"...but now we must say goodbye to the Five, and to Kirrin Island too. Goodbye, Julian, Dick, George, Anne – and Timmy."
Yes, after providing bedtime reading for almost three years at our house, Enid Blyton has been returned to the bookshelf now that my son is seven. I will not miss her dreary prose, but I will miss her quaint dialogue and the risible vision of 1950s, class-bound England. Enid Blyton may be a snob, but her works have been so frequently parodied since their publication that her class and gender stereotypes elicit mere amusement in adult readers. What I wonder do today's children make of her depictions of a vanished world? My son was certainly bemused at times: "What? Do you mean boys were once considered the protectors and guardians of girls?" "Did children really have that much freedom in the olden days?" "Why do you keep snorting like that when you read these stories, Mummy?"
Most often, my derision was triggered by Blyton's clumsy signposting of working class and/or foreign and/or criminal and/or morally weak characters. Such characters are inevitably heralded by an outbreak of non-standard English ("I'm sorry you didn't get out; right down upset I am") and – most reliably of all – references to unkemptness or untidiness.
Thus, in Five On Finniston Farm, we are introduced to the character Junior with a description of his room:
"It was so very untidy that Dick couldn't help exclaiming.
'Gosh – how does he get his room into all that mess?"
And what do you know? Junior turns out to be a spoilt, pasty-faced, rude troublemaker and (shudder) an American, whose father is intent on buying up items of historical importance and shipping them back to the States.
In other books, stable hands are invariably "rather untidy" and in Five Run Away Together, Mr Stick, who turns out to be a thief, is described as:
"... not a very pleasant sight. He had not shaved for some days, and his cheeks and chin were bluish black ...his hands were black and so were his finger-nails."
I have been reminded of Blyton while reading some recent crime reporting, including a piece in the Mirror about the Shannon Matthews "kidnapping" case:
"During Shannon's 24-day kidnap I had spoken to Karen – always through a fog of cigarette smoke – several times. She used to mumble one-word answers to my questions as she sat in her dirty lounge packed with supportive neighbours."
Karen Matthews' behaviour speaks for itself: she orchestrated the kidnapping of her own daughter in a plot to secure media attention and reward money, endangering her daughter's life and triggering a search operation costing £3.2 million. But not only that, she smokes and is no great shakes with the Shake 'n Vac.
Certainly, there is a point at which bad housekeeping crosses the line into child neglect. Quite likely the household had reached that point judging by the other details that have emerged in this case. But in this instance the information regarding the dirtiness of Matthews' surroundings is given in isolation of any discussion of her neglect of her children. It is as gratuitous as Blyton's references to dirt and grime, serving merely to pander to our prejudices and assure us of our own superiority. Polly Toynbee remarked on this in her Guardian piece on the Matthews' case:
"The shock and thrill of the extremities of human behaviour are part of the stuff of life, avidly devoured as a comforting reminder that most of us are rather good, compared with the very wicked." (Guardian, December 6).
Unfortunately, the Mirror report provides the opposite of reassurance because "dirty flat" is unhelpfully vague. Where is the point at which slovenliness become dirt, filth and squalor? After all, one's person's show home is another person's pigsty.
Overcrowded, poorly maintained social housing is likely to look unkempt in the absence of a never-ending assault on dirt and disorder, resulting in spotless cleanliness, hence the traditional working class obsession with blanching doorsteps, etc. Indeed, reporters seem equally compelled to comment on the incredible housekeeping feats of the respectable poor despite the odds. Take a random article about, say, slum dwellers in Mumbai and it's a pretty safe bet that the word "spotless" (along with "vibrant") will turn up sooner or later ("See, it can be done!")
Seldom do we hear about the housekeeping standards of middle class inhabitants of spacious owner-occupied dwellings, who, in any case, can get away with a middle ground.
Children do thrive in orderly surroundings and slovenliness is not a virtue. But neither is it a proxy for criminality or moral degeneracy. In fact, I've heard that there are some solid, law-abiding citizens out there who, try as they might, don't always match their mothers' housekeeping standards. Some of them even read to their children at night, apparently. Although I'm not sure that Enid Blyton counts.
