"A mesmerizing account of the well-known story of Matsyagandha
... and her transformation from
fisherman’s daughter to Satyavati, Santanu’s royal consort and the
Mother/Progenitor of the Kuru clan." - Hindustan Times
"Themes of fate, morality and power overlay a subtle and essential feminism to make this lyrical book a must-read. If this is Madhavan’s first book in the Girls from the Mahabharata series, there is much to look forward to in the months to come." - Open Magazine
"A gleeful dollop of Blytonian magic ... Reddy Madhavan is also able to tackle some fairly sensitive subjects such as identity, the love of and karmic ties with parents, adoption, the first sexual encounter, loneliness, and my favourite, feminist rage." - Scroll
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Just lying here on my reading sofa, gazing up at my books, realising that some of my best friends have been dead for so many years I've basically been hanging out with their ghosts. They draw me in, words written by people who were once as alive as you and me and who have now been dead for longer than I've existed and still, like echoes, like portals, like a mirror that only shows you what it wants to, they're always here. That's my one wish for myself as a writer too: let me live on, let me live forever and ever and ever. #bookstagram #shelfie #ghosts
No secret that I've been in a bit of a reading rut recently. All I seemed to be fit for was Agatha Christie who is delightful but not quite...SATISFYING in a way that a large absorbing read would be. But I'm happy to say that this book--which I read cover to cover in 24 hours--finally pulled me out of it and I'm ready for more! Unlikable narrators are all very interesting and make you feel squirmy inside but when your protagonist is essentially a decent person placed in impossible situations, well then you can forget about how you feel about them and just root for them all through. That's true of Maia, the half goblin emperor in this book, a story about how power is scary and new worlds are startling and all very real world except it's about an Elven kingdom and all the names and political offices are made up. I love fantasy books where it's "real world but with [INSERT MYTHICAL CREATURE HERE]" and I love fantasy novels that focus on characters not just plot, so we really get to know everyone and mostly I like to know that the story is done when I finish the book not just left dangling for sequels (*cough Patrick Rothfuss cough*) I loved this and you might love it too if you like stories about good people trying to stay good, court intrigues, making friends and/or goblins. So many options! #mrmbookclub #121in2021 #thegoblinemperor #katherineaddison #sarahmonette
When I stopped to think about it Beverly Cleary was the writer who had the earliest and most foundational impact on my own writing. Through reading her books over and over again (this is just a small sample, all of them wouldn't fit in one picture!) I learned the art of simple sentences and also how to get deep inside your character's mind so while Ramona took my hand and led me down Klicktitat Street I was both next to her and inside her head. I never needed to empty an entire toothpaste tube into the sink because Ramona had done it for me. Beverly died yesterday which makes me sad, not because she hadn't had a good long life, she did, she was 104 but because for my whole life we were alive at the same time. I read her autobiography for the first time yesterday and saw glimmerings of her future heroines, especially Emily. Ramona was my favourite but like Beverly I was a good little girl who preferred to read about mischief than do it herself. At the end is Socks, one of her unsung masterpieces, one of the best books about cats I've ever read. A Girl From Yamhill is darker than I expected the writer of those books to be but it was good to know her even if it was on the day she died. The world is now without Beverly Cleary but you know, the nice thing about writers is that she'll live forever and influence a hundred other little girls searching for themselves in the books they read. #beverlycleary #ramonathepest #agirlfromyamhill #bookstagram #emilysrunawayimagination #mrmbookclub #tribute
My darling green lights all the way till your destination,
Thank you, thank you for overwhelming me with email responses last time! I guess you ARE reading this after all, and now I feel less like this newsletter is reaching your Updates or Promo folder and being deleted unread. I have a few newsletters like that, which I subscribe to, that is, and I feel so bad that the other person is going to see that I’ve unsubscribed, but I’ve just… stopped reading it so they all pile up unread and lonely in my inbox. I’m a little late with this edition, but like fine wine, it aged nicely.
