| Five cheers for Enid Blyton! |
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Vivienne Endicott owes her livelihood to her passion for Enid Blyton's stories - and to Denman College.
Sometimes an opportunity stares you in the face and you know that if you don't grasp it then and there the chance may not come your way again. So it was when I saw there was a little shop in Corfe Castle village for rent over the summer of 2004.  Enid Blyton Not everyone who has ever written a book feels driven to open a shop in order to sell it, but it seemed I was. I had researched the links that Blyton had with Purbeck, her favoured holiday haunt and the subject of her last known poem, for my book The Dorset Days of Enid Blyton. The Famous Five series had very strong local connections and the dramatic Norman ruins of Corfe Castle were widely acknowledged to have been the inspiration for Kirrin Castle. The name of the shop would be important and I was wary about infringing copyright. I toyed with The Kirrin Castle Gift Shop but settled on The Ginger Pop Shop since ginger beer would be an important component of what I was selling. During one of my Denman weekends the staff had allowed me to put out a questionnaire about the sort of childhoods WI members had enjoyed. The key question had been about favourite authors, of course - and without prompting Blyton had an 80 per cent response. It then struck me that The Ginger Pop Shop should be about the childhood of these original readers, rather than a children's shop as such. So with my mum advising me, I set about stocking it with all sorts of things and images reminiscent of the time: old money, toys without batteries, music and 10p back on empty bottles! (A subsequent Denman course on Music of the 1950s helped me with my product knowledge.) 'Dumbed down'I wanted my range of Blyton books to be the best in the country, but I was in for great disappointment when I realised that virtually all the texts had been changed, and for reasons I could not comprehend. Anne in the Famous Five now wore jeans rather than shorts. In the Barney books all references to ginger beer had been changed to lemonade. When Darrell lost her temper with Gwendoline in the Malory Towers swimming pool, she now shook her rather than slapped her: in a modern school she may well have stabbed her, I reflected sadly. Mother in The Adventurous Four had stopped knitting and I was angered that in a single swipe of an inept updater's pen, a woman's war work had been literally written out.  What horrified me the most, however, was finding that Blyton's Noddy was completely out of print, and superseded by the TV tie-in Make Way for Noddy. The works of Enid Blyton had truly been dumbed down. I then learnt that the Famous Five were also to be made into a cartoon. That didn't worry me particularly since a good cartoon doesn't have to look like Scooby Doo. But then more details came out: it would have new characters, new plots and not be set in Dorset! Fearing the worst, that the original Blyton Famous Five would follow Noddy into oblivion, I started a campaign to save the books. There was outrage from customers of all ages and of all nationalities. I urged people to write letters of protest to the decision-makers, and whole families resolved to join in. I now have it on good authority that the books will continue in their present format. Spreading the wordI'd never have guessed that a course on public speaking at Denman would lead me to becoming a WI speaker with a talk called "Five Cheers for Enid Blyton", as well as giving interviews for TV and radio. I had Ben Fogle all to myself for 10 minutes when Countryfile came to visit! It is a fortunate person indeed who can make a business out of a hobby, and Denman College has played a big part in helping me to make a success of Ginger Pop. A vast amount of rubbish has been written about Blyton, largely by people who haven't actually read the books, and it gives me great pleasure to debunk the myths. She stands accused of "using simple language" but is that a problem for children learning to read fluently? Her talent was that she could write appropriately for children aged 3-13 - her description of Noddy seeing the sea for the first time and thinking that it is "too big" is very different to the grandeur of the sea bird colonies evoked in The Sea of Adventure. It is sad that many adults still think that the critics must be right, and repress the pleasure they know she gave to them as children, to the extent that it somehow becomes a guilty secret. Those blinkered experts who declared Enid Blyton's work ephemeral would be amazed to see children of the 21st century almost fighting to get to her books in my shop. Modern kids have some wretched adult looking over their shoulders virtually every minute of the day and the freedom to go off by themselves for a picnic by bike is fantasy enough, let alone explore a secret passage. For most of them these are things that can only happen in books. So don't be shy; dust down your Secret Island or Faraway Tree, take a bottle of ginger beer to a quiet place and curl up with an Enid Blyton to indulge your inner child. Kids shouldn't have all the fun... Vivienne Endecott is a member of the Winterborne Zelston & Almer WI. The Ginger Pop Shop is open from Easter to October and is located in Corfe Castle Square, Dorset, tel: 01929 477214, www.gingerpop.co.uk Viv leads 'Talky-Walkies' from the shop during high season (groups by arrangement) and gives five-minute talks to groups in the shop out of peak times. WIs interested in hearing her illustrated talk should contact her on This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Amazing creative outputBorn August 1897 Enid Blyton had two children by her first husband but they divorced and she married again. She died in 1968 suffering from Alzheimers, having produced a prodigious body of work. She started out as a teacher, writing children's books in her spare time. With sales exceeding 400 million, in 2007 she is still in the top ten of the world's most popular authors according to the volume of translations of her work. At one point in her career she was said to regularly produce 10,000 words a day. Such prolific output - around 700 titles and decades of magazine writing - led many to believe that some of her work was ghost-written, yet no ghost-writers have ever come forward. |
