This touched me on a couple of of levels—first because every childhood illness meant a shower of books from the library, chosen by my mother with a keen understanding of my interests. It also sent me riffling through my files for a very old article on Blyton and her quietly miserable family that appeared in The Telegraph. I saved the piece because tge family was so intriguingly strange.
Blyton had two daughters who became estranged and gave sharply differing accounts of growing up with Blyton. One chose to focus on the good in her mother. The other said, “She could love the children who were her readers. It was only her own children who failed to capture her love.”
That quote about Blyton! It almost has the lapidary elegance of a sentence from a Mauriac novel. And it makes Blyton sound a bit like Dickens' Mrs Jellyby with her "telescopic philanthropy".
Get better soon and thank you for this essay. It’s perilous to read childhood favourites. The Children of Cherry Tree Farm literally changed my life (it wasn’t until I was 41, but eventually I went away to the country to ‘simply run wild’ after an illness). And Tammylan the Wild man is an interesting and unusually positive depiction of PTSD. And yet… the general lack or compassion for others shocked me, even at the time. I read, ‘Oh, Sammy’ [The Sunshine Book] and it was very clear to me that if Sammy was trying his hardest and still making mistakes or missteps, then it was both cruel and counter-productive to punish him. By the time I was in my 20s I had a word for Sammy’s ‘dreaminess’, ‘laziness’ and ‘carelessnes’: neurodivergent. Like Mr Twiddle, the message was to tow the normative line or be despised. Kids are very good at reading such subtext.
Thank you, Michelle. I guess you're right that reading childhood favourites is a risky business. And yes, we pick up a lot of attitudes from our childhood reading without knowing it.
It is a strangeness I'm certain because I believe we are similar ages Jeffrey, or at least close enough to have shared a similar choice of children's reading, yet, I don't recall ever seeing anything written by Enid Blyton on the bookshelves or balanced, as they often were, on our bedside tables and now I am intrigued as to why? Of course, now, the answer may take some investigation but I feel, knowing my parents both loved reading, that there must have been good reason. Or perhaps not...
I do hope you are much recovered now, many days later — my apologies for tardy reading, it certainly didn't detract from the enjoyment!
Thank you, Susie. I think in our case Blyton was there partly because my mother had loved the Faraway Tree novels as a child. She was a dreamer, who spent much of her years as an evacuee on her own with just children's books and her own thoughts to sustain her. But you also make me reflect what else was in the house (I'm not sure we had a bookcase as such) and I know I read the Water Babies. Much of my reading was done at school but I don't think that book would have been there, so it must have been at home. Nor do I think it was part of the travelling library that used to appear occasionally, and which was a lifeline for my mother, who was never without a book when she got a moment to rest. Odd to think of Charles Kingsley and Enid Blyton side by side on the bedside table…
We lived in Australia for a year when I was 8, and I discovered the beloved children’s books that were unknown in the States. I learned what I now know was antique British slang, like ‘topping’ - what now would be ‘brilliant’ (yes?). And a rug was a blanket. ‘Lashings’ was ‘a lot.’ And so on. The stories were dull. But E. Nesbit! What a joy. I wonder if I would like her books now.
Gosh (we you may also have read in those books), I haven't heard the word “topping” used in that sense since I was a child, probably while reading similar books! I guess “brilliant” is a close contemporary equivalent, as you say. “Spiffing” was another such word, quite similar in meaning, the kind of word I associate with Bertie Wooster somehow. I'm also curious about how Nesbit sounds now…
Not exactly the same, but it took me ages to get over the film 'Good bye Christopher Robin.' I loved all of the Pooh books so dearly. I hope you are feeling better now Jeffrey and funnily enough I too gravitate towards Rupert & friends when I am poorly.
It's a beautiful film in many ways - but I always find anything to do with WWI especially disturbing and in this case, it's a double whammy of the already sadly distant relationship between father and son against a backdrop of Milne being traumatized by the war. It's no Paddington let's put it that way lol.
Myriad features of my childhood led to my being introduced to almost none of the classic literature written for children or typically enjoyed by children. The second-rate (third?) American Hardy Boys mysteries come the closest. Lots of third-rate (fourth?) instead, alongside many classic Hollywood movies easily consumed in fantasy by a child. Very few on revisiting in later adulthood have retained their charm. I find related instruction in the history of child actors among the 1950s and 60s sitcoms that played so fundamental a role in creating the wholesome and imaginary world that fills MAGA fantasy. Many of these actors, in contrast to the worlds their characters inhabited, were victims of bad parenting and abandoned by Hollywood when their adult appeal failed to match their younger charm. Quite a few struggled in adulthood, including poverty, drug addiction, and suicide. A much darker tale but a true one.
