Timble2
Imaginary Person
- Joined
- Feb 9, 2003
- Messages
- 6,064
- Location
- In a Liminal Zone
We've had Bible Codes, Da Vinci Codes, Shakespeare Codes now we have the The Enid Blyton Code....
Gosh! Mystery of how Blyton got her revenge
New biography claims the beloved children's author hid a secret code in her work to make cruel jokes at the expense of her first husband
Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent
Sunday September 23, 2007
The Observer
Enid Blyton's books have a reputation for innocence, innocence even to the point of banality, with their handy clues, helpful dogs and lashings of parochial adventure. The truth, however, may be rather less cosy.
A new biography of the writer, who is still loved by hundreds of millions of readers all over the world, has discovered a strain of cleverly disguised domestic spite running through her series of children's books.
Writer Duncan McClaren has researched the real-life connections and resonances in the many books that Blyton wrote during her prolific career for his new study, Looking for Enid: The Mysterious and Inventive Life of Enid Blyton
While McClaren argues the novelist's imaginative powers and wit have been vastly under-rated, he has also found evidence one of her silliest characters, the bumbling local policeman of Peterswood in the highly successful Mystery books, was, in fact, a prolonged and sometimes cruel joke at the expense of her first husband, Major Hugh Pollock.
Throughout the series of 15 books, PC Goon is repeatedly humiliated and bested by a gang of five smart children known as The Finder-Outers - Fatty, Larry, Daisy, Pip and Bets, not forgetting Buster the dog. The Mystery books, like her other adventure series, The Famous Five and The Secret Seven, each involve solving a problem or crime and the book jackets were all marked with a magnifying glass and a fingerprint.
Applying his own magnifying glass to the text now, McClaren believes Blyton was laughing at Pollock, the influential older man she married in 1924.
'Enid loved riddles as a child and had developed a secret code, which I call the box and dot code, which she used to write postcards to her friends,' he said. 'Ostensibly, the Mysteries are about the solving of mysteries by the Five Finder-Outers and Dog,' he argues in his book, 'To a large degree, the books are really about the ridiculing of Goon.'
The biographer's theory, already vetted by members of the Enid Blyton Society, fits the facts neatly, he claims, and the full name of the fictional policeman involved provided his first clue.
'In the first Mystery written in 1943, The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage, the pattern is set. Fatty and the gang pit their wits against the local policeman, PC Goon,' said McClaren this weekend, going on to explain that in the second book Blyton 'gives this buffoon of an authority figure' the unlikely Christian name of Theophilus.
'In The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat, for instance, the sentence is, "If I don't force a confession out of him, my name's not Theophilus Goon". I noticed that this sentence type, ending with "my name's not Theophilus Goon", was repeated in several books,' he said.
McClaren then played with a series of mildly abusive anagrams of Theophilus Goon involving the name 'Hugh', such as 'O Hugh Spoilt One'. He had recalled the fictional Peterswood setting of these books had already been established by Blyton scholars as Bourne End, the real Buckinghamshire village where the author shared a home with Pollock and their two daughters, Gillian and Imogen. This was also the place where the marriage broke down and where, as revealed in Barbara Stoney's 1974 biography of Blyton, Pollock used to retire alone to the cellar to drink.
Clue Number Two is the cellar itself, which recurs as a motif in several books. At the conclusion of The Mystery of the Secret Room, Fatty locks the unfortunate PC Goon in a dirty cellar overnight.
But perhaps one of the most persuasive new clues follows from the idea that Blyton came to regard her first husband as imaginatively hamstrung.
Although Pollock was a well-connected publisher and instrumental in launching Blyton's career, McClaren suggests he soon resented his wife's success.
'Enid was an extraordinarily creative person with very easy access to her imagination,' McClaren said.
'What surprised me when I looked into it was not just that everything that ever happened to her would be used in some way in her writing, but the most important things that happened to her became fundamental to her writing.'
In The Mystery of the Vanished Prince, PC Goon vainly tries to speak in a fake foreign language, something the children have done to fool him earlier on in the book. He is unable to relax into this childishness, just as Pollock could not follow Blyton into letting 'her mind go free' when she wrote. 'When you've got the imagination that Enid had, and the playful intelligence, and the hurt from the breakdown of the marriage, then that makes it almost too easy for her to put together a literary revenge,' McClaren said.
The biographer also believes Blyton's emotional development was arrested at the age of 12 when her parents' marriage broke up. 'That kind of froze her and explains why so much of her work deals with pre-adolescents,' he argues.
The Mystery books were written during her happy second marriage to the surgeon Kenneth Waters, at a period when she was writing an average of 5,000 words a day and turning out 20 books a year across all her many series, including The Malory Towers books and those set at St Clare's.
For McClaren it is this extraordinary childlike fluency that makes Blyton's books still so appealing to children and so charming for adults.
Some of the clues
The name: PC Theophilus Goon
The character's unlikely name was not chosen by Blyton in her usual way (using a telephone directory) and is one of few that would let her create anagrams using her ex-husband's first name, Hugh (eg O Hugh Spoilt One, O Let Hugh Poison). The phrase 'or my name's not Theophilus Goon' turns up repeatedly.
The cellar
PC Goon's humiliations include being locked by Fatty in a cellar overnight. During the breakdown of Blyton's first marriage her husband drank alone in the cellar of their Buckinghamshire home.
A lack of imagination
Among PC Goon's faults is the inability to think and behave like a child. Goon, for instance, cannot 'let his tongue go free' and make up a silly language, as the children do in The Mystery of the Vanished Prince. He can get no further than 'abbledy, abbledy, abbledy'.
