Shattering illusions

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Sophie Smallwood has spent most of her adult life keeping quiet about the fact that she is related to one of the most famous and successful children’s writers of the last century. She seldom mentions her lineage to friends and has never written or spoken about it publicly — until now. “People have certain expectations and close emotional feelings when they read my grandmother’s books. If they know who you are, you have to carry a lot of that. I don’t want to do that. When you talk about it, you end up having to answer questions, and it’s easier not to.”

But, today, Sophie has at least agreed to try. The reason, inevitably, is a book that lies on a coffee table between us; one she was invited to write last year to celebrate Noddy’s 60th birthday. Noddy and the Farmyard Muddle is a bright and jolly addition to the Blyton canon, which looks identical to all the others, the only difference being that this one carries Sophie’s name. “I am totally out of the closet. I can’t really hide now can I?” She laughs awkwardly, distinctly uncomfortable with this new reality.

We are sitting in the London offices of Chorion, the company that owns Enid Blyton’s estate. The family sold its interest in the estate in 1996 for £14m, which was divided between the writer’s daughters and other shareholders. Blyton’s books alone have sold more than 400m copies worldwide, a legacy that Sophie appears to find slightly embarrassing. She does seem a little out of place in such a slick, commercial environment. Shy and bookish, she says she much prefers the studious, anonymous life of teaching at a pre-school in West Sussex.

How long did it take her to write her own Noddy book? “Oh, not very long,” she says breezily. “Once I got started I mostly wrote it in one weekend... er, although, as you know, by the time you’re writing you’ve thought about it a lot beforehand.”
Sophie is generous about her grandmother, but also guarded. There is little warmth in her tone when she talks about her. “There were photographs of her in the family home and my mother would read her books to me but she was too big and famous to be just a grandmother,” says Sophie, now 38. “Enid Blyton was a publicly owned figure, so there wasn’t a sense of connection. She’s a name rather than a person, and that’s how I viewed her as I was growing up.”

Blyton’s past

Twenty years ago, Imogen Smallwood, Enid’s youngest daughter, wrote a candid memoir, A Childhood at Green Hedges, that shattered any illusion of Enid’s family life reflecting the cosy, idealised world of her fiction. At one point, Imogen writes, “The truth is, Enid Blyton was arrogant, insecure, pretentious, very skilled at putting difficult or unpleasant things out of her mind, and without a trace of maternal instinct. As a child, I viewed her as a rather strict authority. As an adult, I did not hate her. I pitied her.” Later she said in interview, “What Blyton did as a writer was brilliant. But as a person, as a parent, she was far from brilliant.”

Enid’s own upbringing had been far from happy — she didn’t get on with her own mother, but adored her father. As Sophie points out, “I don’t think she really had a model to follow because her own mother was so hard on her. They didn’t have a meeting of minds. Her mother wanted a dutiful daughter and she wanted to write.”
Aged 13, Enid was devastated when her parents decided to divorce. Her biographer Barbara Stoney suggests that, emotionally and even physically, her development froze at that crucial stage on the cusp of womanhood. “Which is why her writing is that of an intelligent 12-year-old,” says Sophie. “In my view that’s why adults find it difficult to relate to her because she doesn’t quite have the depth; it has that childlike quality.”

It explains why Enid wasn’t ideally suited to motherhood, if she was barely an adult herself. Instead she devoted her time, in the family home in Buckinghamshire, to Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy the dog’s latest adventures, while — according to Imogen — barely venturing into the nursery to visit her own children. “Most of my mother’s visits to the nursery were hasty, angry ones, rather than benevolent. The nursery was a lonely place,” she wrote. Yet Enid’s elder daughter, Gillian Baverstock, who died two years ago, didn’t agree at all. She said in one interview, “She was a fair and loving mother, and a fascinating companion.”

Which version of Enid does Sophie feel is more accurate? “I would say they were over four years apart in age and they each had different experiences,” says Sophie cautiously. “My mother had less attention because my grandmother was becoming so successful. She was working hard and there wasn’t time for anything else.” However, she does agree with her mother that Enid was anything but maternal. “I don’t think she was a mother,” she says pointedly. “No, not at all, not in the conventional sense.” Imogen’s memoir was published when Sophie was 16 and she felt proud of her mother’s decision to challenge the idyllic Blyton family image. “It was very fair and insightful. I think too it must have been very difficult to show the truth rather than accepting the assumption of a perfect mother because of the way that Enid wrote.”

It is fair to say that Imogen was determined to be a different sort of mother to her own two children.  “It was a very different time by then. Our dad died when I was one, and she was a single parent. She just had to get on with things,” says Sophie.
After he died, Imogen looked after her children full-time, and later taught and also studied psychotherapy. Sophie and her brother, who is now a pilot in Australia, spent most of their childhood in Oxford where they were surrounded by books — her father owned a bookshop. As a young girl, Sophie remembers being read to every night: “My mother was happy to read Enid Blyton to me — she enjoyed my favourite one, Secret Island, too.”

Stuck in childhood

We talk about AS Byatt’s latest novel, The Children’s Book, and Byatt’s thesis that often families of great children’s writers appear to be unhappy — particularly the offspring. Kenneth Grahame’s son killed himself when he was at Oxford, and Alison Uttley’s husband and only son also ended their own lives. Christopher Milne, AA Milne’s son, later hated the fact that he was immortalised in Winnie-the-Pooh.

Byatt suggests that it’s because some children’s authors wanted to extend their own childhoods, so their children had no place to be themselves. That must be all the more galling for children such as Imogen Smallwood — knowing that her mother was channelling so much energy into a perfect childhood that never existed at home. Sophie agrees with Byatt’s idea. “Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote to support herself and her family, and you wonder how much time her two children got from her.”

It’s not a life Sophie would like to emulate, and she has no plans to write another children’s book; if anything she would like to try adult fiction. Visibly relieved that our interview has finished, she can’t wait to scurry back to the privacy of her life in West Sussex where she lives quietly, alone. “Being related to Enid Blyton has always been a very private part of my life,” she reflects. “I tend to compartmentalise it so I can get on with everything else. I like the idea of disappearing back, because it’s so important to just be oneself.”