writing, and was allowed to sec her for only one hour a day. How her
mother's early were filled with sadness, something her readers were probablv
never aware of. She told me of how Enid Blyton was inseparable from her father,
who taught her all he knew of nature, music, and poetry, and how she was shocked
rigid when her parents' shaky marriage collapsed and he walked out when she was
12. Of how she blamed her mother for this and rarely, if ever, saw her again
after she left home at 19 to train as a teacher even refusing to visit her when
she was dying, avoiding her funeral because she was "too busy." In
spite of her huge success her annual income was estimated at $200,000 she had
problems in adult life, too. Her first marriage ended in divorce, she had miscarriages,
and not much talent for human relationships outside her children.
Yet none of
this ever came through her writing, which (lowed implacably from her pen like
the stream from a punctured bag of sugar. "She lived on two levels. I'm
sure." said Gillian
"She
probably retreated to this magic world of hers to escape the unpleasantness of her
teenage home and stayed there.
"I'm no psychologist but I'd be fascinated
to think what she might have written if her world hadn't been shattered at 13
and she hadn't had such a sad time. "It affected her so profoundly, that
when her own first marriage was breaking up to my father she tried to conceal
from my sister and myself that there was a break-up. She didn't want us to
suffer the traumas she had gone through.
"So my
father left to go to America during the war and that was the last time I saw him.
"He died two years ago. two weeks after we had traced him. Oh how I would because
I know now how very fond he was of me."
Enid Blyton
was adamant in refusing the girls' father access to his daughters, indeed they
were not told that he had asked it. "And I have no idea why." said
Gillian Baverstock. clearly baffled. "She never talked to me about it and
I couldn't begin to explain her reasoning. Her father was allowed to come back
and take her out after he left home. But I know she always went home
desperately sad that he wasn't still living with them.
"She
probably thought a complete break was better for us I know she worried because
he drank but now that I know how he loved me it does seem very, very hard that
she didn't allow us to meet."
Was she,
then, two people? "She had two sides, yes. The ordinary, happy woman who
enjoyed her family, and the writer who had to have peace, who could not bear the
flow of her mind being interrupted. "liven as a small child one absolutely
did not go down to her when she was working. except in an emergency. She was
writing up to ten thousand words a day. of course. We only saw her after tea
for an hour, and this was rigidly adhered to. "She didn't have much to do
with our day-to-day lives, and we had to play jolly quietly in the garden if
she was working there or she would be very annoyed."
Had she not
then felt it rather a bitter irony that what kept them apart was the precise
fact of her mother's spending eight hours a day to delight other people's children?
"Oh
absolutely." Gillian smiled ruefully. "I've always "And yet that
hour I had with her each day i recall as being the happiest part of life the
country walks, the picking wildflowers, the gardening together, the witty amusing
stories she told me.
"All
those sunsets and birdsongs she wrote about genuinely meant a lot to her and
this she gave to me.
"She gave
me sufficient in order to continue myself. To give someone a love of something,
be it nature or music, you give them a great gift. "That is the important thing.
And although her work kept us apart, I did have the great joy of sitting on her
knee and hearing the stories as they were written."
I remarked
that her mother did sound unsentimental to me. Was this judgment fair? "I
think it is. She did cut ties fairly easily, as you see. lt all goes back to
her childhood and her dislike of her mother.
"She
told me that her mother was jealous of her closeness to her father. What she
failed to tell me was that her mother was still alive. "I thought she'd
died years before I was born. In fact I think she told me she had died, so I
had no idea she was alive somewhere in a nursing home.
"This
was at the root of her unsentimentally. That the tie that should have been so
great between mother and daughter never existed." Enid Blyton may not have
been able to communicate with her mother but she had the unique gift of being
able to tune in absolutely to the child's wavelength, through her stories. Her
daughter feels this is because she saw the world as a child sees it.
"People criticise mother for being so
very simple, but in the end this is why children are able to enjoy her. Because
they could enter her world without difficulty.
"A part
of herself remained child-like. That is why she could still enjoy a sunset or
the first snowdrop coming out: unlike most grown-ups she never lost the ability
to enjoy as a child does, the sweetness of a moment
"And
she knew, as well as anyone in the world, how to communicate this, that was her
secret."
The
Australian Women’s Weekly – October 16, 1974
Famous Five translated into Bahasa Indonesia language, as LIMA SEKAWAN (Five Friends)
they are extremely popular in the '80s
Author Dies - Enid Blyton Obituary in 1968
Lihat Juga Link-link di blog ini mengenai Enid Blyton:
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- The Blyton Story - 1953 article about Enid Blyton
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