The Little Missus by Elinor M Brent-Dyer

Hooray, I have now read all of Elinor M Brent-Dyer’s books!   This is a short historical novel, set in Kent and Dorset during the Napoleonic Wars.  Unlike The Little Marie-Jose, in which the peasants are the goodies and the aristocrats are the baddies, our heroine is the daughter of an English lord and a late French “Pretty Mamma” who had to flee from “wicked Robespierre”.  Lower class people are either faithful servants or a bit thick and, if male, spend most of their time in the pub.

The Little Missus has four much older half-brothers – whom Elinor, as she does, refers to as “step-brothers”.  One of them, Roger, is disowned by his father for marrying Pleasance, the daughter of the family’s steward.  For various reasons, the Little Missus is then packed off to stay with her Great-Aunt Susannah.

Great-Aunt Susannah is planning to evict Seth, who runs the local pub, for getting drunk and swearing a lot and other such heinous crimes.  Meanwhile, she and the Little Missus bump into Roger, who just happens to be living nearby, and she punishes the Little Missus for speaking to him.

So the Little Missus runs away, but only gets as far as the pub before she hurts her ankle, and is rescued by Seth’s wife Mary … and overhears Seth plotting to burn down Great-Aunt Susannah’s house.  In the meantime, a message has been sent to Roger, but he’s away, so Pleasance comes instead, and Great-Aunt Susannah sees that she’s a lady really.

Seth and his mates, the Little Missus and Mary, Roger, and Dear Papa and one of his other sons, then all head for Great-Aunt Susannah’s house.   Roger, who fortunately carries a pistol around with him, shoots and injures one of the baddies,  some soldiers turn up, the plot is foiled, and Dear Papa, Roger, Pleasance, the Little Missus and Great-Aunt Susannah are all reconciled and live happily ever after.

It’s a bit of a daft story, and it’s not very long, but I’m so glad to have read all of Elinor’s books at last, 40 years after I read my first Chalet School book!

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The Little Marie-Jose by Elinor M Brent-Dyer

This is a historical adventure story, set in late 17th/early 18th century France, New England and Quebec … and rather exaggerating the conditions of the time, which I suppose at least made it dramatic!   There’s a strong religious theme to it, but it isn’t nearly as preachy as I was expecting: I actually rather enjoyed it.  And it was one of only two of Elinor M Brent-Dyer’s books which I hadn’t read, so I’m very glad to have got a copy of it at last.

The foreword takes a reference to its being 100 years before the French Revolution literally, and therefore takes the start of the book as being in 1689; but there’s also a reference to having heard of Cotton Mather, so maybe it’s meant to be just after the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.  Or maybe they’d heard about his earlier witch trials.  And was he really that notorious in France anyway?  Am I overthinking this?!  Anyway. What isn’t mentioned at all is the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.   I appreciate that the book was written just after Elinor’s conversion to Catholicism, but the emphasis on Evil Puritans persecuting Those of the True Faith, with not the slightest reference to the fact that Catholics also persecuted Protestants, gets a bit much.  I could also have done without all the thees, thous, dosts, etc, but I suppose they were meant to make the book seem more historical.

Our family are forced to flee after 10-year-old Marie-Jose slaps the local seigneur’s spoilt daughter, who’d drowned her kitten and whom she was frightened was going to kidnap her baby brother.  It’s a jolly good job that they do so, as we later learn that the said seigneur was going to send both children away to do hard labour in factories.  And it’ll be 100 years before the Revolution happens, and frees the oppressed peasantry.

I’m not entirely sure that ancien regime France was full of child-kidnappers, or indeed juvenile aristocratic kitten-murderers, but it’s interesting to see Elinor taking such a strong stance against the ruling classes and in favour of the peasantry, and praising the French Revolution as a time of liberation.  There’s also that idea of Simple Peasants and True Faith which we get when Elinor writes about Oberammergau in The Chalet School and Jo, and also in 19th century movements such as Russian Slavophilism.

With the help of some kind people met along the way, Maman, Papa, Marie-Jose and baby Jeannot take ship for Quebec.  Unfortunately, their ship is hit by a hurricane, and is unable to make it to Quebec but instead has to put our family and some of their shipmates ashore in New England.   They’re initially helped by some English Protestants who are, wa-hey, actually nice and kind, but unfortunately the local schoolmaster sends for the extremist Baddie Puritan authorities.

