Behind the Chalet School: A biography of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer

by Helen McClelland

  That reads very much as though Elinor were looking back, perhaps to the time of Hannah Rutherford’s last illness, and remembering things she had seen and heard herself at the age of six-and-three-quarters. And this imparts a feeling of authenticity which carries the reader along. It is a pity that this is not fully maintained in the scene which follows, where the Robin recalls Joey from the brink of death by her singing of a favourite Russian folk-song. This is perhaps one of the best-known passages in the whole series; and one, it must be acknowledged, that was often singled out for special praise in fan letters. But today the account seems rather contrived. Perhaps it is all too like the typical Victorian death-bed scene — or something from the Sunday Companion. Perhaps the reader simply feels too sure that Joey is not going to die.

  In an earlier book, The School at the Chalet (1925), Elinor had dealt far more convincingly and movingly with a similar situation. Here, too, it is Joey who is gravely ill. She is lying unconscious, while the doctor and Frau Mensch, a kind friend, keep watch at her bedside. Madge, carrying out her duties as headmistress, is downstairs in one of the classrooms.

  At about three o’clock, as Madge was wearily trying to help Amy Stevens disentangle . . . her map of Asia, word came . . . [from] the doctor . . . Literally flinging the map at the astonished Amy, [Madge] . . . fled up the stairs to her bedroom. The doctor was standing by the bedside, one hand on Joey’s wrist. He looked up as her sister entered.

  ‘Ah, mein Fräulein . . . I think she is beginning to arouse. Please stand just there, where she can see you.’

  Madge . . . stood, her eyes fixed on Joey’s face. There was no doubt that she was coming out of the stupor. Her lashes flickered more than once, her lips were parted. The only question was, Would she wake up the old Joey, or would it be to the babbling delirium of fever?

  . . . The only sound to be heard was the breathing of the four people . . . and the ticking of the doctor’s watch. Then, slowly, slowly, the long black lashes lifted, and Joey looked full at her sister.

  ‘Hullo!’ she murmured. ‘I’m awfully tired!’ . . . with a little yawn [she] turned slightly, snuggling down into the pillow, and fell asleep.

  ‘Gott sei dankt!’ said the doctor, quietly. ‘She will do now; there is no further danger. Hush, mein Kind,’ for Madge had begun to cry, ‘It is well now!’

  ‘I know,’ sobbed Madge. ‘But oh, Herr Doktor, the relief’ . . .

  When, finally, the tears were all dried . . . Frau Mensch suggested bed.

  ‘I must tell the girls first,’ said Madge. ‘I will make myself tidy, and go and tell them.’

  Ten minutes later Miss Bettany, who looked like herself once more, entered the room where they were all anxiously awaiting her news. She looked at them, but no words would come to her lips. It was Bernhilda the quiet who helped her out.

  ‘Ah, Madame,’ she said, ‘there is no need to say anything. Joey will get well.’

  And that last phrase may provide the essential clue to understanding why Elinor did have this obsession with death-bed scenes. The point surely is that, with few exceptions, they are not death scenes at all, but describe last-minute miraculous recoveries. And Elinor’s continual assertion in fiction that ‘Joey will get well’ was almost certainly her way of compensating for a loss she had suffered at the age of eighteen, when someone very close to her was taken ill with dramatic suddenness — and did not ‘get well’.

  This tragedy is recorded concisely and impersonally by the Medical Officer for South Shields in his report for the year 1912: ‘Cerebro-spinal fever became notifiable within the Borough in 1912. One case was notified and was removed to the Isolation Hospital, where death occurred. No secondary cases developed.’

  The official wording strikes cold. But then no doctor could allow himself to mourn for every individual death; and in this case, as far as concerned his borough of South Shields, one death was plainly less important than the fact that a possible epidemic of cerebro-spinal fever had been averted. This was a killer-disease: sometimes known as Spotted Fever, or cerebro-spinal meningitis, it had been rife during previous centuries; but by 1912 the disease was becoming less and less common; and there must have been general relief among the medical fraternity in South Shields when no further cases followed the first.

  The name of that one unfortunate victim appears in the deaths column of the Shields Gazette published on Wednesday 25 September 1912. The announcement is of the briefest: ’DYER. At Denes Hospital, on 24th inst., Henzell Watson Dyer, aged 17. No flowers.’ But it needs little imagination to picture the grief and stricken numbness that lay behind those few words. Moreover, for Elinor, the sudden death of her brother followed little more than a year after the death of her school-friend, Elizabeth.

