During Enid’s final term at St Christopher’s, the family had moved from Elm Road into a smaller, semi-detached house in nearby Westfield Road, which had only two main bedrooms and a boxroom for Theresa and her three teenaged children. The loss of the room at Elm Road that had meant so much to her and the impossibility in the smaller house of escaping for long from the critical eye of her mother drove Enid into spending more time than ever with Mabel and this inevitably aggravated the situation between mother and daughter. As the months passed, Enid’s frustrations grew, for she was now convinced that she was being made to work towards a career for which she was totally unsuited.
F
rom earliest childhood Enid had been schooled in the belief that she would eventually become a musician. She had always been told how much she resembled her Aunt May, both in looks and temperament, and knew that her father was convinced she possessed a similar musical talent. Year after year she had worked doggedly through examinations and practice sessions – not because she particularly enjoyed what she was doing, but because Thomas expected it of her. As she grew older, however, and writing became increasingly more important to her, she begrudged the long hours she was forced to spend at her piano. Playing and listening to music was enjoyable, up to a point, but the idea of working as a professional musician was a different matter. Creating and writing down the poems and stories that seemed to come to her so easily gave her far greater satisfaction for she knew she would never be able to express herself in the same way musically. She tried to explain this to Thomas on the rare occasions they met, but he refused to discuss any alternative to the career he had planned for her. It did not help that she had no substantial writing success with which to back up her argument – nor could she expect support from her mother, whose views on ‘Enid’s scribbling’ were only too apparent. When she left school there seemed little alternative but to follow through her father’s plans.
By the summer of 1916, however, after months of enforced piano practice and tuition from her music teacher, she felt she needed to get away, if only for a while, from the tensions and tedium of the life she was leading at home. As usual when she needed advice, she sought out Mabel Attenborough, who came up with a suggestion to which Enid eagerly agreed: that she should spend a short holiday with her friends, the Hunt family, at their farm in Suffolk.
The farm was run from Seckford Hall, a fifteenth-century mansion near Woodbridge, some seven miles out of Ipswich. Although it has since been completely restored, the rambling old house was then partly in ruins and only the portion rented by George and Emily Hunt for their family still retained something of its former glory. The Hunts were great friends of the Attenboroughs, who had spent many holidays at the Hall. For visiting children, the old Tudor building, with its ‘haunted’ bedroom, secret passage and surrounding farmland, was a source of constant delight. Many were the ‘battles’ fought in the decaying, partially roofed, banqueting hall, for its minstrels’ gallery remained intact and the seed potatoes stored here provided perfect ammunition for the bombardment of ‘enemies’ beneath.
Enid had heard all about Seckford Hall from Mary and Mabel Attenborough and was overjoyed at the prospect of a holiday in such a setting – especially as it gave her an opportunity to feed and tend the numerous animals on this large, mixed farm. The Blyton children had never been allowed to keep pets – a deprivation which possibly accounted for Enid’s intense love of animals which remained with her all her life. She often recalled her sadness at parting from ‘Chippy’, a small, bedraggled kitten she had once found on a common near her home and kept secretly until it was eventually discovered and sent away, for Thomas was happy to see wild creatures in their natural surroundings but had little interest in those of the domestic variety and his wife even less.
At Seckford Hall, with horses to ride and dogs to take on walks through the attractive Suffolk countryside, her worries about her future were temporarily forgotten. She went on long cycle rides, or to nearby beaches, with the Hunt sisters – Marjory and Ida – who, though a few years her senior, proved sympathetic companions. Their two brothers, William and Herbert, were both living away, one in the army and the other married, but the Hunt family were hosts to several young officers billeted at the Hall and there was always much friendly teasing and laughter in that happy household.
Ida was a Froebel-trained kindergarten teacher at Ipswich High School – a large day school for girls, with a trainee-teacher, kindergarten section. She also taught at the Woodbridge Congregational Sunday School. Enid went along with her most Sundays to help and Ida was surprised by the way the class seemed to respond to the inexperienced girl. This prompted her to ask if, with her obvious flair for handling young children, she had ever thought of taking up teaching. Up to then this was something that Enid had not even remotely considered but later that day she thought over what Ida had said.
