First Page Excerpts [please, note that italics and other formats are not reproduced in this excerpt] ---------------------------------------------------------- Enid Blyton: The Mystery Revealed Hugh Crago 3 Not in front of the children! The Patrick Hardy Lecture Jacqueline Wilson 17 Odysseys: The Childness of Journeying Children Peter Hollindale 29 Ethel Talbot David Grugeon 45 Brethren’s Child Ethel Talbot 47 ---------------------------------------------------------- Enid Blyton: The Mystery Revealed Hugh Crago So here it was, after so long--the book with the secret inside, the secret so many people had wondered about for so long! The secret of Enid Blyton! Hugh couldn’t wait to read it! He opened the first chapter. Gosh! The person who’d written this book actually thought the same thoughts as he had! It was almost as if he’d written some bits of it himself! Any reader of Enid Blyton will recognize her style in what I have just written. Imitating it and denigrating it are easy things to do. But how, as an intelligent adult, does one write about Blyton without attracting a similar denigration? How can one take seriously a writer whose very name is synonymous with ‘childish’, without courting scornful laughter? While David Rudd’s new book doesn’t totally live up to the promise of its title, Enid Blyton and the Mystery of Children’s Literature is founded on a wide-ranging scholarly research project, and delivers thought-provoking and controversial conclusions. For all those of us who for years have harboured the treasonable thought that Blyton is important, if only because of her immense readership and influence, here is the book we’ve been waiting for. It begins with style and authority: Enid Blyton was born in 1897, in fin-de-siècle England, just two years behind her fated contemporary, the golliwog. It was a time when the ‘cult of the child’ was pre-eminent and--with the invention of public cinema--a revolution in the media had just begun. But 1897 also saw the birth of Dracula and psychoanalysis (the term was coined the year before); in fact, Blyton and Freud share a final resting place, a crematorium at Golders Green. So while there was a celebration of innocence and purity on the one hand, there was a recognition of darkness and instability on the other. (1) That immediately announces the book’s range of reference. This is not kiddylit; this is cultural studies, invoking phenomena from racism to psychoanalysis, and theorists from Saussure to Lacan. Simultaneously, Rudd’s rhetoric tends to the neat wrap-up typical of postmodern writing. As London is a very large city with several crematoria, perhaps it is surprising that Freud and Blyton have ended up in the same one. However, there are doubtless other chance combinations of ashes that would seem equally significant. But in this kind of rhetoric, poetic rather than scientific, the selected com....... ---------------------------------------------------------- Not in front of the children! JACQUELINE WILSON It’s a great honour to be asked to give the Patrick Hardy Lecture--though a little terrifying! I’m not someone who usually gets nervous about speaking in public, which is just as well, because I bob up all over the place nowadays and talk incessantly to children, to teachers, to librarians, to family audiences. But I do mean talk. I might jot ideas down and clutch my notes for comfort but I usually just natter on in an informal manner though there’s generally an underlying structure to my talk and reasons why I might suddenly produce a toy rabbit and make it do tricks. Okay, what are these reasons? The main one is to surprise and entertain the children. That’s what I’m about. Occasionally teachers twitch a little because they’ve been hoping I’ll reinforce all the things children are supposed to learn in the literacy hour. They want me to tell them to make detailed plans and redraft and think hard about their paragraphs and punctuation. I can’t help feeling this approach utterly crushes any creative urge. Children should find writing fun. Why can’t they make up a story and rush through it right away? Why do they have to be so painstaking and pedantic? I know some teachers want me to give the children useful guidelines about writing stories and find it irritating if I waste time playing with bunnies. But there are other reasons apart from entertainment. My rabbit is a little toy mascot called Radish, who appears in a book of mine called The Suitcase Kid. It’s a story about a child going through a traumatic time when her parents divorce. I needed some way of comforting her and a device to ease the tension for my child readers. I often write sad stories so I need to have funny moments, cosy corners within the narrative to stop the book being too black and bleak. Children frequently regress during a family crisis so I thought my girl Andy would become heavily dependent on her toy