Enid Blyton Read Online Free

on outings to the theatre or to the country. She would look forward to these but, although the scar was beginning to heal, the fact that he was now living with someone else created a small barrier between them which prevented a complete renewal of the rapport they once had. The expensive presents he brought her were no compensation, she felt, for what she had lost.
    Some forty years later in Six Bad Boys, which, according to reviewers at the time, was an unusual attempt for Enid at social realism, she described a similar family situation in which the three ‘Berkeley’ children (two girls and a boy) were deserted by their father after numerous, violent quarrels between their parents. The effect his departure had on the children and the subsequent behaviour of the mother – even to the pledging of the family to secrecy over his disappearance – was an echo of this desperately unhappy period of Enid’s life, yet such was her reticence about her early years no one guessed at the time that she was writing from personal experience.
    The Berkeley children’s comments on ‘being glad of dear old school – even French and Maths’ to take their minds off their troubles, must have been Enid’s own feelings about St Christopher’s, for at no time did her work there appear to have deteriorated. She was popular with pupils and staff alike and really appeared to enjoy her school life, throwing herself into all the activities with enthusiasm and many of the characters and happenings she was later to describe in her school stories were based on the people she met and incidents that took place during those years.
    Her fellow pupils remember her as a vivacious, intelligent girl with a sallow complexion, large nose, dark hair and eyes – and a penchant for playing practical jokes, which carried over well into adult life. She would plague the mistresses and her classmates with an assortment of rubber- and tin-pointed pencils, artificial blots and other ‘tricks’ bought from a local shop and, although her friends found them fun at first, her exuberance invariably carried on the joke just a trifle too long. She is remembered for her ‘great daring’ in being the first girl in the school to have her long plait cut off and to wear her hair at shoulder length, tied back with a bow on a large slide. This earned her the nickname – among the girls who were boarding at the school – of ‘the hairless day girl’.
    Although she had once played the title role in Tresco’s production of Alice in Wonderland, she was not, apparently, considered to be a good enough actress to perform in St Christopher’s School plays. This rather vexed Enid, whose love of theatricals stretched back to her early childhood, when Thomas would take her and Hanly to musicals or plays at the nearby Crystal Palace Theatre. Undeterred, however, she set about organising her own concert party and, dressed in mauve with white ruffles and black pom-poms, the subsequent ‘Mauve Merriments’ troupe of eight senior girls eventually became a popular end-of-term entertainment for the whole school. Her friend Mary Attenborough usually took the lead in these small shows, which comprised several short sketches, dancing and the singing of popular songs, accompanied by Enid on the piano.
    Her agility and enthusiasm for games led to her becoming both tennis champion and captain of the lacrosse team and her ability to put the same effort into everything she undertook undoubtedly accounted for the number of prizes she was awarded for various subjects and for her being made head girl during her final two years.
    Out of school Enid was also the instigator of a small magazine – Dab – named after the surnames of its three contributors: Mirabel Davis, Mary Attenborough and herself. This usually consisted of a few short stories written by Enid, poems by Mirabel and illustrations by Mary. When the three were away on holiday they would correspond by coded postcards in order, as