The French party are then immediately grabbed off the street and hauled off to prison for being the wrong religion, which sounded more like something from Isabella I’s Castile than something from Puritan New England, and the priest was burned at the stake.  Our family are told that they can either convert and be split up and set to work separately or, if they won’t convert, they’ll be sold south into slavery.

There’s no doubt that Puritan extremism existed in late 17th century New England.  Massachusetts notoriously executed a number of Quakers in the early 1660s – and, partly as a result of that, was put under English rule and forbidden from doing so again.  But things’d calmed down a bit by the 1680s and 1690s, and, even before that, people weren’t just grabbed off the street and burnt at the stake.  And the last person I’d have expected that sort of exaggeration from is Elinor Brent-Dyer.  In the Chalet School world, Catholics and Protestants co-exist in perfect harmony.   A Catholic priest and an Anglican vicar ride around together on a motorbike.   When a pupil questions by Protestant pupils are attending a Catholic service, she’s told firmly that the different denominations are just “different paths to God”.  The goings-on in this book are all very dramatic, but not particularly historically accurate and certainly not very Elinor.

Obviously, our family cannot possibly renounce the True Faith.  However, help is, of course, at hand.  Some of the Goodie Protestants whom they’d met earlier break them out of prison, and they set off to a port from which they can get a ship to Quebec.  But then they get attacked by bears.

However, they fight off the bears, and make it safely to Quebec, where they settle and prosper.  Everything’s going swimmingly for them, when who should arrive but the baddie seigneur and his kitten-murdering daughter, who’ve got into trouble at home.  The daughter is inspired by Marie-Jose’s example to become a good person and a True Believer, and eventually realises who she is and asks her forgiveness, and they become best friends.

Then one of the goodie Protestants from New England arrives, looking for Marie-Jose.  They fall in love, but, oh no, she can’t marry him, because he’s not of the True Faith.  But, hurrah, he sees the light and converts, and they get married and live happily ever after.

Despite the rather melodramatic storyline, I did quite enjoy this; and, as I’ve said, I’m very glad to have read it at last.

Chudleigh Hold by Elinor M Brent-Dyer

This was a Blytonesque adventure/mystery/thriller book, but with some very Brent-Dyer-ish touches – a large family, a long-lost cousin and two redoubtable old ladies.  It had a definite post-war feel, with references to both Nazis and rationing.  I really enjoyed it apart from the confusion over Arminel Chudleigh becoming Gill Culver of the Chalet School.  Why the name change and why the personality change?  And why on earth was Arminel nicknamed “Crumpet”?!  The other nicknames, which were fairly self-explanatory anyway, were explained, but there was nothing about that one.

Chudleigh Hold was home to a young baronet, his seven siblings, their nanny, a governess rejoicing in the name of “Loo” and a housemaid, later joined by their great-aunt and her companion.   It was close to the sea, with smugglers’ coves and secret tunnels – you get the idea – and the house was full of valuable paintings and jewellery.

A hitherto unknown cousin invited herself to stay, and Mysterious Things began to happen.  Of course, it turned out that she was a fake, and the truth all came out and the baddies were vanquished in a dramatic adventure, with Great Aunt Merrill and “Crumpet” in the thick of it.  It’s really rather a shame that EBD didn’t write more adventure books, because the Chudleigh Hold series is great fun!

The Condor Crags Adventure by Elinor M Brent-Dyer

  For someone associated with Girls’ Own school stories, Elinor M Brent-Dyer wrote Boys’ Own adventure stories remarkably well.  This is very much of its time (1954), or indeed earlier – a well-to-do Englishman, Sir Godfrey Chudleigh, is kidnapped by a Bolivian tribe demanding the return of some jewels given by one of their ancestors to one of Godfrey’s ancestors.  Godfrey’s brother, two chums and a Brazilian associate (who happens to be an expert on planes) set off to rescue him.

Fortunately, Godfrey is not being kept locked up, but is free to wander around; and is kept supplied with food and ginger beer by a badly-treated mestizo man with whom he becomes friends.  I’m not sure why ginger beer seems to be so readily available in the Bolivian Andes, but never mind.

