by Nadia Cohen Naked tennis, a lesbian fling and lashings of scandal
The jolly tangled love life of Enid Blyton revealed in biography marking the 50th anniversary of her death
INFIDELITY, betrayal, ferocious anger and a series of most unconventional friendships…they are all the ingredients you might need for a torrid pot-boiler.
Yet these themes underpin not a steamy novel but my new biography of Enid Blyton, the children’s author whose output has long been synonymous with more innocent times.
Over the course of her 40-year career Enid produced over 800 books, most of them sun-splashed stories of midnight feasts, lacrosse matches and picnics with lashings of ginger beer – a phrase which itself became shorthand for the bucolic world of Blyton’s characters.
Yet away from the limelight and the jaunty fiction, her real world was complex and troubled – and exceedingly racy. Released to mark the 50th anniversary of her death, my book, The Real Enid Blyton reveals that while the much-loved author meticulously crafted her public image, her private life was a riot of extramarital affairs – including the hint of a lesbian romance – summary betrayals and casual cruelty, a course of life far more suited to a modern day soap opera than her wholesome boarding school drama, Malory Towers.
It is no small irony that the woman loved by children worldwide was not even a particularly good mother, for while Enid may have famously declared in reply to her critics that she was ‘not interested in the opinion of anyone over the age of 12’ she took little interest in her own dear offspring.
The fact is that marriage and motherhood had barely featured in young Enid’s sight lines. A published author by her 20s, and already on her way to becoming reasonably wealthy, she had shown very little interest in men.
That is, until she met Major Hugh Alexander Pollock, a former soldier 10 years her senior who was an editor at the firm which became her regular publisher.
Hugh was handsome, debonair and worldly, and Enid was charmed from the moment she met him. There was just one snag: Hugh was also married.
True, he was separated, but such distinctions meant little in the buttoned-up Twenties, and openly courting a man who was legally married to someone else was still scandalous, not least for a former teacher turned children’s author.
Still, Enid was certainly not the sort of woman to let such little things get in the way and by 1924, barely a year after they had first met, she had become Mrs Pollock. Even by then the couple, while besotted, had engaged in the sort of furious rows which would foreshadow those that lay ahead.
The baby both wanted took longer than they thought, six years to be precise, during which time Enid underwent pioneering fertility treatment in the form of daily hormone injections.
Naturally Enid was initially delighted with the arrival of her first-born, Gillian, in July 1931, although it was only a matter of weeks before she hired a fulltime live-in nanny, Betty, to join the roster of staff she now employed at the then family home, Old Thatch in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire.
Betty not only looked after Gillian during the day but slept in the same room overnight, and by the start of 1932 Enid was spending barely an hour a day with her daughter.
It says much about her priorities that while she scarcely mentioned little Gillian in her diary entries for January of that year, she recorded updates on her new book almost every day. Betty didn’t last long: she was fired when Gillian fell out of her cot shortly after her first birthday, even though the baby was not hurt. Other staff too, found that Enid could be a cold and unsympathetic employer. One maid was summarily sacked for going out with a friend who had developed scarlet fever, with Enid calling her a fool and accusing her of putting her family at risk.
Enid’s second nanny was a rather different matter. Hired after the birth of Enid’s second daughter Imogen in 1935, Dorothy Richards, a trained nurse with a rather masculine appearance – she often dressed in a formal shirt and tie – quickly became far more than a humble employee.
From the moment of Dorothy’s arrival the pair struck up an intense friendship that long outlasted Dorothy’s employment and which quickly left Hugh feeling surplus to requirements. When they were not out for walks the two shared private jokes and it was now Dorothy, not Hugh, to whom Enid turned to proofread early drafts of her work.
So significant was their friendship that over the years it was implied that they were lovers too and that ‘there may have been some homosexual attraction between these two women’, as Imogen would herself observe.
Certainly the language in the letters they exchanged seems suffused with romantic attachment.
‘I want to hear all you have to say even if I argue at first,’ Enid wrote in one. ‘You can say anything to me. I want you to.’
There were other aspects to her character, too, that might have surprised her army of devoted readers – in particular, a lack of interest in her own children, starkly at odds with the warmth she projected through her writing. While Gillian and Imogen were routinely wheeled out to pose for happy family portraits, the reality was that Enid was a distant mother.
In interviews, she spoke cheerfully about the delicate balancing act she performed between her writing career and her role as a devoted mother.
Her daughters, however, scarcely recognised the domestic angel she claimed to be.
Despite her entire career being devoted to improving children’s literacy, Enid hardly ever read to her children, while physical contact was more likely to involve a beating with a hairbrush than a cuddle.
By the late Thirties, there was little about Enid’s home life that in any way resembled the rosycheeked innocence of her stories.
By 1938 she and Hugh, who by now was drinking heavily, were living virtually separate lives, with the encroaching war equipping Hugh with good reason to be away to help the war effort.
What domestic energies Enid
An unsympathetic and cold employer
retained, meanwhile, seemed to be ploughed in to throwing glamorous parties at the family’s new palatial home, Green Hedges, in nearby Beaconsfield.
So far so suburban – except that the guest lists frequently included a number of unattached young men, among them several young army officers who had been posted nearby, as well as a bachelor doctor who moved in next door.
It wasn’t long before Enid’s frantic socialising led to her becoming the subject of local whispers, not to mention the subject of gossip columns. One enjoyable rumour had it that visitors once arrived at the house to find their hostess playing tennis entirely naked.
Hugh was furious when he came home to learn his wife had been entertaining men in an unsuitable way in his absence, although he scarcely had cause to complain, given he was himself cavorting with a young novelist called Ida Crowe – a development to which Enid was alerted by an anonymous phone call with the words: ‘Don’t let Ida crow over you.’
By early 1941 the marriage was all but over, its fate was sealed when Enid was persuaded by Dorothy to join her on a trip to visit her sister Betty Marsh at her home in Devon. Among Betty’s other guests was a surgeon called Kenneth Darrell Waters – Enid’s Malory Towers heroine Darrell Rivers would later be named in his honour – and from the first moment he and Enid met over a game of bridge one evening, it was love at first sight for both.
As soon as they returned home they embarked on an affair, meeting in secret as often as they could. Enid rented a discreet flat in Knightsbridge to carry on their romantic liaisons – brazenly using Dorothy’s name to cover her tracks.
In fact she had no problem using her dear girlfriend as a scapegoat: when confronted at Green Hedges by Kenneth’s furious wife in the wake of her discovery of her husband’s betrayal, Enid not only made a complete denial but said Dorothy was the true culprit – a plausible excuse seeing as the flat was rented in her name.
Dorothy was mortified, but said nothing out of loyalty to Enid. Enid’s books might have become synonymous with a strong moral and ethical code but this was sorely lacking in her private life. As Imogen later wrote: ‘For a whole year she carried on her lives with two different men, deceiving, or appearing to deceive, everyone.’
Indeed, it was quite blatant: when her absent husband did return to the marital home in 1944 after a few weeks absence it was to find Kenneth staying there, his clothes hanging in the spare room.
Humiliated, Hugh left home for good after one last bitter argument, although Enid concealed the fact from her daughters for over 18 months, using the war as an excuse.
It would prove the start of an increasingly bitter rift.
After insisting that she should be the one to launch the divorce petition against him to avoid any adverse publicity – citing his adultery with Ida – Enid’s way of thanking her husband for his cooperation was to cut him out of their daughters’ lives, insisting they should focus instead on their exciting new future with her second husband, Kenneth, whom she married at the City of Westminster Register Office in October 1943.
With Enid’s income soaring to well over £100,000 a year – around £4.3m in today’s money – the newlyweds could afford to indulge themselves. They employed a number of staff including a cook, maid and chauffeur to drive their fleet of cars which now included a Bentley, a Rolls-Royce and an MG sports car. Enid would often spend entire days shopping at Harrods.
One event proved unexpected. In 1945, at the age of 48, Enid discovered that she was pregnant again. Kenneth, who had always longed for a child, was delighted, and Enid too seemed pleased. Then, five months in, Enid fell while climbing a ladder to gather apples from a barn – something Kenneth had expressly forbidden her to do – and lost the baby.
Devastated, Kenneth was never able to talk about it, but true to form Enid instead threw herself straight back into work with enthusiasm. Imogen later suggested Enid had, perhaps, deliberately risked her pregnancy by climbing the ladder. She wrote: ‘She would have been aware of the high risk of giving birth to a child with a defect at her age; and her books were still the most important part of her life.’
No one could dispute the latter: more literary success followed – among them the Noddy series. However, by 1957 Enid was suffering failing health which would dog her until the end of her days 11 years later. She died in a Hampstead nursing home on November 28, 1968, slipping away in her sleep at the age of 71, apparently untroubled that the world she portrayed so famously should bear so little relation to the life she had pursued.
Glamorous parties at her palatial home She got pregnant again at 48 … then disaster
The Real Enid Blyton by Nadia Cohen is published by Pen & Sword History, priced £19.99