Free Enid Blyton by Barbara Stoney Page A

dance with him and have the ring. He fetched me at 7 at Charing Cross and we taxied about in the Park and he gave me my ring. It’s a lovely one. Then we went to Prince’s to dinner and a dance … I loved dancing with Hugh … It’s been a heavenly evening and it’s so simply lovely to be engaged to my darling, darling Hugh and have his ring on my finger.
    The following Wednesday, Teachers’ World announced the engagement. Mr Allen wrote in his ‘News and Views of the Week’:
    I am sure my readers will be delighted to hear that Miss Enid Blyton is engaged to be married. While I am not at liberty to disclose the name of the happy man, I may say that the marriage will probably take place in August. And Miss Blyton will continue to write for the Teachers’ World I hope, because, with her, marriage does not mean the end of her career as a writer but merely the beginning of a new phase of it. On behalf of all Teachers’ World readers I tender good wishes and congratulations. I may add that when the artist drew the cartoon on another page he was ignorant of this piece of news. Otherwise I am sure he would have provided Miss Blyton with assistance in carrying her window.
    The cartoon referred to was one showing how some of the regular contributors to the magazine spent their holidays; Enid is depicted carrying a small suitcase in one hand and a large window in the other over the caption ‘Miss Enid Blyton took her window with her.’
    On 16 June, Hugh decided to lodge at a small private hotel in Oakwood Avenue until the wedding and from then on the couple saw each other every day. Meanwhile, Enid was writing more than ever. Her first series of Readers, commissioned by Thomas Nelson and Sons earlier in the year, had been accepted without alteration and she had been asked to write a second – as well as a poetry book. She had prepared a book of fairy stories and poems which had been accepted by Newnes at the beginning of June and finished The Zoo Book, commissioned by Hugh for Newnes, on 3 July. In celebration of the occasion she joined Mabel on a seaside holiday at Felpham in Sussex. Hugh stayed over the weekend and, according to her diary ‘spoilt things by being upset because a man is coming to our boarding house next week …’ Hugh’s jealousy understandably annoyed Enid and the quarrel continued the next day, until ‘we began to laugh … and then Hugh was sweet to me’. But despite their quarrels, they were obviously very much in love.
    Enid records having found ‘a ripping flat at Chelsea’ and of how they both went to look at it on her return from holiday. She made no further entries in her diary for 1924, but her account book shows that she had been busy preparing several columns and regular features in advance, so as to leave the following weeks free for a most important event in her life – though even this went unrecorded in her diary – her wedding on 28 August at Bromley Register Office.
    It was a very quiet ceremony, no member of either Enid’s or Hugh’s family being present. Hanly had had a similarly quiet wedding two months before, but although he, his wife Floss and his mother were still living in Beckenham, they were not invited – nor was Phyllis Chase, that friend of many years standing. Only Mabel and her parents – ‘Grandpa’ and ‘Grandma’ Attenborough – were at the register office and there was no announcement of the marriage in any of the local or national newspapers.
    Enid later explained to her friends that this was because ‘Hugh didn’t want the people at Newnes to know at the beginning that we were married because of the work he has commissioned me to do. They might not have liked it.’
    Her honeymoon appears to have been spent in Jersey, for shortly afterwards she wrote two articles for Teachers’ World – ‘La Corbière’ and ‘Dawn at Sea’ – which described incidents on holiday, though she made no mention of having recently married. Regular readers no