MEETING MY HEROINE ENID BLYTON AND TWO BEAUTIFUL LADIES (SIXTY YEARS LATER)

It's perplexing and strange to learn how someone's books that you've had a link to all your life - even from early childhood - are now banned in some English schools. 

Way back in 1950, I met Enid Blyton in London at the Methodist Central Hall when I was a Brownie. The speaker attending that meeting was indeed Enid Mary Blyton, who at the time was around 50 years of age, but seemed very old to our little group of Brownies who received their new pack badges - mine was the writer's badge.

Enid Blyton's books are still enormously popular with later generations of children (including my own), most of which have been translated into 90 languages.  She wrote on a wide range of topics, but is best remembered, I suppose for her Famous Five, Secret Seven and little Noddy books. 

Enid's very first book Child Whispers was a 24-page collection of poems,  published in 1922. Following the commercial success of her early novels such as Adventures of the Wishing Chair and The Enchanted Wood, she went on to build a literary empire, sometimes producing fifty books a year in addition to her prolific magazine and newspaper contributions. Apparently, Enid's manuscripts were unplanned and sprang largely from her unconscious mind: she typed her stories as events unfolded before her. The sheer volume of her work and the speed with which it was produced led to rumours that the writer had employed ghost writer (which she denied).

Enid's work became increasingly controversial among literary critics, teachers and parents from the 1950s onwards, because of the alleged unchallenging nature of her writing and the themes of her books, particularly the Noddy series. Some libraries and schools banned her works, which the BBC had refused to broadcast from the 1930s until the 1950s, because they were perceived to lack literary merit. Her books have been criticised as being elitist, sexist, racist, xenophobic and at odds with the more progressive environment emerging in post-Second World War Britain, but they have continued to be best-sellers since her death in 1968.

Another series I adored was the famous 'Sunny Stories' and, together with  the books in my picture, had been best sellers  for decades before our meeting. Enid said she had felt that she had a responsibility to provide her readers with a strong moral framework, so she encouraged them to support worthy causes. In particular, through the clubs she set up or supported, she encouraged and organised them to raise funds for animal and paediatric charities.

The story of this author's life and times was dramatised in a BBC television film entitled Enid, featuring Helena Bonham Carter in the title role and first broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC Four in 2009. There have also been several adaptations of her books for stage, screen and television.

During that summer in 2009, I had the pleasure of meeting Helena Bonham Carter in London. There she was with her beautiful mother at the Royal Horticultural Society's Chelsea Flower Show. It was lovely to chat with them both and, bearing in mind the film she had made that year about Enid's life, she was interested in my strange little meeting with the author sixty years earlier. Our meeting place was appropriate, too, in the Wendy Hut on the children's flower stand at Chelsea and this amazing meeting (along with hundreds of other interviews)  is recalled in my own life story.