I grew up in a time and place where children's book was an oddity. My first readings were actually classic literature for adults, but before I could read, stories like the One Thousand and One Nights, or those by Hans Christian Andersen were read to me, by my mother. There will forever be magic in those stories (and I just downloaded the complete Andersen works to my Kindle)!
Thank you for adding that perspective, Yi! I can well imagine the enduring magic of those stories read to you by your mother. I have no recollection of my mother reading me any stories as a child. Maybe that's why I learnt to read an an early age 😊.
Thanks for this great post and hope that you have enjoyed good health in the interim between this story and now. I ordered Mr. Twiddle and The Wind and the Willows. I am not reading them because I am sick. Rather I enjoy the word Twiddle, and I enjoy silliness and adventure and all the wonderful possibilities of life. And while thinking of this I hear a police siren that indicates some sort of hopelessness occurring out there that will need to be sorted out. And in the literary world and society the jaggedness of temporary emergency is more serious and more worthy to be written about then Mr. Twiddle or the adventures of Mr. Toad. And I guess my sickness is that the protagonist of my first novel is not jagged or Mick Jagger enough to be interesting and the protagonist of my 2nd novel is learning to be jagged but might not turn out to be jagged enough to be interesting. But the power of Mr. Twiddle and Mr. Toad is in their ability to be themselves and seize the day in terms of adventurous possibility. Twiddle and Toad may be underachieving simpletons, but they were able to appeal to children and more simple minded adults who hadn't turned jagged like Mr. Ripley and his authoress, Patricia Highsmith. Now instead of hearing the sound of a police siren, I hear the nursery jingle of an ice cream truck alerting the simple minded to the joys of ice cream in middle October prior to all the Halloween jaggery.
Thank you for that lyrical response, Larry! I enjoyed this: "Now instead of hearing the sound of a police siren, I hear the nursery jingle of an ice cream truck alerting the simple minded to the joys of ice cream in middle October prior to all the Halloween jaggery." I'll take the ice cream truck every time.
Glad you enjoyed it. I enjoy your tales of life in England and then outside it everywhere you go. In the small New Jersey town I live in, the ice cream trucks are a relic from a kinder time that persists and the driver/sellers of mostly soft cold milky cream custard out of spigots are a unique breed like Bruce Springsteen. They hibernate about now although will venture out and about on an Indian summer sort of warm autumn day. Like the first birds, the ice cream truck jungles, announce the arrival of spring sometimes as early as April. If you happen upon any similar holdover curiosities like these in Japan, it would be great to learn of them although there may have been previous posts I missed.
When I find myself incapacitated whether through sickness or the occasional surrendering to the weight of the world. It will be to Danny The Champion of the World I go.
I was a fan of Blyton as a child as well as the wild Wind in the Willows. Roald Dahl’s romping abandonment and humor overtook when I was about 9, I’d say. Starting with BFG and the Twits. Danny became my true favorite though.
His books have plenty of problematic parts, I imagine less than Blyton for what that’s worth.
The plucky courage to persevere, to puzzle a way through adversity and adversaries, became a beloved theme for me. Danny like many main characters is an unlikely hero coming from difficult circumstances. A gentle hero full of tenderness in a cruel world of adults.
Dahl’s usual heavy dollop of humor countering the predicament of being alive, in a world full of unfairness. ) though albeit at the expense of others) gave me, as a child some hint of freedom that I could shake off much of what I was being given to me and find my own way.
Thank you, Elizabeth. Your description of Danny as "a gentle hero full of tenderness in a cruel world of adults" makes me want to go back to Dahl, though these days I seem mostly to encounter him in films of the books.
I read all the Famous Five books several times over when I was a kid. Never could get into the Secret Seven though. Thanks for the memories.
I think it was the Noddy books, and particularly the Golliwog character - remember also the Golly on the Roberston's jam labels? - that did her reputation in.
Pish-posh and fiddlesticks; I enjoyed reading Blyton when I was younger and I liked how different series were available through the age groups. Noddy, The Famous Five, The Secret Seven and then the 'Adventure Series.' In my boredom, I even read the Mallory Towers series.
