A cluster of marigolds peeks from a teapot sitting pretty on a red-and-white chequered tablecloth. Outside, a weathered picket fence flanks the soft sands by a sparkling ocean. Children with a cane basket picnic in the cove below. And, all of a sudden, sitting by a seaside café in Galle, I’m reminded of a childhood ghost, Smuggler Ben, and how one Blytonian summer I joined him to sail the Cornwall coast in his leaky boat, feasting on lettuce-and-ham sandwiches.
Faraway Tree on the big screen
News that noted filmmaker Sam Mendes’ company is bringing to the big screen The Faraway Tree series puts the spotlight back on British children’s writer Enid Blyton. As much as she ruled the imagination of generations with pixies and fairies, adventures and mysteries, and boarding school tales, Blyton had to make way for books that depicted the depressing reality of our times; war, abuse, alien invasions and dystopian science fiction. Afternoon tea under a cherry tree, midnight feasts that sealed friendships for life, solving mysteries in haunted castles and romping around the countryside with your cousins and a dog aren’t considered instructive enough for today’s children. A book had to have a ‘take-away’ and Blyton, for all her stories with happy endings, taught nothing new.
Her writing is now considered politically incorrect, especially with references to brown skin, golliwogs and gypsies as thieves, and sexist: Mother was always baking and Wilhelmina was the tomboy at Malory Towers simply because she rode a horse named Thunder, and monocultural. The food and the customs were very English, with no reflection whatsoever of a multi-cultural Britain.
But Blyton could be forgiven all this; rivalling her flair for a mystery well was the way she introduced food to her readers. Sample this from The Secret of Cliff Castle . “She had cut them potted meat sandwiches, tomato sandwiches and egg sandwiches, and had put out some buttered scones, some ginger buns and some boiled sweets too. And then, there were bottles of iced lemonade.”
To girls and boys around the world, especially in the former colonies, Blyton opened the door to an English larder. Pictures of luscious strawberries and cream, tinned sardines, quivering blancmange, succulent pork pies and hard-boiled eggs crowded our dreams. In a way, Blyton was the food blogger of her times, she didn’t even need Instagram, just her descriptions.
In Upper Fourth at Malory Towers , she writes, “There were great chunks of new-made cream cheese, potted meat, ripe tomatoes grown in Mrs Lucy’s brother’s greenhouse, gingerbread cake fresh from the oven, shortbread, a great fruit cake with almonds crowding the top, biscuits of all kinds, and six jam sandwiches!” Writing during the War years, Blyton also had the innate ability to make food as innocuous as boiled eggs — dipped in a screw of salt — a luxury in an era of rationing, delicious. But what underlined her writing on food, perhaps, was that she celebrated the fresh and the wholesome.
Not one for packaged cereals and ready-to-eat dinners, her food listed frothy milk straight from the cow, butter churned on a farm and freshly dug-up radish and turnip. And, a meal was always announced with a dinner gong.
As different as Blyton book jackets were, changing from pastel watercolour illustrations to quirkier ones over the decades, so was the food platter for her many story series. Boarding school diets were Spartan, so common-room tea parties featured treats such as sausages and éclairs. The Five Find-Outers (and Dog) sucked on humbugs and chewed liquorice sticks while cracking a code, the table at Mr Pink-Whistle’s tea party was filled with macaroons and golden syrup and the children of The Faraway Tree devoured blueberry tarts and jelly treats by the dozen.
Blyton’s signature dishes were not always flavoursome though: anchovy paste stinks to high heaven and potted meat sandwiches often taste like boiled sawdust. But, when my order of sticky ginger cake, buttered scones and tea arrives, redolent of island spices and the flavour of the New Year, it rekindles memories of lazy summer afternoons, a kinder, gentler world, and a jolly good time.
