posted on 15 May 2022

In bed with Enid Blyton and the mumps

I have written elsewhere on this site about the fact that I was never much of a reader until my mid to late teens when, for some reason, my fascination with books and the world of the imagination suddenly took off. I was a pretty avid comic reader throughout the bookless years and I’d always imagined that I was just a bit late making the leap from the likes of The Hornet or The Lion to real, substantial books but I’ve recently been trying to get a better handle on why it was that I suddenly seemed to switch onto reading in the way I did. I’m now starting to think that the answer may have been a particularly evil attack of the mumps I contracted when I was about 14 or 15.

I caught the infection from my younger brother who, as a seven year old, had brought it home from school and, as he shared a bedroom with me, I was bound to find my glands swelling up too. It’s an unpleasant enough malady for young children but a specially nasty one for a teenage boy – literally every gland that could swell did so. One consequence of this was that I couldn’t stand or walk around for quite an extended period and the 1960s was a time when family doctors visited and recommended long term bed rest.

At first sight an order to stay in bed for a couple of weeks might seem to be a pretty good prescription but for a teenage boy in an age when there was no technology to keep him entertained – no t.v. or radio in the bedroom – boredom soon sets in. It wasn’t long before I was desperate for diversion and there’s only so often you can read a comic – with everyone else in the house out at work or school all day and me bedbound, I had to make do and mend.

Was there anything I could reach to distract myself? Casting around I spotted a collection of Enid Blyton’s ‘Secret Seven’ books that had been given to my brother and which I had, until this moment barely noticed. I don’t remember any of the titles but they were just in reach and so I started, reluctantly, working my way through them.

Even now when I see those Secret Seven books in second hand shops I have a momentary and fleeting memory of that two weeks in bed. And, if I try hard, I can also bring to mind the sweet acrid taste of a bottle of cheap fizzy pop and a packet of biscuits that was left for me every morning on my bedside table.

I’ve always thought that this experience was insignificant and transient – after all these were just simple children’s stories – not reading of any substance appropriate to a fifteen year old boy used to the thrills of war stories or the chills of Amazing Tales. But the older I get the more this moment in my past comes swimming back to me and the more significant it feels. I can’t pretend that I remember any of the stories but I do remember the feeling of the reading experience – I especially recall the sense of being transported into an imaginary world where the mundane reality of time and place was suspended. I also remember my eagerness to return to them the next day when everyone had once again gone out about their business leaving me to disappear for a few hours into the world created by Enid Blyton.

At the time I kept my reading of the books strictly to myself – admitting I had enjoyed reading ‘childish’ books would have been shameful for some reason I can’t explain. However, a little more than fifty years on, looking back to this time I spent in bed with Enid Blyton, I can’t escape the feeling that this experience may well have been the unacknowledged genesis of my lifelong reading addiction.

 

Terry Potter

May 2022