The Bettany Twins and the Chalet School by Helen Barber

OK, this really wasn’t what I was expecting!   I don’t want to give the game away for anyone who’s got this book but hasn’t read it yet (I never know whether anyone actually reads anything I write or not 🙂 ), but let’s just say that it involves a wartime spy story about an Indian jewellery box and a Nazi plot, in which are embroiled both Dick Bettany’s new house in Devon and the Armishire poacher once encountered by Daisy Venables and her two best pals.  Rather more Enid Blyton than Elinor M Brent-Dyer.  However, as the author points out, the “canon” books also include spy stories – Gertrud Beck for one and the Chart of Erisay for another – and strange adventures (notably the one where a kidnapping drug gang give Val Gardiner rich creamy milk and pay for her train ticket, and not forgetting Professor Richardson’s spaceship).  And it means that we get to see Madge being the heroine of a dramatic car chase through the countryside.  I love Madge, so I particularly enjoyed that bit.

If you were expecting Sales, Christmas plays, showdowns in the study, prefects’ meetings and tea parties at Joey’s, though, you’re going to be out of luck – and, given that people pay the premium prices for the “fill-in” books because they want to read about the Chalet School, some readers may have issues with that.  But there’s school stuff in there too, we get to see plenty of the Bettany and Russell families (and not too much of the Maynards, which makes a pleasant change), and we get to see quite a bit of interaction between the School and the locals, something which most people love about the Tyrol books and bemoan the lack of in the British and Swiss books.  This isn’t one which I’ll read over and over again, but I did quite enjoy it.

I love the family scenes in The Chalet School in Exile and Bride Leads the Chalet School, and am always sorry that we don’t see more of the Russell and Bettany boys during the course of the series.  I was disappointed that David Russell, for whom I’ve got a soft spot, didn’t feature in this, but, as the title makes clear, it’s mostly about the three sets of Bettany twins – Madge and Dick, Peggy and Rix, and Maurice and Maeve.  People on fan fora/fan groups often say that it’d be interesting to see more about how the Bettany family got on when two families suddenly became one – Madge, Dick and the two youngest children, who’d lived as a family unit in India, and the four eldest children, who’d been brought up by Madge and Jem alongside the Russell and Venables children.  So I think this was a great idea for a fill-in book.

As we – i.e. Chalet School fans –  know, there’s a bit of a muddle over the Bettanys’ return from India.  The three short “retrospectives”, Tom, Rosalie and Mystery, seem to forget that there’s a war on, and so we get Dick, Mollie, Maeve and Maurice sailing from India to Britain in wartime, which seems very odd, and then there’s also a mention of them spending time in Australia, which doesn’t seem to fit with anything else.  So Helen Barber did face quite a challenge in making sense of it, and explained it by saying that Dick was involved in secret war work which necessitated his return home.

I thought that that was a good idea, but the spy/mystery/adventure story itself really is very far-fetched, and, as I said, seems to belong far more to an Enid Blyton series than to the Chalet School.  Also, we see quite a few characters who are Helen Barber’s own creations from her Taverton books, rather than being the old Chalet School friends for whom most readers are probably looking.  But the school scenes and the family scenes do work very well, and it’s nice to see Miss Wilson in her role as brevet auntie as well as her role as headmistress.

The characters are all very well-portrayed, too.  Maeve and Maurice are only seven at this point, and the Chalet School books don’t include many school scenes with such young children – apart from the excruciating ones in which Robin Humphries is treated like a toddler, and, even with those, we don’t see things from Robin’s own viewpoint.  We do with Maeve in this book, and Helen Barber manages that very well.

All in all, this wasn’t what I was expecting, but it’s a fair point that the Chalet School books do sometimes veer off into spy stories, adventure stories, etc … and I did love the idea of Madge whizzing round country lanes in pursuit of a Nazi spy who’d got Maeve and a Welsh harp in the back of his van.  We also hear that Madge has recently been appointed secretary of the local WI.  I love the description of Madge in the later books, sounding a bit like Audrey and Marjory from To The Manor Born, involved on loads of committees, and always wish we’d seen some of that during the war years, as I’m sure Madge would very much have wanted to Do Her Bit.  Go Madge!   If you were looking for a classic Chalet School story, this isn’t one.  But, if you want a general GO book to read, then this isn’t a bad one at all.

