Writers Enid Blyton and Antonia White are two more people who passed on their bad experiences to their children.
Apart from writing fiction, having two daughters and causing a lot of suffering for many of the people around them, Enid Blyton and Antonia White have little in common.
There are a few references on here to Antonia White’s life and her autobiographical fiction with more to come, but there is little in Enid Blyton’s life and books that is relevant to this blog so this is almost certainly her first and last appearance.
Enid Blyton’s books
Enid Blyton was one of the most popular and successful children’s writers ever. I never cared much for her books myself, but millions of other children did: she was one of the most borrowed authors in the public libraries. I remember being informed when I first joined that her books were too popular to be reserved - as if I cared!
Enid Blyton and her family
I read some biographical material that revealed the dark side of Enid Blyton a while back and have summarised from memory an example of her passing it on.
Enid Blyton’s parents frequently had violent quarrels. She had first-hand experience of the devastating effect this can have on sensitive and impressionable young children. Her idolised father left the family when she was 12 years old. She had only occasional contact with him after that, and he died when she was 23.
She seems to have been permanently affected by his desertion and death.
As often happens, rather than take extra special care to ensure that her children never had to go through what she had been through, she passed it on.
She ruthlessly prevented her first husband from having any contact with their young daughters after he left the family and re-married. The two girls never saw their father again.
Enid Blyton and her second husband had terrible rows.
All this had much the same effect on her daughters as her experiences as a child had on her.
Passing it on is not inevitable: while Enid Blyton left her daughters to the care of nannies and sent them away to boarding school, neither of her daughters employed a nanny nor did they send their children away to school.
The definitive biography is Enid Blyton: The Biography by Barbara Stoney.
Antonia White is the author of four very autobiographical - and very depressing and disturbing - novels.
Antonia White’s daughters’ relationships with her were dominated by fear. Just as she suffered because of her mother’s unpredictable temper, so did they suffer because of hers.
The incidents selected for this article may seem trivial, but I know how much such things can hurt and they are a very good illustration of how some people pass on even relatively small injuries.
Two yellow dresses
Antonia White’s younger daughter Lyndall has a tale to tell about two yellow dresses:
“On the rare occasions she came to say goodnight I would sometimes pretend to be asleep because she so often seemed to be cross about something.
The first thing I remember her being cross about was my not wearing a yellow dress she had given me for my birthday...she had knitted it herself while she was in hospital...”
At first Lyndall was delighted with the dress, but when she put it on to show it off her sister Sue said, “You look like a scrambled egg.” This comment hurt Lyndall so much that she couldn’t bring herself to wear the dress again.
Lyndall was given the dress for her fifth birthday. Almost 50 years later she learned that at the same age Antonia had worn a yellow dress to a party and a little boy she liked very much refused to sit next to her, asking whether she was in fancy dress and supposed to be a scrambled egg!
This is uncanny.
Embarrassing behaviour in public
When Antonia reached the age of seven, she was terrified of the impression her eccentric mother might make on her school friends and found her refusal to look and behave like the other girls’ mothers shameful and embarrassing.
That was exactly how Lyndall later felt about her on the thankfully rare occasions when Antonia came to school to take her out.
Then there were the scenes in shops:
“Shopping expeditions with Antonia, luckily rare, remain in my memory as one of the most unpleasant experiences of my childhood...Invariably Mother ended up losing her temper with the shop assistants and us while fellow customers looked on in astonishment.
’What do you mean you don’t have her size?’ she would rage at a salesgirl ...And so it went on as we trudged miserably behind her from one department of Harrods or Peter Jones to another.”
Lyndall tells us that she used to wither into a state of misery when her mother made scenes in public. As she had no children of her own, we will never know whether Lyndall would have passed it all on and made her children as miserable as Antonia had made her.
The definitive biography is Antonia White: A Life by Jane Dunn.
Both of her daughters wrote a memoir:
Now to My Mother is by Susan Chitty.
Nothing to Forgive, the source of the above anecdotes, is by Lyndall Hopkinson:
