![]() She’s always busy, she always has chores for the kids, which is fine, but she doesn’t seem loving at all. For example, in the books for younger children, The Faraway Tree series say, the mother is sketchily described. She was never close to her mother, and she doesn’t seem to have forgiven her father either, she didn’t attend either of their funerals.īad mothers abound in Blyton’s books, but you have to look for them carefully. rabbit, but he left their family when Enid was thirteen to go live with another woman. Thomas is the one who instilled a love of nature in young Enid, so evident throughout her books, the robins chirp, the flowers bloom, the rabbits. (I have just discovered there’s a BIOPIC starring HELENA BONHAM CARTER, must see if I can get a hold of it!) She was born to a salesman (of women’s clothes) Thomas Carey Blyton and his wife, Theresa Mary. By the ‘50s, people were already objecting to her work, it seemed too sexist, too racist, too unchallenged to still be in kid’s libraries. Okay, a lot of those were short fables and stories for children, but FIFTY. What was so funny?) I understood, see, at age 5, that there were books that would challenge you and help you grow, and let you learn things as you grew older, and there were books that were comforting and soothed you and would feel good to read, yes, but would let you stay in exactly the same space of reading development for as long as you liked.Įnid Mary Blyton always denied that she used ghost writers, but she wrote about fifty books a year. At age 5, I proclaimed, “I love reading Enid Blyton but I think I’m too old for her.” (This was recorded for posterity in a school magazine and all the adults laughed, while I was bemused. Why are we pandering so much? Next they’ll change Jo in Little Women to Josie or something and then you’ll all cry.), I had always had a Wishing Chair in which I could fly to faraway places with Chinky the pixie (okay, I get why they had to change his name to Binky or Winky), I prepared to go to Mallory Towers or St Clare’s, I solved mysteries with Fatty and his friends, slipped the password to the Secret Seven, went for rambling nature walks with Uncle Merry and joined the circus with Mr Galliano. Every Blyton entered my life as though it had always been there: I had always roamed through the Enchanted Wood with Jo, Bessie and Fanny (changed I believe for modern children, now they are Joe, Beth and Frannie, as though kids will no longer be able to RELATE to a kid called Bessie or Fanny. So much so that I can’t remember the first book of hers I read, nor the last. It is a joy to be Books Auntie, sprinkling good things down on these kids and watching them discover Roald Dahl, for example, for the first time, but I have to do all my shopping in advance, from Amazon, which, as you know, is evil and killing authors and publishers with their heavy discounts.Įnid Blyton made up my childhood. Not a Richard Scarry book in sight! Once, standing next to a father and a daughter, I heard him tell her to pick out a book of mythology, which is fine, everyone should know the old stories but must it be constant and must it be a chore and must it be the only thing your child is reading? I read wildly in my youth and only got to the myths when I was reading the Amar Chitra Katha comics to myself and I am now somewhat of an expert as you know so see, reading Enid Blyton or Astrid Lingdren in my childhood did not irrevocably corrupt me for everything else. It’s all 101 Stories About Ganesha and 20 Stories From The Ramayana mixed up with random Frozen merch. Forget the more esoteric stuff (although would we call Pippi Longstocking esoteric?) there’s hardly any picture book classics, no Where The Wild Things Are or even The Cat In The Hat. ![]() Anyway, unless it’s a dedicated children’s bookstore (Bahri Kids is nice in Delhi and Lightroom in Bangalore is even better), the selection in most shops is terrible. This is pre-COVID, you understand, when I could still browse in a small shop shoulder to shoulder with other patrons. Many a time I have been stuck at the last minute without a present and since I physically cannot go to a child’s birthday party without a present and since my presents are almost always books (this often pleases the parent more than the child I think but oh well, someday they’ll be happy with the books I give them) I used to stop off at the closest bookstore to pick out something for them. SEGUE: A RANT ABOUT THE CHILDREN’S SECTION IN BOOKSTORES Enid, also wondering what the world has come to
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