Twist of the Thread by Christine Evans

This is the sequel to Song of the Shuttle.  Much like that, it’s well-researched and quite entertaining, but a little far-fetched!  I’m not sure how realistic it is that a housemaid from a Lancashire mill town would persuade a former Confederate soldier to marry her, and then take over the running of his ruined plantation, insist on paying all the former slaves a fair wage, and become close friends with all the former slaves, giving everyone else in their district of Louisiana a salutary lesson in race relations and equality, during Reconstruction.  Nice idea, though!  The fictional town of Gorbydale doesn’t match up exactly to anywhere, but it’s probably closer to Rochdale than anywhere else, and Rochdale was particularly well-known for its anti-slavery stance.

Meanwhile, the dodgy husband tried to murder his wife’s ex-employer’s cousin, accidentally murdered her friend instead, spent a lot of time gambling on Mississippi riverboats, faked his own death, and then turned up in Liverpool.  As you do.  As I said, it wasn’t particularly realistic, but, apart from a quibble over the demography of Cheetham Hill, and possibly some confusion over the date of the opening of Strangeways (I’m not quite sure what year it was meant to be in the book by then), the actual history was fairly accurate.  And it was a good read.  I need distracting, at the moment.  I’m sure we all do.

This was meant to be a series, but, sadly, the author died suddenly.  She’d written the third book before her death, but obviously there won’t be any more.  There wasn’t as much history in this book as in the first one – that, despite the rather bonkers storyline, appealed to me because it was about the Cotton Famine, my dissertation topic, and the American Civil War, one of my great and long-term historical loves, but this one was more about the personal lives of the characters.  As well as the story of Dolly, the housemaid, we heard about Jessie, the main character in the first book, and how she coped with having a disabled child, and also about Jessie’s friend Honora (whom Dolly’s husband tried to murder!) and her medical studies in America.  It was all quite interesting, but a bit more about Gorbydale’s recovery from the Cotton Famine would have been nice.

During the Famine, of course, there was state assistance via the Public Works Acts, but there was also a huge privately-organised relief effort, with money being raised from all over the world, and local committees distributing it, and organising, for example, sewing schools, which feature in this book.  With Andy Burnham launching the OneGM fund today, and Marcus Rashford doing so much to raise money to provide meals for disadvantaged children, I’ve been thinking a lot about this.  And my house is built on the site of what was a Cotton Famine Public Works programme.  Anyway, that’s beside the point.  This isn’t the greatest book ever, but, as a 99p Kindle download, it was well worth reading!

 

Diary of a Provincial Lady by E M Delafield (Facebook group reading challenge)

This wasn’t what I was expecting at all.  I thought it was going to be rather prim and stuffy: instead, it was like Bridget Jones’s Diary in inter-war Devon!   This must be where Helen Fielding got a lot of her ideas from, surely.  The Provincial Lady sounds exactly like Bridget.  She even writes notes to self, although she puts “mem”.  The style of writing seemed almost identical to me.  And so I thoroughly enjoyed this, which I didn’t really think I would.

The Provincial Lady’s general scattiness, and the way in which she keeps ending up doing slightly the wrong thing in social settings and being intimidated by more confident people – notably one Lady Boxe – are very reminiscent of Bridget, as is the way she stays hopeful and keeps on trying, but her life is very different.  She’s a Smug Married, with two children, and servants; and, living in a different time, she doesn’t work, but is involved with various committees and spends a lot of time visiting friends – but it never seems boring

Her attempts at impressing people and doing what’s expected, and the way in which she usually falls short, are rather endearing.  However, she also spends a lot of time bemoaning her financial position, and it’s hard to sympathise when she keeps going on holiday, buying things she doesn’t need, and not paying tradesmen’s bills.   But, all in all, it’s a very amusing and entertaining book.  I can’t get over how much it reminded me of Bridget Jones’s Diary, though!   I’ve mentioned this to a few people, and some have agreed with me and some haven’t, but I personally am convinced that Helen Fielding knows this book very well indeed!

Back to School with Alison Hammond – ITV

This programme, shown as part of Black History Month, was very interesting, and a much more positive approach than that shown by certain other TV channels and certain newspapers.  It was also very encouraging to see a black history programme that didn’t focus on either slavery or the US Civil Rights movement: obviously those are important, but it was good to see other subjects being raised too.  Alison Hammond is a very engaging presenter, and the stories she investigated – including one about a trumpeter and one about a footballer 🙂 – were all fascinating in their own way.