My mum likes to tell the story about how when I was twelve or thirteen or thereabouts, she couldn’t take me shopping for new clothes without also asking my best friend at the time, we’ll call her Osha, to come along with us. “Because if Osha disapproved, you wouldn’t wear that outfit ever again,” she says now, rolling her eyes, “It was easier to just plan a trip where Osha could come along.” I remember some of these expeditions, I think. My thirteenth year feels like one someone else lived, and so it is pretty much removed from my memory. It was a weird year for me. I was trying so hard to fit in that I forgot to also live. And so, like sands on a beach, my memory is completely wiped. A few days stand out: trying on things in a big shop, watching Osha’s eyebrow quirk, her mouth turn either up or down to indicate approval. We all wore versions of the same thing, after school that is, after our uniforms, and so it should’ve been easy enough but I didn’t trust myself to get it right.
Clothes did not give me joy for such a long time that I’m sometimes surprised by how much I love them now. Clothes, fashion, all areas where I could fail. I wasn’t cool enough, not hip enough, not teen enough. This was the 90s, we all wore versions of skinny jeans and big oversized t-shirts. This was what we wore all the time, summer or winter, to parties or to the movies. In the winter we’d wear baggy sweaters instead of t-shirts but the principle was the same.
I love baggy slouchy pants, and I’m forever buying them. With this I’m wearing one of my mother’s old sari blouses backwards so the design is in the front and slip on embroidered shoes I bought for our wedding.
Right now, in 2021, I have a few favourite dresses, I sometimes run my hand back and forth across my dresses hanging in my (sadly overcrowded) cupboard because I love them so much. A few things I will always be drawn to: flared skirts with fitted waists, interesting cuts in pants and skirts, where you look like you’re a samurai or something, prints that are fun, but also not ubiquitous, so crows, yes, owls, no. Dresses that combine Indian prints with Western cuts, with a special emphasis on ikat and kalamkari, although these days I am drawn to the idea of a nice bandini frock. This is new to my thirties, suddenly discovering Indian fabric could make pretty dresses. In my twenties, I lived exclusively in western wear, recently doing a closet turn out I discovered a stack of beautiful kurtis, all tailor made for me, that I grew out of after only wearing them once or twice. (They have all gone to good homes.)
But when was I aware of clothes, of how they were more than just something you slipped on to go outside? Shorts and t-shirts for playing in, pretty frocks for parties, lehenga-blouses for weddings? Everything itched, nothing felt as comfortable as stripping down to my petticoat and underwear—in the ‘80s I wore a thin cotton petticoat under my school uniform, it was apparently a common practice—and staying in that till dinner time, no matter how raggedy I looked. I’ll never forget a friend of my mother’s, who I’d never met before or since, by the way, encountering me like this on the front balcao thing our house from our brief Trivandrum years had. I was an exceptionally snotty child, allergic to everything, nose constantly running, mouth a little open so I could breathe, and by this time I had been in my petticoat for hours, so imagine me, slightly grubby, (short) hair standing on end (my mother did not know how to deal with curls so boy cuts were the norm of my youth), shiny trails of snot on my arms and on the front of my top, and this man, who is pretty well-dressed, at least showered, looks at me, and his lip curls and he looks away which is a very man-like thing to do, a woman would have been kinder or at least considered who I was. I’ve hated him ever since, but you know, looking back, I don’t know that Adult Me meeting Child Me on the porch wouldn’t have had the same reaction.
I love Avatar: The Last Airbender, so K made me this t-shirt for my birthday last year.
By the time we moved back to Delhi, I was a little older so less inclined to be in my petticoat—and I think we dropped the petticoat after those two Trivandrum years. Maybe Kendriya Vidyalaya (yes, but it was a good one in Trivandrum so everyone went there, especially all the Gulf children being sent “home” because of the war) (I will go more into my Trivandrum years in a later issue. T? or H is for Home?) insisted on a dress code? Who knows. I still accepted what my mum made me wear, my aunts sent what I can best describe as “baba suits” from the States. You know what I mean. We’d call them co-ords now, but they were very unflattering and extremely babyish—a set of matching shorts and a t-shirt with primary coloured art prints on them. I wore these, dear reader, till I was about thirteen or fourteen and should have really known better, until one day I rebelled and refused to put a single one on again. (In public. They made good nightsuits.)