Some of the language in relation to disability and ethnicity doesn’t really work today, but the book’s nearly 70 years old, and none of the terms used would have been considered offensive in the 1950s.  And the dialogue is all very Boys’ Own slangy, with the young men addressing each other as “old cock”!  The Chudleighs are all very brave and manly, what-ho, and they aren’t going to be done down by the Andean kidnappers, even though they’ve threatened to chop Godfrey up piece by piece.

That’s the blokes, natch.  There’s no question of the girls having any involvement … which is a bit annoying, when you think that Bessie Marchant, Dorothea L Moore and to some extent Enid Blyton were quite happy to let girls be involved in derring-do, and indeed so was Elinor herself in some of the Chalet School books.  However, a woman doses two men, which would never happen in Chalet School land.  You go, girl!!

One of the Chudleigh sisters, Arminel, is Gillian Culver from the Chalet School books, and I’ve never been quite clear as to why the same character has two different names and two different personalities!  But she barely features in this.

Our Brazilian friend, who for some reason speaks Spanish rather than Portuguese, fortunately guesses exactly where Godfrey is, and the rescuers fly a plane overhead and signal to him that he will soon be free.  Hurrah!  Meanwhile, Godfrey finds some gold and shoots some pumas.

He and Gonzalo, the mestizo man, then escape through some caves, in the middle of volcanic eruptions, storms, earthquakes and avalanches.  None of which bother our hero one whit.   And the rescuers, flying overhead, spot them.  Yay!!   They are duly rescued.

It’s not exactly realistic, but books in this genre rarely are, and it’s really rather good as Boys’ Own adventure books go.  I am off to try to find copies of the three books in this series which I’ve yet to read!

 

Top Secret by Elinor M Brent-Dyer

This is the last of the five “Chudleigh Hold” books and, unusually for Elinor M Brent-Dyer (EBD) is an adventure book written about a young man, presumably with a target audience of boys.  Nobody is described as being “dainty” or “delicate”, and the only major female character is a wonderful, feisty elderly lady who runs her own business and has never married because she was too busy doing other things.   I didn’t have very high hopes for this book when I started reading it, because I couldn’t imagine a Boys’ Own book written by EBD, but it was actually very, very good!

Hawk Chudleigh, the brother of the Chalet School’s Gillian Culver (I’m hoping at some point to acquire copies of the other Chudleigh Hold books, but I gather that even they don’t explain why the Culver/Chudleigh family haven’t got the same surname as they have in the Chalet School books) has been dispatched to Australia, to work as an engineer but also to carry “Top Secret” papers detailing how future wars can be prevented using some mysterious thing which won’t hurt anyone.  If only such a thing existed.  Dorita Fairlie Bruce’s Toby at Tibbs Cross contained a similar idea about a mysterious way of preventing wars: I don’t know whether or not EBD had read that.

Of course, some baddies are on to Hawk.  But, before they can do anything to him, the ship he’s on explodes, apparently due to a Japanese landmine remaining from the war years.  (The book’s set in the 1950s.). But he and another lad are sleeping in a lifeboat as their cabins were too hot (as you do), and the lifeboat’s set adrift, and eventually came to an island on which was a well-to-do family’s holiday home, easy to break into and well-stocked with food.   OK, nobody said that adventure books had to be realistic!   It’s written so well that the story genuinely doesn’t seem silly, even to an adult reader, though.

The island was off the coast of New Zealand, and how they got there when they’d been sailing SW from Tasmania is, er, anyone’s guess, but never mind!  The family then arrive; and are totally cool with the two lads having broken into their home.  Everyone’s getting along jolly well when, whaddaya know, there’s a hurricane.  Then, during the clean-up operation, a group of armed baddies arrive.  They’re led by an old university pal of Hawk’s, turned traitor.  This is Cold War stuff:  the group are working for the Soviets.

The baddies then torture our boys and their friends (the houseowners).  It’s quite nasty, worse than is usually found in a children’s book.  But, hurrah, the secret papers have already been sent away, concealed inside a gardening catalogue, and one of the family escapes to fetch help, from a ship conveniently positioned nearby.  The baddies are, needless to say, overpowered.

And then it turns out that Hawk’s friend from the ship that blew up is the great-nephew of the houseowning family’s amnesiac adopted son.  Of course he is.  EBD did love a long-lost relative story!

