Blyton 'never grew up'
ENID BLYTON had the emotional intelligence of a 13-year-old girl after a childhood trauma, her only surviving daughter has admitted.
The creator of children’s favourites including The Famous Five and Noddy was so distressed by her parents’ rows and her father’s abandonment that she never fully got over it.
“I think her approach to life was quite childlike and she could also sometimes be almost spiteful like a teenager,” her younger daughter, Imogen Smallwood, tells Radio 4 in A Fine Defence Of Enid Blyton.
“Barbara Stoney (Blyton’s biographer) suggested the trauma she suffered around about her 13th birthday was so huge that a lot of her emotional development just froze there and I think this is a very good way of looking at her,” says Imogen, now 73.
The trauma in question was a row between Blyton’s mother and her drunken father one evening. Not long after, he left home to live with another woman. Blyton was devastated.
In an archive recording, her brother Hanly says: “Enid and I used to stop at the stairs with our arms around each other, crying and listening to all that was going on.
“Eventually father left home altogether. It had a very great effect on Enid. They both liked music and the same type of books and the same type of natural history. All these things were taken away from her suddenly and she just couldn’t understand it.”
The full effects of that night were not fully realised until Blyton, having difficulty conceiving, visited a gynaecologist. She had an underdeveloped uterus that was “like that of a 12- or 13-year-old girl”, according to Stoney. After a series of hormone injections, however, she gave birth to Gillian in 1931, then Imogen in 1935.
Blyton, who died in 1968, never did exorcise the ghosts of her childhood. In her books, many of the characters were fatherless. In real life, she never visited her elderly mother and did not attend her funeral in 1950, declaring herself “too busy to make the trip to Kent”.
The prolific author still outsells all other children’s authors (500million books at the last count) and this year was voted Britain’s best-loved writer, beating Roald Dahl and JK Rowling.
* A Fine Defence Of Enid Blyton, presented by author Anne Fine, is on Radio 4 on November 27, at 11.30am.
