Lashings of Enid Blyton

I used to enjoy reading some of the books of Enid Blyton when I was a little girl, though she was far from being among my favourite authors. Even at the age of seven or so, when I began to discover her for the first time, I could see that there was something not quite right about the way she presented the world, something belonging to a past age, both in her use of language and her depiction of character.

Still, there was something sumptuous about her child-centred world, the world of the Famous Five and the Secret Seven. Five on a Treasure Island, the very first in that series, was my favourite, appealing to an insatiable romantic thirst for ruined castles and remote places, a thirst that has stayed with me to this day!

I knew the books, at least some of them, though nothing at all about the author. Now, I do; at least I do if the depiction of her in Enid, a BBC Four drama, is anything to go by. In this Blyton is played by Helena Bonham-Carter, a brilliant and convincing performance. But my, oh my; what a monster she creates, a self-absorbed, self-centred woman; a woman who loved her devoted fans but neglected her own daughters, a woman who behaved abominably towards her first husband.

I can’t say how much accuracy there is here as one has always to assume a certain amount of poetic license and dramatic foreshortening, but I assume the outlines of what purported to be a biopic were broadly correct. If so, she comes across as a kind of literary Cruella Deville, at least that’s how Bonham-Carter played her, though she also managed to capture something of her vulnerability, fleeting though it was.

At the beginning of the drama we are shown how devoted Enid was to her father, a man she continued to idealise all of her life, even though he abandoned her and her siblings at an early age. It’s possible, I suppose, that her own callousness and indifference to so many around her was born of an emptiness induced by this early trauma, compensated for in a world of eternal sunshine, of eternal childhood, of wrecks and castles, of heaps of tomatoes and lashings of ginger beer.

Thomas, a Really Sexist Little Engine

Thomas the Tank Engine, I confess, was one of my formative influences. I loved the simple little tales of W. V. Awdry about railway folk, tales that helped with my early reading. No pre-school Christmas would have been complete, moreover, without seeing Thomas on video, all voiced by Ringo Starr. But I wasn’t being delighted and entertained, you see, I was being indoctrinated; for, according to Professor Shauna Wilton, these stories are not only sexist but they also present a ‘conservative political ideology.’ Ah, so that’s where my politics come from; I’ve long wondered about this very point, having no other influences on my life!

Wilton, an assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Alberta, seemingly researched twenty-three episodes of the TV series before reaching her weighty conclusions. Parents are now warned against the malign influence of Thomas and chums, warned that girls, badly underrepresented, or shunted into secondary roles, might be driven off the rails altogether in later life after subconsciously absorbing such a negative message.

The dear Prof puffs on that the show represents an ideology that punishes individual initiative, opposes critique and change and relegates females to supportive roles. It’s clearly not a Thatcherite message then!

Where does this silliness end? Yes, it’s funny, not to be taken seriously by anyone with any capacity at all for critical thought, but what arrogance and condescension this silly woman shows. Children find all sorts of things amusing but they are just little people with the capacity to decide what is useful and what is not, what is real and what is not. The Awdry stories were written for a past age, a gentler age, it might be said, but if we start censoring them for a correct contemporary message we begin a journey with no end. What about The Wind in the Willows, my favourite childhood story, replete with an antiquated class message. After all, what are the weasels but a crowd of stupid chavs! I could add lots of others, I’m sure you could too, including just about everything by Enid Blyton.

If I ever have a little girl she and I will sit down to enjoy the pre-politically correct days of Thomas and Toad and all the rest of these wonderful unregenerate characters from the past that do so much to stimulate the imagination. Oh, and she will wear pink. I loved pink when I was little and it did me no har...excuse me I think I'm about to go off the rails. :-))