It sounds a bit bonkers, but children’s adventure books always are.  I could imagine G A Henty writing something like this, if he’d been around in the 1950s.  I wasn’t expecting much, but I should know better than to underestimate EBD.  I loved this, and am on a quest to find affordable copies of the other Chudleigh Hold books ASAP.

 

 

A Guernsey Girl at the Chalet School by Amy Fletcher

This is an excellent wartime-era Chalet School “fill-in”.  As much as I love the Chalet School books, I *am* sometimes to be found grumbling in discussion groups about the characters not really “doing their bit”.  So I’m delighted to see Amy Fletcher addressing that issue in this book, set in the spring term of 1945, in which we see the Chalet School Guides helping out in the local community and some of the adult female characters without jobs doing important voluntary work with the Red Cross.

It’s very much a Chalet School book, though, with weather-related mishaps, plans for a Sale, prefects’ meetings, and ridiculously unlikely coincidences.  Oh, and there’s a parrot, which is a bit more Blyton or Ransome than Brent-Dyer, but it’s a very cool parrot.  However, it’s specifically a wartime Chalet School book, and it’s obvious that a vast amount of research has gone into it.

The “Guernsey girl” – no, not “Jersey girl”! – is Jacqueline Le Pelley, who’s mentioned briefly in two of the “canon” books.  At one time, no-one seemed to talk much about the occupation of the Channel Islands.  It was years before I realised that a lot of children evacuated from the islands had spent the war years in our local area, especially Oldham and Stockport.  However, in recent times, it’s become the subject of a lot of attention; and, without wanting to post any major spoilers, we learn a lot about the experiences of Jacqueline’s family.

This includes her mother’s work with the Red Cross. As much as I love the Chalet School books, I do get rather irritated by aspects of the wartime ones.  In Exile and Goes to It, admittedly, people seem to be trying to do their bit for the war effort, bot not after that: why do we not see Madge getting involved with the WI or the Red Cross, or the Chalet School Guides doing any sort of war work?  And, when people are doing their bit, it doesn’t always make sense.  Why on earth have Shiena MacDonald, primary carer for her two young sisters, and Sylvia Leigh, primary carer for her niece, been directed into the Forces, rather than doing one of the many other forms of war work?  Robin even suggests that Joey, who at the point in question has three children under the age of four, could be conscripted!

It’s at least acknowledged that Sylvia Leigh wasn’t called up until Lavender was fourteen, but Bride Bettany remarks that she was able to “get off” war service until then, and the unknown Jean McKenzie suggests that Joey take in Flora and Fiona to avoid having working-class evacuees from inner city areas billeted on her. And, at one point, someone – Nell Wilson? – even moans about how inconvenient it is that young women are doing war work rather than applying for jobs as Chalet School maids!  Yes, I’m sure that there were people who thought like that, but it hardly fits with the ethos of the Chalet School.   Or, indeed, the general ethos: many women who were exempt as they had children under fourteen volunteered to do their bit anyway.  It was during the Second World War that “school dinners” became a thing, because so many mothers of school age children were out at work during the day.  I wouldn’t particularly expect the mothers of the Chalet School girls to be signing up to work in munitions factories, but I *would* expect them to be doing the sort of voluntary work which Amy shows here.  I like to think that Madge was busy doing all sorts as part of the WI, but, if she was, Elinor M Brent-Dyer never tells us about it!

Elinor’s insistence that every single Austrian and German character is anti-Nazi just isn’t realistic.  Nor is the apparent absence of food shortages.  And don’t get me started on how the main reaction to Bob Maynard being killed in action is a lot of moaning about the inconvenience of Jack inheriting Pretty Maids!

Rant over!  I love the Chalet School books to bits, and I admire Elinor M Brent-Dyer greatly for her brave writing in Exile, highlighting the way in which the Nazis were persecuting Jews such as the Goldmanns and political opponents such as Herr Marani, but aspects of the war books really do get on my nerves!   What we see here is much more how I like to think of the characters of the Chalet School world behaving

We see the Chalet School Guides helping out in the community, and hear quite a lot about the challenges posed by rationing.  There’s also a chapter devoted to the death of Hilary Burn’s fiance.  TBH, I think that EBD just forgot that she’d mentioned that Hilary was engaged: some years after the war, Hilary becomes engaged to and eventually marries Phil Graves, and what happened to the first fiance seemed to be a mystery until a reader actually asked about it!   But his loss is covered here.  We don’t actually see Hilary hearing the news, but we hear some of her thoughts later on.  The stiff upper lip, keep calm and carry on response, which sees Hilary returning to work within a few weeks, fits with the times – and also with Hilary’s character, as it’s pointed out that people deal with grief in different ways.