But I was finally in a school where everything wasn’t all mixed together, as it were. What I mean is, I moved from the Montesorri where I had been temporarily lodged till they figured out what to do with me, where I was one of the oldest kids and so de facto, one of the coolest, to this big anonymous large school where I’d be starting out with all the other ten year old children. (See more on this school here.) I was at this time a supremely confident person, extremely sure that I was beloved and delightful and an asset to every community I belonged to. (These illusions were swiftly removed, for which I blame the sink or swim nature of large Indian schools, really. No one has time to spend with you individually or figure out what the best things for you are. Home schooling! Or in the absence of home schooling, somewhere small which may not have the best exam results but will light some sort of spark in your kid and not extinguish it.) Anyway, I was invited to a birthday party, and I went, dressed in my best frock (how else to describe it? It was actually very elegant. The style of that time was to have pouffy, birthday cake style skirts, the more ruffles you could slap on, the better. By contrast, this was an exceedingly simple style, which was already what was appealing to me, a straight dress in a floral print with a little lace around the hem and sleeves and a Peter Pan collar with a dusty pink sash around the waist.) because I wanted to impress the other children, and I was forming some nascent ideas about wearing nice clothes being a way to do that.
One of the dresses I had made by my local tailor. I love anything with bird/animal prints on it, unless it’s super common, so these cranes are ideal.
My mum dropped me off at the door and I ascended the stairs to find the whole party, all my class, people I had so far just looked at from a distance, and as one they turned to look at me, and I realised in that moment that they were a) all in jeans and t-shirts and b) were amused and scornful of the get up I was in. I almost turned to run, surely my mother would still be down there, but the birthday girl, with a graciousness beyond her years said, “Oh, you look very nice. Come in and have a cold drink.” I don’t think I ever put on that dress again, kind of sad because I was growing out of clothes so quickly, but after that it was all jeans and t-shirts and I realised I was signalling, “Hello! I am like you!” to all the kids my age as they signalled me back. This is the thing about fashion, about clothes. If you have a practiced eye, and you enter a room, you can probably tell who you’d most like to be friends with versus who you might not wind up talking to at all. I can’t also deny that in an extremely class and caste conscious country like India, it was a way of the elite upper caste English educated types to have a code and a club and a way to keep people out. Obviously this is a thing that the privileged are doing all across the world, but in India I think it took other vicious forms besides just saying, “This is my Louis Vuitton bag.” We all go to Sarojini Nagar, for example, (for non-Delhi readers, that’s this large open air export surplus market where you can buy lovely things for very cheap.) (I wrote a guide to it, pre-pandemic, which I suppose you can still use post-pandemic.) but even the stuff you buy at Sarojini can have a class/caste tag. Cheap polyester stuff is a no-no, or anything shiny or anything, basically, that looks like it was mass-produced with big flashy prints. And so the red velvet rope goes up and divides the masses.
I dressed to fit in for most of my life—up until now. In college, I made the smooth shift to Fab India clothes—boutique-y Indian wear with big block prints, all very expensive and all claiming to “bring Indian culture back.” You could tell a Fab India kurta from one you might buy at your regular market a mile away. The cuts and colours were different. Fab India relied on these block prints, large unorthodox designs placed on indigo blue or scarlet backgrounds, in straight cuts, made to be worn over jeans instead of a salwar or a churidar. My aunts would sometimes send me stuff from Hyderabad—they still do to this day—and I had to say, “Not shiny, not shiny!” until they got the drift and started to appeal to my taste.
As a writer in India, I was following a generation that thought—quite literally—that if one paid attention to one’s clothes, one could not be taken seriously. A woman writer had to be many things, but fashionable was not one of them. The first few times I made forays into public wearing a dress instead of a sari, lipstick on instead of an un-made-up face, I was one of the only people doing it. I saw the way they reacted to people like me, people who they thought were too frivolous to be Real Writers, only good for talking endlessly about fashion. Luckily, that’s changed, and if you ever go to the Jaipur Lit Fest, for example, you’ll see all these amazing clothes, all these shiny people—many saris, yes, for a lot of people, a sari is still a way to say I Am Taking This Seriously, but also many dresses, like mine.
At our wedding, I dressed down, like I always do. I wanted to still feel like me, despite all the trappings around it. I did my own hair and make-up, fixed up my own wardrobe. At our reception/wedding party, I wore a dress and heels, and was comfortable all night. Maybe all of this can be dated back to the one October evening when I went to my classmate’s house and found that dressing up was bad and dressing down was the way to go. Maybe that’s informed my fashion choices ever since? I don’t know, I’ve never liked fuss, I like to dress well, but I like to be comfortable, and comfort often wins. In my underwear drawer, I have two sets of those slimming underwear things which I have worn a grand total of three times. I kept buying high heels, thinking maybe this time I’d be a high heel person, but I’m really not. In Delhi’s coldest months, I abandon fashion altogether and stick to ski pants and a ski jacket. I look like the Michelin Man, but I’m toasty warm, and that’s all that matters. (Which is why I like the summer, not for the punishing heat, but because I can dress in all my pretty, but completely inadequate clothes.)