The trouble is that schools only have a very limited amount of time in which to teach history, and it would be very challenging to incorporate modules specifically on the history of all under-represented groups into that.  As far as I’m concerned, PE and art lessons should be abolished and replaced by extra history lessons, but I’m not sure that the authorities would go for that.  Shame …

She started off by looking into the story of John Blanke, a black trumpeter at the court of Henry VII and Henry VIII.  He certainly sounds like quite a character: he even asked Henry VIII for a pay rise!   However, I think it’s quite hard to argue that lessons on the Tudors should be focusing on trumpeters rather than on the Reformation, the development of the “king-in-parliament” principle, the Anglo-Scottish Wars, etc.  Nobody’s trying to exclude John Blanke from history, of course note; but trumpeters, with all due respect to them, don’t normally get that much attention.

We also heard about Ira Aldridge, a black actor in Georgian and Victorian times.  Again, he sounded very interesting, but Alison Hammond and Adrian Lester, to whom she spoke about him, questioned why they’d never learnt about him at school.  We never learnt about any actors at school, in either history lessons or English literature lessons.  His story was probably a lot more interesting than some of the stuff about medieval monks which we did have to learn about, but actors are just not usually part of a school history curriculum, and I’m not sure why we were expected to be shocked that neither of them had been taught about him.  Fascinating story, but there are so many fascinating stories about individuals, and schools just can’t fit them all in in two or three lesson periods a week.

Walter Tull, however, was someone of whom I’d certainly heard – most football fans with an interest in history will know the name of one of the first non-white footballers to play in the then First Division (for Spurs), and know that he became an officer in the British Army during the First World War but was sadly killed in action.  But – very unfortunately – footballers, regardless of ethnicity, don’t feature on the school history curriculum.  Again, it was a great story, but I wasn’t sure why we were meant to be surprised that his name wasn’t more familiar.

The two most prominent people mentioned – although, TBH, I know more about Walter Tull than I do about Septimius Severus – were Mary Seacole, the Crimean War nurse, and Septimius Severus, Roman emperor from 193 to 211 AD.  I think the name of Mary Seacole is pretty well-known now, and that most people are familiar with her brave and wonderful work during the Crimean War.  We didn’t learn about her at school.  But nor did we learn about Florence Nightingale.  We didn’t “do” the Crimean War.  I wish we had, because my great-great-great grandfather fought in it, and I have actually been to Sebastopol and Balaclava.  But we didn’t.  It’s just not usually on the school syllabus.

Nor is the period from 193 to 211 AD.  We don’t actually know whether or not Septimius Severus was black: we know that he came from Africa, but it was probably from North Africa.  No-one really knows.  We do know that he died in York, and the fact that a Roman emperor – in fact, two Roman emperors – died in York isn’t well-known at all.  But it’s just not a period that’s covered in school history – as in all these cases, it’s nothing to do with racial prejudice, any more than the relative lack of women in history books, as Catherine Morland famously moaned about in Northanger Abbey, is to do with gender prejudice.

All in all, this was a very enjoyable programme, and each of the stories in it was fascinating, and told in an extremely enthusiastic way – Alison Hammond really is great, and always seems so interested in everything she’s talking about.   And, as I said, it was wonderful to see a programme on black history which didn’t focus on slavery or the Civil Rights movement, and which reminded us that “black history” in Britain goes right back to Roman times, and probably earlier.  But the issue is how you would fit that into a school history curriculum, especially bearing in mind that there are other groups who also feel under-represented in history teaching.  Personal histories are great, as the popularity of programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are and My Grandparents’ War shows, but I do think schools have to concentrate on major events, major developments, and the movers and shakers involved in those, regardless of ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality or anything else.  There just isn’t enough curriculum time to include everything.

That’s a great shame.

Maybe we could scrap PE and art lessons, and have more history lessons instead  …

 

The Last Train to London by Meg Waite Clayton

This is a very interesting book, although the style won’t appeal to everyone, about the Kindertransport and one of the women who was most important in it.  Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer, known as “Truus”, was a Dutch (Protestant) woman involved in rescuing Jewish children, initially connections of her own friends and acquaintances, from Nazi Germany, from as early as 1933, going to Germany herself and bringing them to the Netherlands, which became more and more difficult as all countries tightened immigration rules.  When the British government agreed to the establishment of the Kindertransport programme, in 1938, Truus was asked by the Refugee Children’s Movement in Britain to travel to Vienna, meet Adolf Eichmann there in person, and try to persuade him to agree to let children from Austria be evacuated.  He tried to trick her by saying that the plan could go ahead if she could arrange for exactly 600 children to leave, in a very short space of time – and she managed to do it.

