Traumatised

I’m traumatised. I feel as if I’ve just discovered that a sweet little old auntie who used to tell me bedtime stories when I was a child had been a crazed children-devouring witch all along, hiding her fiendish cackle behind tales of jolly adventures and lashings of ginger beer.

I adored Enid Blyton as a child, like several million other kids around the world for many generations. It was because of her books that I longed to come to England and have spiffing adventures. It was her books that made me want to become a writer. I loved the spy-like antics of The Secret Seven and the jolly decent gang that was The Famous Five (though, not being an animal lover, I could never figure out why Timmy the dog counted as one of the five…). I think the Five is the series that most people remember fondly, identifying as one or other of the kids. For me it was a toss up between being Julian - oldest and in charge (read bossy) - and George, the tomboy. Dick was a bit nothingy. And never, ever, in a million years, ever girly, frilly, femmy Anne! There was also that series of books that had titles like The Something of Adventure - what’s interesting about my memory of this series is that I don’t really remember the children in it but it was the relationship between the mother and the adult male figure that caught my attention. Hmm, I wonder what that’s all about!

OK, I know, I know. Enid Blyton did not at any time devour children. But the other week, as I was watching the BBC 4 biopic of her life, Enid, I was horrified and traumatised by how casually cruel she was to her own two children - and maliciously vindictive to her first husband Hugh - while appearing in her books and in public as a charming author who was in touch with all little children all over the world.

Helena Bonham Carter plays the author with just the right mixture of childlike fragility and hard hearted coldness. Her cut glass accent sends chills down your spine as she lashes out at her poor Hugh and dismisses her children. At the same time, there is a tragic, lonely aspect to her portrayal, drawn out in close up shots of her haunted eyes.

The theme of the biopic was Enid’s almost pathological need to escape real life - and that it is this escapism that connects with her kiddy readership while at the same time destroying her ability to connect with the real people in her life. And I guess that’s why we all used to read her as kids and now as adults read other kinds of fiction - as escapes into adventure, love, comedy and so on. I know that feeling of escaping into an inner world to create fiction, too - when I was writing my two novels, I would have a sense of drifting between reality and my made-up world in my head. Sometimes, I’d be physically present and doing things and even chatting to my partner or friends but I’d be somewhere else completely. My partner, as you’d expect, didn’t like that at all.

Nor ultimately, did I. It’s disorienting and strange and it struck me that perhaps, this is how one might go mad - if the inner world became too strong or too attractive and you just gave in to it, disappeared inward altogether. All that would be left on the outside would be a body - functioning perfunctorily for awhile and then just sitting or lying and staring into nothing, while inside the dramas, the tears, the joy, the laughter, the thrills and spills would be filling your mind and soul.

So at some level, I think I gave up on writing fiction after my second book. Sure, on the face of it, I tried to keep the writing going, working on several synopses and draft third novels over a few years. But my heart - and my mind - wasn’t in it. I wanted to be here in the real world, living my real life and not a life of fiction in my head.

At the end of Enid Blyton’s life, she slipped into dementia. In the biopic, this was expressed as part of the spectrum of her need to escape and we are left with a poignant image of her sitting on a small kiddy’s chair after a book reading, happily leafing through one of her own books, laughing softly to herself.

Photo: of Helena Bonham Carter as Enid Blyton, thanks to The Life of Wylie