  Henzell’s illness, however contracted, had lasted for barely five days; and probably he did not spend many of them at home, for the moment the illness was diagnosed he would instantly have been removed to the Fever Hospital in Dean Street, which was known as ‘the Denes’.

  Perhaps it was better that way. Obviously it was distressing for Henzell’s mother and sister to see him removed from his home, while they had to remain there unable to help in any way. But cerebro-spinal meningitis is an illness that can be attended by much pain; it could have been even more distressing for them to have witnessed this.

  As it was, they were probably not allowed to see Henzell at all after he entered the hospital, unless through a glass panel, since this was the usual regulation laid down at isolation hospitals. The rules might not have permitted Nelly and Elinor even to remain in the building while awaiting news of Henzell’s condition. Especially as it was no great distance from Winchester Street to ‘the Denes’, only about twenty minutes’ walk. So most likely the two continued through those anxious days to live at home; and, since they would have had no telephone, to visit the hospital several times each day.

  Henzell’s mother may have felt unable to manage even this. Certainly it was not Nelly Dyer, but the eighteen-year-old Elinor who finally collected Henzell’s death certificate from the hospital and took it to the Registrar. And the ban on flowers that is included in the newspaper announcement does suggest that no one was encouraged to make gestures, still less visits, of sympathy.

  The full effects on Nelly and Elinor of their tragic loss can only be guessed. In Elinor’s case much was to emerge in her writing. But this was almost certainly an unconscious process. Indeed it appears that after Henzell’s death Elinor and her mother seldom talked about him, or even mentioned his existence. At college, only three years later, none of Elinor’s fellow students ever knew that she had had a brother; and many people who met her only in later years were also unaware of it.

  One friend who was a child of about nine or ten when she first got to know Elinor did learn the bare outline of Henzell’s story from her parents; but she still recalls how strongly they impressed on her ‘never to ask anything about him’, for fear it might upset Elinor’s mother. She grew up thinking that his death must have taken place only a short time previously. In fact this was in 1922. Henzell had died in 1912.

  Probably it was only to a few friends who knew her really well that Elinor ever again spoke of Henzell — the brother who had been so close to her that she couldn’t ‘remember a time when he wasn’t there’. And it was not until twenty years had gone by that she felt able to dedicate one of her books — The Little Marie-José (1932): ‘To the memory of my brother.’

  CHAPTER VII

  TANGLED WEBS

  LOOKING at Elinor’s life with the wisdom of hindsight, it seems clear that in some ways she never fully recovered from the shock of Henzell’s death. True, certain qualities must always have been latent in her character; in particular a tendency to take refuge from harsh reality in fiction. But the loss of her brother and earliest companion, which severed the links with her real childhood, may also have contributed to an almost indefinite prolonging of her adolescence.

  According to the conventions of th
e day she had become technically speaking a grown-up on her eighteenth birthday, more than five months before her brother died. This event would have been marked in the traditional ways: skirt hemlines down, and hair up. The latter was obviously important to Elinor, for right through the thirties, forties and even into the fifties, her Chalet schoolgirls are anachronistically preoccupied with the question of putting up their hair.

  Not that an eighteen-year-old was considered ‘of age’ at that time. Nor was the attainment of her majority at twenty-one going to bring Elinor the vote: for this right, even after the Act passed in 1918, she would have had to wait until her thirtieth birthday in April 1924; and Elinor was to have reached the age of thirty-four when in 1928 the franchise was finally extended to women over twenty-one. But then, many people today seem unaware that, until 1918 — a time still within living memory for some — even men of twenty-one did not all have the vote; while in Northern Ireland there was no universal suffrage until after 1968.

  For Elinor, her eighteenth birthday brought another important change, apart from those in her garments and hair-style. On that day, 6 April 1912, she became, according to the records of the Department of Education and Science, ‘an unqualified teacher’. And that snippet of information provides the only available evidence about when Elinor’s own schooldays ended. It has been impossible to discover anything definite about her last years at school, or to resolve a particular mystery which surrounds them. This concerns the impression she gave when interviewed on television in January 1964 that she had been at Dame Allan’s Girls’ School in Newcastle upon Tyne.