In total, around 10,000 children were brought to safety in Britain.  The book ends in 1939, but Truus continued to help refugees throughout the war, despite being arrested more than once, turning down the chance to leave the occupied Netherlands for safety in Britain herself.  She was unable to have children herself, and the book shows the sadness that this caused her and her husband Joop, but became known as the “mother of 1,001 children”.

The book’s partly about Truus, and partly about three fictional characters – a teenage boy, a teenage girl, and the boy’s younger brother – who become three of the 600.  The style of writing isn’t the most readable I’ve ever come across, but it’s a fascinating story.  We see Truus in action, and also her home life, and we see how the lives of the two teenagers, misfits who’ve become close to each other,  and their families are torn apart.  There’s also a toy Peter Rabbit.  I’m not sure how big Beatrix Potter was in inter-war Austria, but rabbits seem to be a bit of a thing in books about children escaping from the Nazis.

We also see just how quickly things changed in Austria.  It wasn’t a gradual process as it was in Germany.  Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancellor, was opposed to the Anschluss, and Austria had no equivalent to the Nuremberg Laws until it was taken over.

The title of the book refers to the last Kindertransport train, which was from Prague, to depart before war declared.  It never reached the Netherlands, and no-one knows what happened to the children on it – but, sadly, I think we can probably imagine.  It does have a link to the characters, but it’d be a spoiler to say what.

Some of the language jars slightly: no-one in 1939 said “chalkboard” rather than “blackboard”, and a British person would have said “disembark” rather than “debark”.  OK, OK, that’s nitpicking; but it’s quite a strange book, with newspaper cuttings (which I think are actually fictional, although what they say is factual) about the latest events included in between every few chapters.  I thought it worked quite well, but people might find it off-putting.

It’s also quite unusual in that not only do Hitler, Eichmann and other Nazis feature as characters but we actually see things from Eichmann’s point of view in some scenes.  He has to be included because Truus did meet him in person, but it’s quite strange when we actually “see” his thoughts.  And the book does jump about a lot, between the different characters – not just the main characters, but various minor characters as well.  However, it’s a very interesting story – both the part about Truus, largely based on fact, and the part about the children, who are fictional but who speak for so many real children who were parted from their families by horrific events, but whose lives were saved,

The Kindertransport was sanctioned by the government here in that they agreed to make an exception to the immigration laws in the case of the children concerned,  but it was all organised by private individuals.  The treasurer of the Refugee Children’s Movement went to my old school, and two of the prominent committee members name-checked in the book went to our brother school.  Sorry, I just had to say that!  I’m not just being cliquey, honestly: I’m making a point that these were ordinary people, not aristocrats or politicians or celebs.  They put in a huge amount of work to persuade the government to agree to it, to raise money and win popular support, and to find homes for the children.  We’ve rather lost that civil society thing now: governments are expected to deal with anything and everything.  The work that these people did, on a voluntary basis, was very admirable, to put it mildly.

But they, at least, were safe in Britain – it was Truus who actually went into the Third Reich, putting herself in danger, to bring the children out, and without any personal reason for doing so, only that she wanted to help.  I’ve read better books than this, but it’s an amazing story, and she was an amazing woman.

 

 

Harriet

I missed this film, about Harriet Tubman, who escaped slavery and helped many others to do the same, at the pictures.  It’s really not like me to miss a film about 19th century American history; but it wasn’t on for long, and not all cinemas showed it.  So thank you to Sky for showing it, as part of Black History Month.  All the local cinemas would, however, definitely have shown the new James Bond film next month, had its release gone ahead; and I would definitely have gone to see it, as would many other people.  I’d also have gone to see The Secret Garden, but that’s now gone straight to Sky without even being shown at cinemas.   And now it looks as if Cineworld are going to mothball all their cinemas, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Vue and Odeon follow suit.  It’s very sad.  The film distributors aren’t giving them a chance.

Anyway, back to the point.  This unfortunately isn’t very historically accurate, but it does get across the message of how brutal slave owners could be, the tragedy of families torn apart, and the bravery of those involved in the Underground Railroad – and just how much work and organisation went into it, at a time when communication systems were obviously nothing like they are now, and many of those involved hadn’t even had the chance to learn to read and write.

It’s quite an old-fashioned film, with an ’80s/’90s feel to it – glorious music, sweeping panoramas, elegant costumes for the slave owners and the free black characters, and a dramatic chase through the forest.  I know there was a bit of moaning that the lead role went to a British actress rather than an American actress, but Cynthia Erivo really does a superb job.  It must have been particularly difficult to portray Harriet’s belief that she was having religious visions – thought to have been linked to a severe head injury inflicted on her when she was young – but she does it very convincingly.

