Woking Writers Circle member Liz Lennie’s current creative interest is in ‘life writing’. She recently discovered a rather dismissive postcard reply from Enid Blyton’s assistant, who also gets Liz’s surname wrong, after she had written to the popular children’s author from boarding school in the 1950s. Here she re-imagines her original letter, which also contains insights into her childhood living on a Surrey farm. She asks – in vain – that Enid Blyton start a cat club for cat lovers. In her letter she also tells how cats are not so loved down on the farm …
A LETTER TO ENID BLYTON, SEPTEMBER 1955.
(Reimagined on rediscovering, in June 2022, the somewhat formal postcard reply from her assistant).
Dear Mrs. Blyton,
I hope you are well. I am writing to you from school. I have just become a termly boarder and on Sunday after church we are allowed to write letters until lunchtime. I have done my letter to Mummy and Daddy at home at Blackwell Farm and Matron says it is so good that she is going to show it to The Head Mistress and that she likes my idea of writing to you.
At home I have no one to play with because my three sisters are all young. We are three years apart; Mummy says that is the right gap. So, in the holidays I read a lot of books. One week I read eight!
I like yours very much because the girls as well as the boys have adventures and a pet dog as well as their own ponies. My pony is from Dartmoor and is called Tiptoes, Tippy for short. Sometimes she bites or kicks, but not often.
Our cows are lovely and brown and white and they give lots of lovely warm, creamy milk. Every year there is a different letter of the alphabet to begin their names, which we girls get to choose. The cow with my name is a kicker so Tom has to be careful when he puts on the teat cups.
Also my sisters and I each get a kitten of their own and can give it a name. My cat, Peter, was black and white. Mummy just wrote to tell me he died. I was crying a bit in prayers but I don’t think anyone noticed.
I cannot even count the outside cats. They live somewhere in the buildings. They are all tabby and very skinny, and they hiss and spit at you if you try to stroke them. Worse than that, there is always a great big pot of fish bones simmering away on the kitchen stove that the village fish man gives Mummy for nothing. It smells disgusting but Mummy says we have to feed them a bit as they are so good at killing the rats. But they do have too many kittens which we have to find as soon as possible so that Len can take them away and drown them.
We have seven men. Walt is the oldest and he can’t even write his own name. He just puts an X. Once he told me he was going to string the cats up by their necks on the washing line. I think he just wanted to make me cry. One day, when I’m a famous writer I can put that idea in a story. I did begin it under the desk one day in English when the lesson was boring.
I should tell you why I am writing to you for help. I wonder if you could start a cat club for cat-lovers, with a magazine and competitions for stories, poems and pictures. I am sure that children like me would really like that.
Love from
Elizabeth Brock
Woking Writers Circle 