rabbit and enter into many escapist imaginary games with her--and of course there would be total page-turning panic if the rabbit became lost. I tell the children how much Radish means to Andy, and even the toughest streetwise children understand. They don’t laugh at me when I produce the real toy rabbit. They seem delighted ... ---------------------------------------------------------- Odysseys: The Childness of Journeying Children PETER HOLLINDALE In this lecture I hope to examine the meeting-point between two subjects. The first is the journey as a life-event and metaphor. The second is the unstable complex of attitudes, values, beliefs and feelings that encompasses the phenomenon of childhood. This composite is held by all adults and children, though its nature changes from person to person and from one time to another. Elsewhere I have proposed the term ‘childness’ to represent it, and its main essentials are summarized below. When children go on a journey--any journey, whether in life or fictions--the complexities of childness are highlighted, especially if the children are unaccompanied by adults, above all if they are alone. A journey of any length and consequence, in life, contains a series of small or not-so-small collisions between the traveller and other people. If the traveller is a child, these encounters with both adults and other children will bring different constructions of childness, of what it is to be a child, into contact with each other. The same is true of fictitious journeys in children’s literature. The act of reading a story can itself be metaphorically understood as a journey. If the child’s journey of reading is tied to the fortunes and misfortunes of a fictitious journeying child, where the likelihood is that a series of chance encounters will finally assume an overall significance, we can expect that competing concepts of childness will confront each other in the story, and in so doing they will touch the reader’s own perceptions of childhood and of self. Before examining some illustrative texts, it may be helpful to separate out the two key terms--journey and childness--and set out the significance of each. Journeys One of the oldest imaginative anchors held by us as a species has been the idea that life is a journey. We have used Odysseus and Aeneas and their kind as vicarious navigators for our own life-journeys ever since recorded narrative began, and we still do. At the .... *********************** Ethel Talbot DAVID GRUGEON ‘Ethel Talbot must be reckoned one of the major writers of schoolgirl fiction if only by the volume of her output. But she stands out also by the emotional intensity of many of her books; readers are rarely neutral about her writing, either loving it or hating it. Either way, she remains an interesting, moving and unusual writer.’ Sue Sims & Hilary Clare The Encyclopedia of Girls’ School Stories (Ashgate, 2000) Aunt Ettie, as Ethel Talbot was known in our family, was born in 1880 and died in 1944. She was my father’s favourite aunt, very supportive of him when he went to university and broke away from his strict Plymouth Brethren upbringing, and even more so when he married a former drama student (an actress, a ‘painted lady’, as the family story had it) in 1932. I was aware that Aunt Ettie had also been brought up in a Plymouth Brethren household in Shrewsbury and that she had published a number of girls’ school stories. A couple of photos from the 1930s that were around in my childhood in the 40s and 50s showed a stylish person with an Eton crop, a long cigarette holder in one hand; another had her reclining in a hammock. Her output was prolific: from Billy the Scout and his Day of Adventures (1918) to Jane Steps Out (published posthumously in 1948), the British Library lists 118 books, mainly girls’ school and Guiding stories. There is also a vast contribution to annuals and a range of verse and prose in well-known publications. Brethren’s Child is a previously unpublished text of 53,000 words, originally sent to publishers from Chipstead in Surrey (as typed at the end of the manuscript), and subsequently from St John’s Wood, London, and Haywards Heath, Sussex (as in her handwriting on the front page). From this I surmise that this fictionalized memoir of her childhood in the 1880s and 1890s was constructed after she had become a successful author in the 1920s and may well have been drafted when she was around fifty. It is a remarkably ‘unprotected’ account, bearing out the ‘emotional intensity’ that Hilary Clare writes of. Brethren’s Child is written from the perspective of Ethel (‘Helen’) at age six. Older siblings appear as ‘Becky’, ‘Margaret’ and ‘Susy’; inscriptions in the family Bible list their real names: Grace Rebecca, Emily Margaret (my grandmother), and Sophie Susanna (whom I always knew as Auntie Sue). Younger siblings appear in the book as *******************