Enid stories put blight on her centenary

Like any right-thinking person, the Diary is always mortified when sex and one’s own parents are talked about in the same breath.

But it was doubly mortifying when Enid Blyton’s sexual conquests, and there are more than you would expect, were retraced in front of her now elderly daughter, Gillian Baverstock.

Comedian Tony Robinson, a speaker at the Victoria & Albert Museum dinner, which celebrated the beginning of the author’s centenary year, was behind the travesty.

He told how Blyton had lured a married man into being her first husband. And how both grew apart amid a flurry of affairs. Finally, the old dear remarried and had two children. She may have been the author of over 700 morally righteous, racist and politically dubious books, but she still found time to let her hair down.

All pretty rum stuff for a kindly old granny to hear about old her mum. Robinson tried to puncture the embarrassment with a hollow laugh when he said: “It’s very difficult to talk about this in front of Gillian.” He should have tried being in the crowd.

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