She certainly enjoyed those Sunday School afternoons and her first close encounters with small children, for from the beginning she seemed to feel a close affinity with them. She loved helping to paint large pictures for the Sunday School walls, making the models and pieces of handwork which illustrated the lessons and, most of all, telling the children stories. From her own Sunday School days with Mary Attenborough at the Elm Road Baptist Church, she had learnt most of the Bible stories she now passed on to the children and found that, without much preparation, she could relate them with the same ease with which she wrote her own, as yet unpublished, stories at home. No ‘rejections’ from editors here – her listeners were always eager for more.
Quite suddenly, she knew what she must do – become a teacher. In that way she could carry on with her writing and if she were with children all day long – something that now appealed to her greatly – she would be able to study them closely and then, perhaps, learn how to write about and for them. Everything, she felt, had at last fallen into place.
It was typical of Enid that, having made a decision about something, she lost no time in acting upon it. She confirmed with Ida that it would be possible to begin a National Froebel Union course at Ipswich that September, provided her application was accepted, and then set about tackling the greatest obstacle of all – her father.
She walked to Woodbridge village to put through a telephone call to Thomas at his London office and told him that she proposed to give up her place at the music school in September and train instead as a kindergarten teacher at Ipswich High School. According to her own account of the incident, an astonished Thomas had replied: ‘How like you, Enid, to tell me these things over the telephone! Why must you be so headstrong? I must think about it. No, I can’t give you an answer now. Why, I didn’t even know you liked teaching!’
Enid said that she did and pleaded with him to agree to sign her application form, adding, ‘You can think about it afterwards.’
Thomas’s sense of humour was always to the fore and he began to laugh. Many years afterwards Enid wrote that she could still hear that chuckle, so keyed up was she over the call that was to change the direction of her whole life. She was almost overcome with joy when he finally gave his agreement, but was often to wonder afterwards over his sudden capitulation. Was it that he saw a reflection of himself in the ‘headstrong’ decision of his daughter – or was it the phrenologist’s report, which Enid was to find among some old papers many years later, that eventually swayed him?
The phrenologist had visited the house in Clockhouse Road when Enid was about eight years old. Interested, as always, in furthering his knowledge of every subject, Thomas had invited the balding man with the sensitive fingers to ‘feel the bumps’ on his young daughter’s head. He was no doubt disappointed when the subsequent report made no mention of a musical ability but read instead: ‘This child will turn to teaching as she develops. It is, and will be, her great gift.’
Whether by luck or skill, the phrenologist was to prove uncannily right for, from the moment she entered her training school, Enid was, as she later described herself, ‘a round peg in a round hole’.
But there were other changes for Enid during her first year at Ipswich. Just as some six years previously her father had made a new start away from his family, so now did she. Hanly never knew exactly what happened to cause the break. It could be that Enid and her mother exchanged heated letters over the decision to give up her musical career, but it seems far more likely that the final severing of the family ties came about through non-communication on both sides. For reasons known only to herself, Enid may not have let Theresa know what she was about and may even have asked Thomas and Mabel to keep her movements secret. Theresa might well have stubbornly refused to write to her daughter until an equally obstinate Enid had written herself. This seems more probable, in view of Theresa’s strange explanation of Enid’s departure to enquiring relations and friends. She informed them that her daughter had left home, against her wishes, to join the Women’s Land Army and that when Enid found – as she had been warned – that the life was too harsh for her, she had been ‘too frightened to return home and admit her mistake’.
Such subterfuge may be difficult to understand in these days of emancipated women and reformed divorce laws, but in the narrow, suburban circles in which Theresa moved, not only was a wife living apart from her husband treated with suspicion, but an unmarried daughter leaving home and not communicating with her family was thought to be even more suspect. No ‘nice’ girl would consider such a step unless she had ‘something to hide’. Theresa knew Enid had been on holiday to a farm, and in 1916 more and more women were being accepted into industry and the services to help the war effort, so she must have thought this explanation plausible enough to be accepted by the neighbours.