I was sorry not to see more of Grizel in this book, but that’s just my personal feeling.  I was also sorry not see more of Madge.  We see quite a bit of Jo, but much of that’s in the context of Charles Maynard being ill: we don’t see Jo barging into the school uninvited, or being consulted about difficult pupils with whom the staff and prefects are apparently unable to deal without her, which can get rather irritating!  Daisy; who’s one of my favourite characters, is Head Girl in this book and a friend of Jacqueline’s, so she plays a big role.

More typical Chalet School plotlines include a group of girls getting lost in the mist and, you guessed it, finding a hut to shelter in, and work being done for the Sale.  So it is very much a Chalet School book, but it’s a wartime Chalet School book.  The war permeates everything.  And that’s how it would have been.   There can’t have been any pupil who didn’t have friends and relatives on active service, living with the constant fear of hearing bad news, and this book does reflect that, as well as the general effects of was on everyday life.

There’s one other storyline which is specific to the wartime era, and that’s the introduction of Anna Steiner, a young Jewish Austrian girl who’s come to Britain on the Kindertransport.   She isn’t a pupil at the Chalet School.  Hmm, now that’d would have been an interesting storyline.  My old school, along with some others locally, made a number of places available on scholarships to Jewish girls who’d come to Britain as refugees … but I suppose that what worked for a day school in Manchester would probably not have worked quite so well for a boarding school in rural Herefordshire with a strong Christian ethos.  Anyway, Anna is staying with a family in the area, and we see some of the Chalet School girls going round to meet her and to talk to her in her native German.  However, there’s an utterly ridiculous coincidence as it turns out that Anna is from Tyrol and that her elder sister was best friends with the sister of one of the Chalet School characters.  But, hey, those sorts of coincidences happen an awful lot in the Chalet School books, so I suppose it’s authentic from that viewpoint!

Unlikely coincidence aside, the inclusion of the character of Anna Steiner is a lovely idea, and fits in very well with The Chalet School in Exile.  Some of the wartime Chalet School books just don’t: it’s hard to think how you go from the girls rushing to help a defenceless elderly man being attacked by a Nazi mob to talking about “getting off” doing war service.  But everything about this one does.  And yet, although it’s so different to Elinor M Brent-Dyer’s wartime books, it always feels like a Chalet School book.  Bravo, Amy!   A very, very good book.

 

 

The Chalet School Returns to the Alps by Lisa Townsend

  This, the latest Chalet School “fill-in”, is a lovely book.  It covers three topics within the series which I’ve always felt merited more attention – Nancy Wilmot’s apparent personality transplant between her schooldays and her teaching days; the story of Sue Meadows, who’s in a rather Victorian position as “companion” to her sick cousin Leila Elstob; and, albeit briefly, Leila’s friendship with Con Maynard.  The characters are true to how they appear in the “canon” books, the style is very much like Elinor M Brent-Dyer’s, yet it avoids those traits of Elinor’s which grate on people slightly – Joey Maynard is helpful rather than overbearing, nobody preaches, and there are very few references to Nancy’s weight!   My only gripe is with the rather odd cover picture.

However, this is yet another “fill-in” which, rather than filling in, runs parallel to an existing book – in this case, The Chalet School and Barbara.  Several of the scenes are those already seen, just told from a different viewpoint.  I’m not criticising the fill-in authors in any way, but wouldn’t their talents be put to better use in writing more original stories?  There’s all sorts of scope for spin-off books about a number of characters, or for sequels to the La Rochelle books.  Or, if GGBP want to stick to school stories, how about a book set at the Carnbach branch of the school?

That’s not to take anything away from this book, which is highly recommended if you are a fan of the Chalet School fill-ins.