Finally, a couple of years ago, I discovered the tailor down the road from our house would do pretty faithful copies of clothes I liked, if I gave him the material. Suddenly, I was discovering creativity in clothes even, not just stuff I’d bought, but stuff I could turn into whatever I liked. K, in the meanwhile, started experimenting with designing and printing t-shirts online, so between us, we had the custom clothes experience down. Few things make me as happy as seeing something I’d only imagined turn into something beautiful in real life. It’s almost as good as writing the perfect sentence.
For my friend’s wedding last January, I decided to mix up Indian wear a bit by teaming my grandmother’s old Kanjeevaram with a fanny pack belt, a leather jacket and ankle boots. Lots of layers inside so I was toasty warm and still wedding appropriate.
Do you have something you wear that always makes you happy? Tell me about it.
Obviously, I only live on through your patronage etc etc and while this newsletter may not buy me any new clothes, I still like the clout so like, share.
Previous editions of the alphabet editions are here: A, B, C, D and E.
I did a couple of Zoom panels this week if you’d like to listen.
The first was a fun discussion with Anuja Chauhan about her new novel and we veered into a discussion about pretty much everything else. That’s here.
The second was a talk with ARSD College where the kids asked me a bunch of questions about trolling, living on the internet and writing for a living. That’s here.
Links I Liked On The Internet!
This is an extra long list so I’ve divided it into SECTIONS, being thoughtful and mindful of your time etc.
Bookish links:
My new Auth Couture column where I investigate fashion through writers is up. This time I decided to look at Agatha Christie’s pearl necklace (not dirty, a real pearl necklace) through the annals of time.
You may have heard some murmurings about how Substack (the service I’m using to send you this email) is secretly evil but here’s a take I agree with. (I haven’t given it much thought tbh. It’s useful and free for me unlike others that start charging after 1000 subscribers or whatever, and aren’t all tech companies kinda evil in the end?)
That’s it from your friendly neighbourhood Spiderman. Speak soon!
xx
m
Where am I?The Internet Personified! A mostly weekly collection of things I did/thought/read/saw that week.
Who are you?Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of seven books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.
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Forward to your friends if you liked this and to the person who ruined your favourite outfit for you by saying something disparaging about it if you didn’t.
Felt very mother of dragons this morning. Mostly cupboard love from their side but I'll take it. Read a book last night where the cat was killed by the controlling boyfriend and it really upset me so extra pets for my little fatties today. #catstagram #catsofinstagram #olgadapolga #squishytheblackcat #brunothetabby
Lovely @janicepariat came over for dinner last night and brought us these lovely flowers which I was just admiring in the morning light. Pink carnations which mean "gratitude" as in, I'm so thankful to have friends, I'm so thankful we got through this last year, I'm so thankful for the things I previously took for granted, a friend walking over from her house to mine for dinner, a bottle of wine, long conversation from 7 pm to almost 11. The Latin word for the carnation family is Dianthus which comes from the Greek, actually. It was discovered by ancient Greek botanist Theophrastus and means "divine flower." there's also a myth involving the goddess Diana which is kinda gory: she took a liking to a shepherd boy who refused her advances (very unwise). In a fit of rage she plucked out his eyes and cast them to the ground where they sprouted into flowers. Hurray? But most appropriately: the word "carnation" derives from "corona" which we ALL know the meaning of because it was so often woven into a crown. Symbols of resistance and good grace, wear them proudly, remember when you next see one that you're looking at a long history of scholarship and also blood and gore. #flowers #carnations #languageofflowers