I wouldn't touch them now though, and my children never read them.
Another author who has been banned is Hugh Lofting. The unfortunate stereotypes and cartoonish caricatures do not stand up today. But, the imagination and sheer delight of exploration do.
So much of today's 'literature' is just so damn worthy- where is the joy?
THanks, James. I just looked up Lofting's bio - I hadn't realised that he studied at MIT. When my kis were growing up, some time ago now, among the most compelling books for them were the Horrible Histories and similar series. “Real life” turned out to be as much fun as fiction!
I was also recently ill with a very nasty virus, including high fever. I made the mistake of trying to read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials - as my fever rose, the fantasy descriptions from the books took on a hallucinatory quality that was not restful.
In childhood, I read Bylton's Mallory Towers books, about an English public school with great interest, simply because the idea of boarding school seemed, well, exotic to a working-class Canadian child. But as I grew older, Blyton's books were among those I grew out of, even though other classic children's novels have remained enjoyable. I cannot really remember any controversial aspects to her books - it was simply that while Blyton's level of writing is a little better than the syndicate the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys mysteries, it isn't as good as Tolkien or Lewis or even Noel Streatfield, Elizabeth Goudge, or Rosemary Sutcliff, who all wrote children's novels that deserve more notice.
Yes, I agree that Blyton suffers by comparison with better writers like those you mention. I may be wrong, but it's hard to se her winning new generations of readers.
Blyton was fortunate to die at a time when she still had a solid reputation, though I would suspect that if she had lived longer she might have been able to refute her critics.
Your comment made me think of fallen idols and how our cultural landscapes are littered with them. Which made me think of The Fallen Idol, a film which paints no wholesome world of fantasy in our near past (I think you're a Greene fan, too?).
This touched me on a couple of of levels—first because every childhood illness meant a shower of books from the library, chosen by my mother with a keen understanding of my interests. It also sent me riffling through my files for a very old article on Blyton and her quietly miserable family that appeared in The Telegraph. I saved the piece because tge family was so intriguingly strange.
Blyton had two daughters who became estranged and gave sharply differing accounts of growing up with Blyton. One chose to focus on the good in her mother. The other said, “She could love the children who were her readers. It was only her own children who failed to capture her love.”
That quote about Blyton! It almost has the lapidary elegance of a sentence from a Mauriac novel. And it makes Blyton sound a bit like Dickens' Mrs Jellyby with her "telescopic philanthropy".
Get better soon and thank you for this essay. It’s perilous to read childhood favourites. The Children of Cherry Tree Farm literally changed my life (it wasn’t until I was 41, but eventually I went away to the country to ‘simply run wild’ after an illness). And Tammylan the Wild man is an interesting and unusually positive depiction of PTSD. And yet… the general lack or compassion for others shocked me, even at the time. I read, ‘Oh, Sammy’ [The Sunshine Book] and it was very clear to me that if Sammy was trying his hardest and still making mistakes or missteps, then it was both cruel and counter-productive to punish him. By the time I was in my 20s I had a word for Sammy’s ‘dreaminess’, ‘laziness’ and ‘carelessnes’: neurodivergent. Like Mr Twiddle, the message was to tow the normative line or be despised. Kids are very good at reading such subtext.
Thank you, Michelle. I guess you're right that reading childhood favourites is a risky business. And yes, we pick up a lot of attitudes from our childhood reading without knowing it.
Oh childhood books. I am still haunted by 'Marianne Dreams' by Catherine Storr....
Somehow that book passed me by. Is it too later, I wonder, to read it now…
Don’t! I still dream about those wretched stones….
It is a strangeness I'm certain because I believe we are similar ages Jeffrey, or at least close enough to have shared a similar choice of children's reading, yet, I don't recall ever seeing anything written by Enid Blyton on the bookshelves or balanced, as they often were, on our bedside tables and now I am intrigued as to why? Of course, now, the answer may take some investigation but I feel, knowing my parents both loved reading, that there must have been good reason. Or perhaps not...
I do hope you are much recovered now, many days later — my apologies for tardy reading, it certainly didn't detract from the enjoyment!