The original series is rather prone to inconsistencies, affectionately known as “EBD-isms”, and one of the many is that Nancy Wilmot, who as a schoolgirl was described as lazy and had a particular dislike of maths, returns as a maths mistress, and is so efficient and hard-working that, by the end of the series, she looks set to become the next headmistress.  The obvious explanation is that, like so many people of her generation, she was changed by her experiences during the war, and that’s what Lisa Townsend shows here.  We also see Nancy’s close friendship with Hilary Graves, nee Burn, which, although it is mentioned in The Chalet School and Barbara, seems to be forgotten thereafter – rather like Peggy Burnett and Rosalie Dene being cousins, and Phoebe Peters being Reg Entwistle’s childhood mentor!

One of the biggest strengths of the Chalet School series is that we see the viewpoint of the staff as well as the girls, and we see Nancy having some issues fitting in, and being concerned that she’s not seen as a “proper” Old Girl because she’d been at St Scholastika’s.  The issues arising from the merger of the two schools were an issue in The New Chalet School, but the series jumped two or three years so they were never mentioned again.

There’s a vast amount of fanfic about Nancy, but most of that centres on her relationship with Kathie Ferrars.  As this book’s set long before Kathie arrived at the school, that obviously doesn’t come into it, but it’s good to see more attention being paid to someone who becomes such an important character.

The other main character in the book is Sue Meadows.  I’ve always found Sue’s story interesting – she’s in Switzerland as a “companion” to her sick cousin Leila Elstob, and her fees are being paid by Leila’s mother, who seems concerned only about Leila and not about Sue.   It’s something different, but it’s never really explored.  Also interesting is Leila’s friendship with Con Maynard, who sadly gets very few storylines.  Even with that one, we get Con being summoned to the San, and a lot of talk about how it might affect her, but  it then all seems to be forgotten, and we never hear of the two girls seeing each other again!  The friendship isn’t really gone into here, but we do see the triplets getting to know Sue and then getting to know Leila.  Sue’s story is gone into in far more detail – we learn that her parents are in America due to her dad’s job; and we see what a complex situation it is, with both Mrs Elstob and Sue genuinely frightened by Leila’s medical condition but Sue’s needs being neglected as a result.

It all fits together very well, along with a sub-plot about Mary Woodley, the girl who bullies Barbara Chester.  It really is a very good book and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I just think that, now that most of the “missing” terms have been “filled”, it might be better for GGBP and the authors to go in the direction of writing about something new, rather than writing about events which EBD’s already written about.  But that’s in no way a criticism of either this author or this book – it really is a lovely book.

 

The Evangelical Books by Elinor M Brent-Dyer

I bought this three-in-one – Nesta Steps Out, Beechy of the Harbour School and Leader in Spite of Herself – for Elinor M Brent-Dyer (EBD) completeness: I am *not* in the habit of reading any sort of evangelical books, and, having read Beechy before and found it pretty horrendous, I didn’t have high hopes of the other two books.  However, they really weren’t bad at all, and even Beechy wasn’t quite as bad as I remembered.

For the most part, they were, albeit very short, fairly standard EBD school stories – everyone looking trig and trim, accidents on expeditions, rushing around in the mornings, overly efficient matrons, et al.  It felt as if the preachy religious bits had just been shoehorned in to appeal to the Sunday School prize market, rather like Diana Barry shoehorning a reference to the Rollins Reliable Baking Powder Company into Anne Shirley’s “Averil’s Atonement” 🙂 .

Like Anne’s story, these would have been rather better with the shoehorned-in bits taken out, and I suspect that EBD may well have preferred them that way, but maybe they serve as a useful reminder that, unlike some of their heroines, most of our favourite Girls’ Own authors weren’t from wealthy families, and were writing books to pay their bills.  If that meant shoving in a few preachy comments, or, indeed, accepting that the books were going to be abridged when republished, then that was what they had to do.  Unlike fictional characters, most people do not get swept off their feet by rich doctors or conveniently inherit fortunes from hitherto unmentioned godparents or great-uncles/aunts!