What a lovely day to talk about some books by women I read recently. @penguinindia sent me those two collections of short stories on the top: Impetuous Women by Shikandin (a pseudonym) and Women Who Misbehave by Sayantani Dasgupta. They seem to be packaged together, the covers are similar, their details were sent to me in one release and I see today that they're having a combined book launch today. It makes sense: these are both collections of short stories featuring women in domestic situations. They are similar enough that reading them back to back, I had to go back and check which story belonged in which book. But then it's hard to tell you which one to read, which one I preferred because even if two books are sent to you at the same time with the same intentions, I still liked one more than the other because, well, we are human and we express preferences. For me that book was Impetuous Women, for no other reason than I saw myself in some of the stories. They are both equally well written and have equally enough heft to be enjoyed individually or as a couple. As for the other two non similar books I read this week, there's Andrea Levy's (I recently learned she died of cancer a few years ago which makes me so sad) Never Far From Nowhere about sisters in London, one black, one lighter skinned and their lives unfolding next to each other. I get what Levy was trying to do with it but it was hard to feel sympathy for Olive, the darker skinned sister after a while. She was unlikable but interestingly, that made me question WHY I found her so and that led to a whole conversation with myself in my head. (Highly recommend debating yourself for some truth bombs.) Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld (another author I adore) is about what would have happened if Hilary hadn't married Bill but friends, I am finding it a drag. Toooo much political information, not enough of those lovely lively details Sittenfeld normally puts in to make her characters alive. This is like fan fiction. I will finish because Curtis, but it is a bit of a slog. Anyway! Long wall of text but I wanted to show you the female authors I was reading for women's day (coincidentally but still!) #bookstagram
I bought these slouchy pants on sale (marked down from 3000 to 567) so that is my big achievement in this photo. Paired here with an embroidered sari blouse worn back to front and a fanny pack I bought ages ago on Amazon. (No link unfortunately, this was ages ago, but pants are off Anscetry.) Excuse the mess behind me, trying to channel Goa chic without actually being in Goa. #whatiworetoday
It’s Women’s History Month and so this newsletter (E!) is very apt because of my subject. That reminds me though: I haven’t heard a word from any of you for the last three editions, is everything okay? Are you bored? Are you tired? Do you just want to read without the pressure of writing back? (I get it, me too.) Anyway, let me know something—anything—so it doesn’t feel like I’m writing into the Great Void. What do I do this newsletter for anyway if not to be constantly validated? (Only slightly joking.)
ANYWAY. Back to what I was saying, which is: it would be really hard to tell the story of my life without also mentioning Enid Blyton. I feel like she’s fallen somewhat out of fashion, whenever I stop off to buy books for my friends’ small children at bookstores I don’t see Enid anywhere.
Enid, also wondering what the world has come to
SEGUE: A RANT ABOUT THE CHILDREN’S SECTION IN BOOKSTORES
Many a time I have been stuck at the last minute without a present and since I physically cannot go to a child’s birthday party without a present and since my presents are almost always books (this often pleases the parent more than the child I think but oh well, someday they’ll be happy with the books I give them) I used to stop off at the closest bookstore to pick out something for them. This is pre-COVID, you understand, when I could still browse in a small shop shoulder to shoulder with other patrons. Anyway, unless it’s a dedicated children’s bookstore (Bahri Kids is nice in Delhi and Lightroom in Bangalore is even better), the selection in most shops is terrible. Forget the more esoteric stuff (although would we call Pippi Longstocking esoteric?) there’s hardly any picture book classics, no Where The Wild Things Are or even The Cat In The Hat. It’s all 101 Stories About Ganesha and 20 Stories From The Ramayana mixed up with random Frozen merch. Not a Richard Scarry book in sight! Once, standing next to a father and a daughter, I heard him tell her to pick out a book of mythology, which is fine, everyone should know the old stories but must it be constant and must it be a chore and must it be the only thing your child is reading? I read wildly in my youth and only got to the myths when I was reading the Amar Chitra Katha comics to myself and I am now somewhat of an expert as you know so see, reading Enid Blyton or Astrid Lingdren in my childhood did not irrevocably corrupt me for everything else. It is a joy to be Books Auntie, sprinkling good things down on these kids and watching them discover Roald Dahl, for example, for the first time, but I have to do all my shopping in advance, from Amazon, which, as you know, is evil and killing authors and publishers with their heavy discounts.
