Enid Blyton
Mention Enid Blyton to a bunch of people of my age and they are taken back in time to adventure stories that have coloured many a youngster back in the 60s and 70s. The Famous Five adventures were to us in those days what Harry Potter is to today's generation.
But did you know that in Malta we have the remains of her first husband Hugh Pollock?
I came across his burial place in the Military Cemetery in Mtarfa by coincidence while doing some research on Mtarfa on moving to the area some five years ago.
Pollock had eloped (at 50) to Malta with his secretary Ida Crowe who was 25 at the time - and who now is in her 80s - and is writing Enid Blyton's memoirs.
He spent his last few days in the Mtarfa Military Hospital (now a Boys' Secondary School) and was buried in 1971 in the cemetery nearby.
Bruce Hospital in Mtarfa
- now a Boy's Secondary School
- were Hugh Pollock died
1 comment:
there's an extraordinary photograph of Kastilja c.1850. Those old cameras needed long exposure to the light to get an image so anything moving would not appear or came out as a ghostly blur - quite appropriate - but in the photo I'm referring to there's one character who appears loud and clear, but you have to look hard to see him... he's an oldish looking man sleeping on the ground, a hat covering his face, beneath a lamp that in those days was situated at the street corner of St Paul's Street. There's no one else in the photo and it takes a while to actually see him, this old man, because the image is faded. But when you see him you are jolted awake, because it actually feels like you've just been transported there. A beggar? Perhaps it was not out of the ordinary for people to take a snooze on the pavement 150 years ago. I'll stop now. Old photos have a tendency to turn me into a quivering emotional mess.
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