The problem with Beechy of the Harbour School is that the shoehorning goes way overboard.  The basic plotline is a fairly standard story, about a girl, Beechy, whose mother has recently died, starting a new school and inadvertently making an enemy of another girl, Olive.  There’s a thunderstorm, Beechy is frightened, and Olive makes fun of her.  This is followed by what looks like it’s going to be a classic EBD scene – a showdown in which Olive bursts into tears in the Head’s study.  But then the Head gives Olive a lecture on how “your sin against Beechy is far less grievous than your sin against God … you have been dishonouring Christ throughout the term”.  On top of that, Beechy then informs the Head that “If only I had had the courage to tell you all … that I had become a Christian … I ought to have been praying … Next term, I mean to start as I intend to go on, and let everybody know that I belong to Jesus.  I don’t think I’ll ever be so afraid in a storm again”.

Er, yes.  The Head telling Olive to be a bit nicer, and Beechy being embarrassed for making such a fuss, would have done fine!  And been considerably more convincing.

In Nesta Steps Out, we’ve got a girl with a very bad temper.  Unlike Margot Maynard of Chalet School fame, she’s determined to try to control it … rather like Darrell Rivers in Malory Towers.  Also like Darrell, she’s got a bosom buddy called Sally – which is unusual for EBD, who usually prefers gangs to bosom buddies.  And there’s a nasty teacher, who falls into a river … but it turns out that she’s not that nasty, just in a bad mood because she’s being obliged to give up her job to go and keep house for a widowed brother.  Nesta does try to keep her temper, and it only gets a bit preachy, with various references to praying for help.  So this one isn’t bad.

Leader in Spite of Herself gets off to a very preachy start, with one girl bursting into tears for very little reason, like a heroine of a 19th century American religious novel, and a prefect lecturing two girls bitching about a classmate on how all their words were offered up to God so they should be more careful about what they said.  However, it does get better.  Standard plot, nasty new girl doesn’t fit in, classmates dislike her but two of them then decide to make an effort with her, encouraged by our “leader” Rosemary, one of the prefects, and all’s well that ends well.

Replace the preachy bits with simple references to trying to be nice to other people, and it would have been quite a good book.  And that’s how I felt about all of them.  But, whilst I may be wrong, I do get the feeling that, unlike the likes of Martha Finley and Susan Warner, EBD herself would probably have preferred the books to be like her other school stories, with people seeing the errors of their ways without all the overt preaching stuff.  However, these books were presumably commissioned, and, as I said, they’re an important reminder that our favourite authors were living in the real world and sometimes had to play to the market rather than just their own personal choices.

The Chalet School in Guernsey by Katherine Bruce

Pity the Coronation Street scriptwriters, who’ve tried so hard to reflect the reality of Covid-era Britain but, not having crystal balls, couldn’t foresee the imposition of Lockdown Two and Tier bloody Three.   And so the episodes we’re seeing now, filmed three months in advance, are sadly a long way removed from what’s actually happening.  Now pity, a million times more, Elinor M Brent-Dyer (EBD), who moved the Chalet School and Jem Russell’s Sanatorium from post-Anschluss Austria to the safety of Guernsey, only for the Nazis to occupy the Channel Islands almost as soon as she’d put down her pen.

The need to get the School and the San over to the British mainland in the next book meant that EBD didn’t have much chance to write about their time in Guernsey, and this new “fill-in” … well, fills that in.  It includes quite a lot of detail about life and restrictions in the early part of the war, which is fascinating from a social history viewpoint.  The Armada editions of the wartime books, the ones in print when I was a kid, annoyingly had a lot of the detail specific to wartime cut out of them.  It’s good to have so much included here.  Our favourite characters may be fictional, but they live(d) in a real place, in a real time.

Fill-in authors do, obviously, have to work with what EBD wrote.  And, as much as I love the wartime books – The Chalet School in Exile really is a very special piece of writing – , it does have to be said that some of what’s in them is a bit bonkers.  Karen, Anna, Frau Mieders and her sister, Herr Laubach, and Emmie and Johanna Linders all somehow escape from/”get themselves smuggled out of” the Third Reich, and a whole gang of people, two of whom have escaped from a concentration camp, somehow all end up meeting up in Bordeaux.  Too many escape stories told in detail would have just been too unconvincing, but I’m delighted that the one we get here is Karen’s … even though I maintain that Karen wasn’t actually a Pfeifen but a family friend (yes, I know that everyone else thinks she was a Pfeifen), and that Anna was Marie’s cousin rather than, as stated here, Marie’s sister (but the books are rather unclear on this).  I’d love to know just how EBD thought they all managed to escape, and indeed to enter the British Isles without the necessary visas, but never mind!