/end rant
Enid Blyton made up my childhood. So much so that I can’t remember the first book of hers I read, nor the last. Every Blyton entered my life as though it had always been there: I had always roamed through the Enchanted Wood with Jo, Bessie and Fanny (changed I believe for modern children, now they are Joe, Beth and Frannie, as though kids will no longer be able to RELATE to a kid called Bessie or Fanny. Why are we pandering so much? Next they’ll change Jo in Little Women to Josie or something and then you’ll all cry.), I had always had a Wishing Chair in which I could fly to faraway places with Chinky the pixie (okay, I get why they had to change his name to Binky or Winky), I prepared to go to Mallory Towers or St Clare’s, I solved mysteries with Fatty and his friends, slipped the password to the Secret Seven, went for rambling nature walks with Uncle Merry and joined the circus with Mr Galliano. At age 5, I proclaimed, “I love reading Enid Blyton but I think I’m too old for her.” (This was recorded for posterity in a school magazine and all the adults laughed, while I was bemused. What was so funny?) I understood, see, at age 5, that there were books that would challenge you and help you grow, and let you learn things as you grew older, and there were books that were comforting and soothed you and would feel good to read, yes, but would let you stay in exactly the same space of reading development for as long as you liked.
Enid Mary Blyton always denied that she used ghost writers, but she wrote about fifty books a year. Okay, a lot of those were short fables and stories for children, but FIFTY. It seems impossible. By the ‘50s, people were already objecting to her work, it seemed too sexist, too racist, too unchallenged to still be in kid’s libraries. (I have just discovered there’s a BIOPIC starring HELENA BONHAM CARTER, must see if I can get a hold of it!) She was born to a salesman (of women’s clothes) Thomas Carey Blyton and his wife, Theresa Mary. Thomas is the one who instilled a love of nature in young Enid, so evident throughout her books, the robins chirp, the flowers bloom, the rabbits.. rabbit, but he left their family when Enid was thirteen to go live with another woman. She was never close to her mother, and she doesn’t seem to have forgiven her father either, she didn’t attend either of their funerals.
Bad mothers abound in Blyton’s books, but you have to look for them carefully. For example, in the books for younger children, The Faraway Tree series say, the mother is sketchily described. She’s always busy, she always has chores for the kids, which is fine, but she doesn’t seem loving at all. Jo will describe her as “fine” meaning “amazing,” Blyton’s children don’t bitch about their parents, but she doesn’t do anything to be particularly wonderful. Other mothers are harried (George’s mother in Famous Five, the only mother we meet) or socialite-y distant (Fatty’s mother) or spoilt (Gwendoline’s mother in Mallory Towers) or stern and scolding (Aunt Lou in a relatively unknown Blyton book which I happen to own, Come To The Circus.) Unloving mothers make an apperance also in Blyton’s standalone books, with slightly adult themes. In Six Cousins At Mistletoe Farm and its sequel Six Cousins Again, the story is about a whole country mouse-city mouse situation. Three farm children have to put up with their citified cousins coming to stay after their house burns down. These city kids are the worst, by the way. The older boy has long hair and recites poetry (shocking), the girl likes to dress up and wear perfume (even more shocking) and the youngest, the only redeemable one, bursts into tears a lot. Everyone shakes down and gets used to each other, but in the sequel, things are almost as bad if not worse, when the mother of the three city kids comes to run the farm next door. Now this woman married one sort of man, a sophisticated city man, who promised her a nice life, and expected of her only that she keep his house well, look after his children and look beautiful. Then he suddenly does a FLIP, and is all like, “Well, I guess I’ll be a farmer now and why can’t you be more like my brother’s wife Linnie, who is the EPITOME of a farmer’s wife and why must you have parties and why must you have a maid and breakfast in bed and make tiny little sandwiches and in all this, oh, our youngest kid wants a dog so you have to slap a smile on and look after that as well and I am zero use to you and no support except for telling you how much I like my brother’s wife, Linnie.” At the end of the book, the “spoilt” city wife has to agree to be a country woman and stand by her man etc and everyone applauds her decision, but still, it’s a pretty grim punishment.
In The Family At Red Roofs, a family is suddenly thrown into the wilderness when the father disappears at sea, and the mother, weak and soft, takes ill and can’t be told her husband is missing. It’s up to the two oldest children, fifteen and sixteen to make money and look after the house, and in all this there are two other terrible mothers: one, the mother of the two kids the older daughter is nannying and two, the mother of her school friend. One mother slaps and is irresponsible, the other constantly breaks down and fights with her daughter. “Gosh,” thinks Molly, our heroine, “I’m glad my mother isn’t like that” but really, her own mother is completely useless, and no one can lean on her at all.