The fact remains that, from then on, Enid’s holidays away from college were spent either with the Hunt family at Seckford Hall or with Mabel Attenborough and she was never to live at home again with her mother and brothers – nor did she have any contact with them during the four years that were to follow.
Enid began her training at Ipswich in September 1916, just a month after her nineteenth birthday. She appeared, by all accounts, to have been a quieter and more withdrawn girl among her fellow students and teachers than she had been at St Christopher’s, but her occasional bouts of depression very soon disappeared when she was with the children. With them, according to her fellow students, she was always ‘relaxed, vivacious and full of fun’. She was no mean artist and carried a small blue book with her everywhere, in which she sketched her charges at play or drew birds and animals seen on the nature walks. She kept a similar book during her last year at school and these two volumes of pencilled drawings provide an interesting insight into how Enid viewed her world at that time: the tousle-headed kindergarten boy, drinking his glass of milk; three small birds, with ruffled feathers, bending a narrow branch with their weight; a round-faced baby asleep in its pram and the rotund back view of a woman sitting on a beach, are all clearly drawn with a keen eye for detail.
There were three main lecturers in the kindergarten department. In charge was Miss Sophie Flear, who also taught most of the main subjects to the trainees. This small, neat woman was a dedicated teacher with a deep understanding of her pupils – whether at kindergarten or student level – and with her air of quiet authority, did not hesitate to try out new methods of teaching if she felt that by so doing she was furthering the scope and standard of her well-run kindergarten. In 1913 she had been chosen by the Council of the Girls’ Public Day School Trust to accompany two other teachers to Italy to study and report on the Montessori teaching methods, with a view to their partial adoption in the Trust’s kindergartens. Although the training at Ipswich was basically Froebel, Miss Flear drew upon her experiences in Italy to broaden the horizons of her students still further. Her lessons were always enjoyed and Enid was not alone in finding those in psychology particularly interesting. She liked and respected Miss Flear but she had an even greater affection for her assistant, Miss Kathleen Gibbons.
Miss Gibbons was a large, motherly woman, who taught zoology and botany with great patience and understanding. Her nature walks, which she took regularly with the kindergarten children and students, reminded Enid of those rambles with her father when he, too, would point out so much of the teeming life of pond or hedgerow and the comprehensive notes she took from Miss Gibbons were to be of great help to her years later when she compiled her first book on nature study.
Miss Kathleen Fryer was the youngest of the three lecturers and had not long been out of college. She was a skilful teacher and Enid found her handwork classes something of a relaxation since they gave her an opportunity to think up new ideas for short stories or poems, as she worked away at the cane or raffia articles she was required to make for her course.
Despite her studies, Enid managed to set aside some time for her own writing, and during her training wrote three poems which were accepted by
Nash’s Magazine.
The first, in March 1917, was written not long after she began her course and moved into Ida’s lodgings at Christchurch Street, five minutes’ walk away from the school. Here the two women had a bedroom each and shared a small sitting room in which they wrote and studied.
Ida knew that Enid had made the break from home, but not the circumstances leading up to it. On this, as on any other unpleasant subject which had touched her deeply, Enid was as secretive and uncommunicative as she had always been. That the younger woman was lonely and, at times, very unhappy, was apparent. In contrast to the Enid who at home would voluntarily lock herself away from the rest of the family, here at Christchurch Street she was forever seeking Ida out – even after her friend had gone to bed, tired and more ready for sleep than for long hours of talk into the early hours. Perhaps, though she would doubtless never have admitted it at the time, Enid missed hearing from her mother and brothers and secretly wished Theresa would write. It is rather significant that in later years she would frequently say to her daughters, when they thought she was worrying unduly about them, ‘You would much rather I did worry about you than not care what happened – which is what I always felt was the case with my own mother.’