A gripe.  It traumatises me when people use “England” instead of “Britain” or “the UK”, and “Russia” instead of “the Soviet Union”.  I am a pedantic historian.   I always pick up on that.  Moan over!

Then, getting back to what EBD wrote, there’s the rather unlikely coincidence of Bob Maynard just happening to have a friend who just happens to have an enormous house to let, which just happens to be close to where Paul Ozanne’s just got a new job.  But, again, never mind!    Ernest Howell’s appearance at the School is one of the scenes which overlaps with The Chalet School Goes To It/The Chalet School At War; but there aren’t many of them, and it wouldn’t have made sense had that one not been included.

It’s nearly all original stuff, other than that.  Some things which never quite get explained by EBD are explained here, which Chalet School fans will enjoy –  notably Rosalie Dene’s job change and Evvy Lannis’s comings and goings.  It’s also great to see a positive portrayal of Marilyn Evans, who’s vilified in the “canon” books without ever actually appearing.  I’ve got a lot of sympathy for Marilyn, the Head Girl who put her school work ahead of the vast array of duties which the Chalet School expects from its prefects.  She was actually at the school to get an education and some qualifications!  She appears in this book as a new girl, and her hard work is actually appreciated at this point.

As much as I love the books, I do get quite frustrated by the attitude towards Marilyn, and the attitude in the wartime books and immediate post-war books towards education, qualifications and university entrance in general.  They don’t say anything very positive about women’s place in life, and that ties in with the very strange scene which we see at the beginning of the The Chalet School in Exile, in which it’s Jem Russell, rather than Madge Russell, who turns up at a staff meeting to say that the School’s going to be moving to the Sonnalpe, and Jem who makes all the decisions about moving to Guernsey.

Until then, Jem hasn’t really got involved in the running of the School.  Why would he?  He’s got more than enough to do with the San.  And he respects the fact that it’s Madge’s school.  Then, later on, Gay Lambert’s brother writes to Jem, rather than to Madge.   And Jack Maynard orders Miss Bubb about, and in front of a pupil to boot!   Miss Bubb’s the acting headmistress, and he’s only the owner’s brother-in-law.  It’s rather odd, in a series which starts with a strong young woman making her own choices and decisions, and shows women managing perfectly well to run a school without any male input.

Anyway.   In this book, Jem and Jack don’t deliberately take over, but we see Hilda Annersley coming to speak to Madge about leaving Guernsey, only to find that Madge is out … and talking it through with Jem and Jack, who both just happen to be around, instead.  It ties in with what EBD wrote, but I do wish EBD had let Madge be the one to decide – or, at least, Madge and Jem jointly, given that the San was affected too and they obviously had to move together.  But, hooray, in this book, Madge does go to the staff meeting at which all the details are discussed.

Before then, there’s a wonderful original, and wonderfully original, chapter in which we see some of the older girls taking part in a rehearsal/role play scenario of what might happen in the event of an invasion.  It’s based on real life events, and it’s fascinating –  a real taste of wartime Guernsey, and a reminder of how frightening those times were.

And there’s also a lot about Melanie Kerdec, a character who appears in the wartime books without it ever being made clear whether or not she’s the same Melanie Kerdec who was part of “The Mystic M” in The New Chalet School.  Presumably she was, but we’re never told.  Without wanting to post a lot of spoilers, in case anyone’s reading my waffle – is anyone reading my waffle?! – and is getting the book as a Christmas present, Melanie is a prominent character in this, in a classic “troublesome new girl eventually settles in and decides the school is great” storyline.

This is the second wartime fill-in in a row, and it’s really interesting to see our old friends – the characters are our friends, aren’t they 🙂 ? – against the background of such a difficult time, and in a setting which is firmly rooted in a particular time.  We know what lay ahead.  EBD didn’t.  And the characters didn’t.  What did EBD have planned for the Chalet School in Guernsey?  We’ll never know, and it’s sad that she never got the chance to write it, but maybe this was some of it.  And any Chalet School fill-in is always a good comfort read, and that’s something which I think we could all do with at the moment.

 

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.