As passwords to the human imagination, adventure and mystery are hard to beat. So it should scarcely surprise us that the adventures of the Famous Five and Secret Seven, albeit written by a middle-aged woman born 100 years ago, continue to be devoured in their millions by children across the world. Next to Shakespeare and Agatha Christie, Enid Blyton is the third most translated author in the world (40 languages). In Britain she is the seventh most borrowed author from public libraries, only beaten in the children's book stakes by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. Unlike the creators of Peter Rabbit and Winnie the Pooh, however, Enid Blyton is not a paid up member of the English literary establishment. On the contrary, her name is a byword for middle-class mediocrity. In the 1970sand 1980s, while Roald Dahl was rightly being feted as the king of subversion, the subversive antics of Noddy and his Toyland misfits were disappearing from library shelves in Britain as not politically correct, accused of being size-ist (Big Ears); racist (a golliwog was one of his companions) and - with Noddy's wooden head always losing the plot, presumably elf-ist to boot.
Of course it's hard to be entirely objective when talking about one's childhood chums and I must come clean. I was brought up on Noddy and the rest of the Blyton cannon, from the Famous Five to the boarding school stories of Mallory Towers and St Clare's. How I longed to have a pedal car like Noddy's. How I longed to have adventures: finding treasure, solving mysteries. How I longed to have a dog. How I longed to go to boarding school where they never seemed to have any lessons and where there was always an exotic French teacher called Mam'zelle. When deputed to read bedtime stories to my younger siblings, it was usually Noddy. Beatrix Potter's vocabulary would floor many an adult and was no match for a barely literate seven-year old.
Yet, according to newly qualified teacher, Carolyn Wade, student teachers in Britain are told to "discourage" their pupils from reading Enid Blyton as she "perpetuates gender stereotypes, portrays a middle class landscape with vocabulary that is repetitive and unchallenging."
As a teacher herself Enid Blyton would have been horrified, says Pam Allay, archivist of the Enid Blyton Company: "Enid always considered her work highly educational and moral in tone." Blyton's banishment to the margins of children's literature started as early as 1959, nine years before her death. Not that she took any notice. She knew what children wanted and she gave it to them: adventure with a safety net, held up by a framework of friends and family. And a madcap dog.
Born in the leafy suburbs of south London in August 1897, Blyton trained as a teacher and by the time she was 22 was running her own kindergarten in Surbiton, Surrey where she contributed poems to Modern Teaching, and Teachers' World. In 1924 she married a publisher, which certainly did her future career no harm. Her understanding of children was broadened by the birth of two of her own. Her first appearance between hard covers was a book of poetry (rather dated now, according to Pam Allay) then came fairy tales and "religious works". The first Famous Five adventure was written in 1942, when she was already 45. At the height of her career, in the 1940s and 1950s, Enid Blyton was producing a book a month, with a minimum print run of 25,000. She could write a full-length children's novel in a week.
But Enid Blyton wasn't all adventure. The book I returned to again and again as a child was The Nature Lover's Book in which she charted the seasons in monthly chapters as Pat, Janet and John were taken for nature walks around their country village by their knowledgeable neighbour Mr Meredith (Uncle Merry) and his Scottie dog Fergus. It was written during the war and like many of the early adventures featured an absentee father. Like the rest of her nature books it is long since out of print, too tame for a generation reared on David Attenborough and Dorling Kindersly, but for one young reader at least, it lit the fuse to a lifelong love of the countryside.
Author Angela McAllister, who writes for pre-school children right through to teenagers, does not deny the criticisms of the anti-Enid Blyton brigade: "I know the arguments, the whole PC aspect with the girls always left to do the washing up on the adventures. But I don't think that children pick up on role models like that. They are more interested in riveting stories, boats being rowed out to islands, secret parcels, hidden treasure, something that makes them curl up on a chair and read them through from beginning to end. That's what's paramount. Her vocabulary may not be challenging but I think the stories stand up as well as they ever did."
Not, she admits, that you could get away with these kind of books now. "But neither could you write Winnie the Pooh or Beatrix Potter now, but they exist and I think they have a lot of value as they exist."
An important aspect of Enid Blyton, says McAllister is that she wrote in series. "It means there's always another one to read and I think getting children reading anything at all is a good thing. What they need is to access their imagination. And I believe books can do that. They fix some sort of golden idea in your imagination that you go on hoping for."
Twenty-year-old Eddy Thomas, a third year language undergraduate, does not agree. Enid Blyton was banned by his parents, completely justifiably he believes. "From a very young age children are being programmed into pigeonholing themselves. These stereotypes have to be broken down. They should learn to question, not accept." But then he was bright. Carolyn Wade would far rather her pupils read more interesting books than Enid Blyton, but in a low-achieving inner-London primary school, she's just happy to get them to read anything at all.
According to Norma McDermott, director of the Irish Library Council, it would seem that Irish librarians are less judgmental than their British counterparts. "I don't think we are in the business of censoring children's material in Ireland. Most children's literature is really subversive, empowering them to act for themselves. And you should be encouraging them."
According to Pam Allay, sales of Enid Blyton are as buoyant today as they ever were. Changes to the texts have been made, but very few. Children wear jeans and t-shirts instead of skirts and jerseys; larders have become fridges; on the PC front, gypsies have been changed into travellers and even this may have to change. As for Noddy, he was rehabilitated in 1991, courtesy of a TV cartoon, sanitised and down-aged for pre-school children. But the Secret Seven still solve mysteries from the safety of the garden shed, and the Famous Five still stumble upon adventures on holiday by the sea.