Thank you, Susie. I think in our case Blyton was there partly because my mother had loved the Faraway Tree novels as a child. She was a dreamer, who spent much of her years as an evacuee on her own with just children's books and her own thoughts to sustain her. But you also make me reflect what else was in the house (I'm not sure we had a bookcase as such) and I know I read the Water Babies. Much of my reading was done at school but I don't think that book would have been there, so it must have been at home. Nor do I think it was part of the travelling library that used to appear occasionally, and which was a lifeline for my mother, who was never without a book when she got a moment to rest. Odd to think of Charles Kingsley and Enid Blyton side by side on the bedside table…
We lived in Australia for a year when I was 8, and I discovered the beloved children’s books that were unknown in the States. I learned what I now know was antique British slang, like ‘topping’ - what now would be ‘brilliant’ (yes?). And a rug was a blanket. ‘Lashings’ was ‘a lot.’ And so on. The stories were dull. But E. Nesbit! What a joy. I wonder if I would like her books now.
Gosh (we you may also have read in those books), I haven't heard the word “topping” used in that sense since I was a child, probably while reading similar books! I guess “brilliant” is a close contemporary equivalent, as you say. “Spiffing” was another such word, quite similar in meaning, the kind of word I associate with Bertie Wooster somehow. I'm also curious about how Nesbit sounds now…
Not exactly the same, but it took me ages to get over the film 'Good bye Christopher Robin.' I loved all of the Pooh books so dearly. I hope you are feeling better now Jeffrey and funnily enough I too gravitate towards Rupert & friends when I am poorly.
I haven't seen the film “Goodbye Christopher Robin.” Should I avoid it?
It's a beautiful film in many ways - but I always find anything to do with WWI especially disturbing and in this case, it's a double whammy of the already sadly distant relationship between father and son against a backdrop of Milne being traumatized by the war. It's no Paddington let's put it that way lol.
Thank you for the useful background and perspective! 🙏
Hope you feel better soon!!
I also loved Kairos 💙
Hope you can at least read some other gems if you are still recovering, Troy.
Myriad features of my childhood led to my being introduced to almost none of the classic literature written for children or typically enjoyed by children. The second-rate (third?) American Hardy Boys mysteries come the closest. Lots of third-rate (fourth?) instead, alongside many classic Hollywood movies easily consumed in fantasy by a child. Very few on revisiting in later adulthood have retained their charm. I find related instruction in the history of child actors among the 1950s and 60s sitcoms that played so fundamental a role in creating the wholesome and imaginary world that fills MAGA fantasy. Many of these actors, in contrast to the worlds their characters inhabited, were victims of bad parenting and abandoned by Hollywood when their adult appeal failed to match their younger charm. Quite a few struggled in adulthood, including poverty, drug addiction, and suicide. A much darker tale but a true one.
I grew up in a time and place where children's book was an oddity. My first readings were actually classic literature for adults, but before I could read, stories like the One Thousand and One Nights, or those by Hans Christian Andersen were read to me, by my mother. There will forever be magic in those stories (and I just downloaded the complete Andersen works to my Kindle)!
Thank you for adding that perspective, Yi! I can well imagine the enduring magic of those stories read to you by your mother. I have no recollection of my mother reading me any stories as a child. Maybe that's why I learnt to read an an early age 😊.
Thanks for this great post and hope that you have enjoyed good health in the interim between this story and now. I ordered Mr. Twiddle and The Wind and the Willows. I am not reading them because I am sick. Rather I enjoy the word Twiddle, and I enjoy silliness and adventure and all the wonderful possibilities of life. And while thinking of this I hear a police siren that indicates some sort of hopelessness occurring out there that will need to be sorted out. And in the literary world and society the jaggedness of temporary emergency is more serious and more worthy to be written about then Mr. Twiddle or the adventures of Mr. Toad. And I guess my sickness is that the protagonist of my first novel is not jagged or Mick Jagger enough to be interesting and the protagonist of my 2nd novel is learning to be jagged but might not turn out to be jagged enough to be interesting. But the power of Mr. Twiddle and Mr. Toad is in their ability to be themselves and seize the day in terms of adventurous possibility. Twiddle and Toad may be underachieving simpletons, but they were able to appeal to children and more simple minded adults who hadn't turned jagged like Mr. Ripley and his authoress, Patricia Highsmith. Now instead of hearing the sound of a police siren, I hear the nursery jingle of an ice cream truck alerting the simple minded to the joys of ice cream in middle October prior to all the Halloween jaggery.
Thank you for that lyrical response, Larry! I enjoyed this: "Now instead of hearing the sound of a police siren, I hear the nursery jingle of an ice cream truck alerting the simple minded to the joys of ice cream in middle October prior to all the Halloween jaggery." I'll take the ice cream truck every time.
Glad you enjoyed it. I enjoy your tales of life in England and then outside it everywhere you go. In the small New Jersey town I live in, the ice cream trucks are a relic from a kinder time that persists and the driver/sellers of mostly soft cold milky cream custard out of spigots are a unique breed like Bruce Springsteen. They hibernate about now although will venture out and about on an Indian summer sort of warm autumn day. Like the first birds, the ice cream truck jungles, announce the arrival of spring sometimes as early as April. If you happen upon any similar holdover curiosities like these in Japan, it would be great to learn of them although there may have been previous posts I missed.
When I find myself incapacitated whether through sickness or the occasional surrendering to the weight of the world. It will be to Danny The Champion of the World I go.
I was a fan of Blyton as a child as well as the wild Wind in the Willows. Roald Dahl’s romping abandonment and humor overtook when I was about 9, I’d say. Starting with BFG and the Twits. Danny became my true favorite though.
His books have plenty of problematic parts, I imagine less than Blyton for what that’s worth.
The plucky courage to persevere, to puzzle a way through adversity and adversaries, became a beloved theme for me. Danny like many main characters is an unlikely hero coming from difficult circumstances. A gentle hero full of tenderness in a cruel world of adults.
Dahl’s usual heavy dollop of humor countering the predicament of being alive, in a world full of unfairness. ) though albeit at the expense of others) gave me, as a child some hint of freedom that I could shake off much of what I was being given to me and find my own way.
Thank you, Elizabeth. Your description of Danny as "a gentle hero full of tenderness in a cruel world of adults" makes me want to go back to Dahl, though these days I seem mostly to encounter him in films of the books.
I read all the Famous Five books several times over when I was a kid. Never could get into the Secret Seven though. Thanks for the memories.
I think it was the Noddy books, and particularly the Golliwog character - remember also the Golly on the Roberston's jam labels? - that did her reputation in.
Thanks, John. Yes, I think the Noddy books became at some point firmly beyond the pale.
I later moved on to the Biggle books - which are probably not without issues also.
Yes, Biggles has issues too.
Pish-posh and fiddlesticks; I enjoyed reading Blyton when I was younger and I liked how different series were available through the age groups. Noddy, The Famous Five, The Secret Seven and then the 'Adventure Series.' In my boredom, I even read the Mallory Towers series.
I wouldn't touch them now though, and my children never read them.
Another author who has been banned is Hugh Lofting. The unfortunate stereotypes and cartoonish caricatures do not stand up today. But, the imagination and sheer delight of exploration do.
So much of today's 'literature' is just so damn worthy- where is the joy?
THanks, James. I just looked up Lofting's bio - I hadn't realised that he studied at MIT. When my kis were growing up, some time ago now, among the most compelling books for them were the Horrible Histories and similar series. “Real life” turned out to be as much fun as fiction!
My son devoured HH. Lofting also served in WWI.
I was also recently ill with a very nasty virus, including high fever. I made the mistake of trying to read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials - as my fever rose, the fantasy descriptions from the books took on a hallucinatory quality that was not restful.
In childhood, I read Bylton's Mallory Towers books, about an English public school with great interest, simply because the idea of boarding school seemed, well, exotic to a working-class Canadian child. But as I grew older, Blyton's books were among those I grew out of, even though other classic children's novels have remained enjoyable. I cannot really remember any controversial aspects to her books - it was simply that while Blyton's level of writing is a little better than the syndicate the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys mysteries, it isn't as good as Tolkien or Lewis or even Noel Streatfield, Elizabeth Goudge, or Rosemary Sutcliff, who all wrote children's novels that deserve more notice.
I hope you are fully recovered, Holly!
Yes, I agree that Blyton suffers by comparison with better writers like those you mention. I may be wrong, but it's hard to se her winning new generations of readers.
Blyton was fortunate to die at a time when she still had a solid reputation, though I would suspect that if she had lived longer she might have been able to refute her critics.
I'm sure she would have had plenty to say!
Your comment made me think of fallen idols and how our cultural landscapes are littered with them. Which made me think of The Fallen Idol, a film which paints no wholesome world of fantasy in our near past (I think you're a Greene fan, too?).