I’m surprised that this didn’t do better at the box office, but – very sadly for me! – American historical dramas just don’t seem to sell well these days.  I was sorry to see Mercy Street pulled after two series.   Oh well, I enjoyed it!  And it tells an important story.

Harriet Tubman was born Araminta “Minty” Ross, into slavery in Maryland, and married John Tubman, a freedman.  Dramas about slavery do tend to focus on the Deep South, where marriages between slaves and free people were very unusual, but they did happen in the Upper South.  And, with Maryland bordering the free state of Pennsylvania, it was easier (in relative terms) there for slaves to escape; and we see Minty escaping, being assisted by members of the Underground Railroad, and adopting her mother’s name, Harriet – the change of name, to reflect her new status, is a powerful moment.

We then see her returning to try to bring her husband and sister to slavery, only to find that her husband, thinking she was dead, had remarried, and her sister wouldn’t leave her children, but then leading many others to freedom, returning time and again to come so and becoming known as “Moses”.  She did indeed lead many people to freedom, thought to be around 70 people in 13 trips  – and she was actually even braver than the film suggests, because this was mostly after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act meant that escaped slaves, if recaptured, would be returned to slavery, whereas the film suggests that many of her missions were earlier.

The film over-dramatises it, giving Harriet a glamorous friend who runs a boarding house where she stays, and giving Harriet’s former owners, the Brodesses, a handsome son who seems to be rather obsessed with her.  It also shows the Brodesses’ neighbours all turning up at their plantation to confront them when they realise who “Moses” is, and Harriet tying up three of the Brodesses inside their plantation house as she helps some of their slaves to escape, and culminates in a dramatic chase through a forest and a showdown in which Harriet gets the better of the handsome son and prophesies the coming of the war and his death in it.   It’s a shame that it’s not historically accurate, because the showdown really is a great scene and Cynthia Erivo plays it so well, as she does another scene in which she reminds members of the Underground Railroad who were born free just how evil slavery is, and how they can’t possibly understand it in the way that she can.

It then shows Harriet fleeing to Canada, and briefly reminds that she led the Combahee River Raid during the war, in which she actually led a military expedition which rescued over 750 former slaves, but that’s all done briefly so as not to detract from the big showdown scene preceding it.

Not too many marks for historical accuracy, but the general storyline’s there – the horrors of slavery, and this brave and rather mystical woman who escapes from it and helps many others to do the same.  It’s not at all preachy or aggressive: it gets the message across through the excellent performance of Cynthia Erivo and the big dramatic, if not accurate, key scenes.  Certainly well worth watching.

 

On the Basis of Sex

I’ve finally got round to watching this, following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  It only covered a small part of her life and work – I’m waiting for the “RBG” biopic to become available on Amazon Prime for no extra charge – but what an inspiring story.  I hadn’t realised that, whilst she was at law school, her husband was being treated for cancer, she was attending his classes as well as her own, and they had a young child.   A lot of people would have struggled even to make it through, but she finished joint top of her class.  And, despite that, struggled to find a job at a law firm because people didn’t want to employ a woman, especially one with a child – but went on to argue successfully a number of gender discrimination cases, including the “Moritz v Commissioner” tax law case on which much of this film focuses.

She became only the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court, the first Supreme Court justice to officiate at a same sex marriage ceremony, and the first woman to lie in state at the Capitol … and I’m struggling to think of any other lawyer who became such an icon, even a cult figure.  It’s an incredible story.

It’s also a wonderful American Dream story.  The film didn’t go into her background, but this woman who achieved so much was the daughter of a garment factory worker whose parents couldn’t afford to send her to college and an immigrant who came to America to escape discrimination against Jews in Odessa.  It would be nice if people would remember that America offers those opportunities, and also that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was someone who tried to build consensus and work with, not against, those with different views, and certainly wasn’t aggressive or abusive towards people with whom she disagreed.

The film showed some of her time at law school, and then her work on the “Moritz v Commissioner” case, and bits about her family life, so it didn’t really do her justice because it wasn’t intended to: it wasn’t a full biopic.  But it was very entertaining and very interesting, with strong performances from all the main cast members.  Oh, and it was also quite romantic, with Felicity Jones as Ruth and Armie Hammer as her husband Marty working really well together.   It wasn’t the greatest film ever, but I’m certainly glad that I watched it.