Fathers are absent in Blyton’s world, either zooming in to give good advice and disappearing (Darrell’s dad, Malory Towers) absent minded and cross (Professor Quentin, Famous Five) or wrecked at sea (Red Roofs, above) or dead (The Adventure Series). So it falls to the mother to be everything: parent and minder and caretaker and captain of small souls and of course, they are inadequate, because Blyton says they are.
She herself had a troubled marriage. She married her editor, Hugh Alexander Pollock, who was already married with two sons (one living and one dead) when she met him and had to get a divorce to marry Enid. Between 1931 and 1935, she fell pregnant three times and had a daughter (Gillian), a miscarriage and then another daughter, Isabel in 1935. By this time, Hugh became a heavy alcoholic and also joined the army again, where he met a woman he had already known years ago, Ida Crowe (who went on to be his next wife and also romance and short story author, Ida Pollock. Hugh liked literary ladies.) Enid, in the meanwhile, had already started to loathe her husband, supposedly when he was wounded during some firing practice she refused to go see him because she was “busy and hated hospitals.” But all of this is coming from Ida’s memoirs, so we don’t know how biased it is. Ida also said Enid had a lesbian affair with one of her kids’ nannies as part of a long series of affairs and rounds of naked tennis? Nude tennis was apparently a thing, but it sounds painful to me, all those boobs and balls bouncing about. Anyway, she properly hated Hugh by the end of it, she threatened to take her books elsewhere if he stayed on at his publishing house so he was fired and couldn’t find a job anywhere else, she promised him access to his kids, which later she revoked and so he fell back into drinking and had to declare bankruptcy eventually.
In all this, Blyton was carrying on an affair of her own, with a man called Kenneth Fraser Darrell Waters (fun fact: Darrell Rivers from Mallory Towers was named after this guy). She married Kenneth as soon as she could, and changed her kids’ last names to his as well. It was an uneventful marriage, it looks like, marred only by the tragedy of Enid falling off a ladder and miscarrying their baby together, a son which they both longed for.
In her writing, she stuck to a schedule. A typewriter on her lap, a red shawl nearby (she liked the colour red, it stimulated her mind she said.) 6,000 to 10,000 words a day. The River of Adventure finished in five days. When she heard of a librarian claiming that she (Enid) hired ghost writers, she started legal proceedings against her. She was very proud of her output, and very upset that anyone should doubt her. She wrote, whatever you say about her, she wrote a lot, and came about her fame legitimately. Her kids existed in this postwar idyll, where nothing bad ever happened except maybe your parents got a little sick before they got well again. Except maybe your sister got trapped in a magic land over a tree and you had to go save her. Except that the village policeman might solve the mystery before you do, that your kidnappers will get away with everything before your cousins can run for help, you are never scared for your life, your biggest fear is that the bad guys will win. The darkest novels are The Adventurous Four series where actual Nazis are on the same island as the kids, and they have to get a message to “their guys” before the Nazis win.
You outgrow Enid Blyton all at once, one summer. Suddenly, the storylines seem babyish and trite. Why are these the concerns of fifteen year olds? Why are we still talking about British honour? You realise there are bigger themes in the world, and Enid only covers very few of them. It’s time for you to break away from her soft confinement, from her world where you are the “little foreigner” and you would be looked at suspiciously. Americans are brash, bold girls (they attend boarding school with Darrell in one school and the twins at another), Indians? Indians speak in gobbeldy goop and no one understands them. Any sort of foreigner doesn’t understand right and wrong and is to be scorned and pitied. You didn’t notice the golliwog stories—perhaps they were already scrubbed out of your books—but you noticed that. It’s when you learned to step out of her books, to look around you with cocked head and raised eyebrow, that’s when you knew you were ready for someone else.
POST SCRIPT: I have linked you to my speculative fiction versions of Malory Towers and Famous Five before, but in case you missed it, here are my two VERY DARK sequels to those books, called What Happened After. (I mean it, they are dark, I have lots of angry comments from people telling me I screwed up their childhood memories, so read at your own risk.)
Where am I?The Internet Personified! A mostly weekly collection of things I did/thought/read/saw that week.
Who are you?Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of seven books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.
Trying to perk up a boring errand and also the second day of my period with my 90s style beaded choker so I took this simpering selfie for you all. Plus then I dropped in on friends so it was worth it. #whatiworetoday