  All existing information points to Elinor’s having been educated only at the Misses Stewart’s school in Westoe Village. Several people, including a fellow student of Elinor’s at college, are convinced of this. However, the late Brian Redhead, who was her television interviewer in January 1964, understood that Elinor had attended Dame Allan’s (then, as now, one of the leading schools in the north-east), as did some of those who watched the interview.

  The school was unable to help much, although they were anxious to do so. But unfortunately they no longer hold records of admissions to Dame Allan’s in the years before the Great War. And so, after patient searching, all they could say for certain was that Elinor had never been a member of their staff which had seemed a possibility worth investigating. They did point out that their library contained a surprising number of books by Elinor — ‘almost everything she ever wrote’ — which might suggest a personal connection with the school. But that was all.

  Even the enthusiastic co-operation of an eighty-three-year-old member of the Dame Allan’s Old Girls’ Association failed to bring anything to light. Neither she, nor any of the friends among whom she made tireless enquiries, could remember anything about Elinor under any of her different names. And since these helpful ladies would have been Elinor’s exact contemporaries at Dame Allan’s, it does seem unlikely that all were unaware of her presence — noticeable as she was.

  So, did Elinor deliberately make a false claim? Or could the whole thing have arisen through a misunderstanding of some kind? There seems no chance now that these questions can be answered. However it does have to be faced that Elinor had an oddly ambivalent attitude to the whole matter of telling the truth. From her books no one could fail to get the impression that honesty was a most highly esteemed virtue. Her schoolgirl heroines all share the infant Washington’s renowned and total incapacity. And yet Elinor herself was seldom honest about her real age. Possibly, like many other women, she felt this form of deception to be harmless and justified. But Elinor went occasionally to the length of entering a false date of birth on an official form (one has survived). And her lifelong habit of romancing often caused her to mix fact and fiction (for example, her statement about the story ‘Jack’s Revenge’, mentioned in Chapter IV), and to make extravagant claims.

  Most of her friends learnt to disregard these. One, who confesses to having rather enjoyed Elinor’s tall stories, added: ‘But I always kept the salt-cellar handy’. Unfortunately, though, people who are prone to inexactitude often end up being unjustly disbelieved. And this did happen from time to time with Elinor: for example, her oft-repeated and perfectly correct claim that her father had been a naval officer was always dismissed by one acquaintance with a brusque ‘We all knew he’d only been in the Merchant Navy’.

  Hence it is possible that another claim Elinor made, which met the same kind of sceptical response, just might have been founded on fact. This was to the effect that she had been much attached, engaged even, to a young man in the Army who was killed in the Great War. His first name, she stated, had been Hugh, but no surname was ever mentioned. Today it seems unlikely there can be proof, either way. But in view of Elinor’s personality, it is more probable that Hugh was a myth, in the sense that he was an embodiment or synthesis of various people and circumstances. For there really was a man who was important in Elinor’s life during the period beginning about three years before the 1914-18 war. And although his name was not Hugh, he did have one thing in common with that elusive Army officer.

  There is ample evidence in the Chalet School series to be found of the lasting impression this man made on Elinor. Many of her Chalet books contain veiled allusions to him, his first ‘appearance’ being in Jo of the Chalet School (1926).

  Presently the girls found themselves looking at another song . . . — one entitled ‘Brittany’ . . .

  These two songs, both by the same composer — an Englishman . . . were totally unlike anything they had ever done.

  Then in Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School (1930) a singing class is working at ‘a setting of “Abou ben Adhem,” by an English composer . . . It was modern, but with a wonderful flow and grace.’

  And for a concert in The Exploits of the Chalet Girls (1933) ‘[Jo] had chosen a very favourite song of the School’s . . . Ernest Farrar’s “Knight of Bethlehem”.’

  Ten years later, in Lavender Laughs in the Chalet School (1943): ‘ “Sing Ernest Farrar’s ‘Brittany’.” coaxed Kitty. “I do so love it, and you sing it toppingly, Jo.” ’

  And again, a further seventeen years on (Joey and Co. in Tirol, 1960): ‘ “Sing that Brittany thing we love so,” Con coaxed . . . as they climbed upwards . . . [Jo] sang the song.’ Incidentally quite a remarkable feat that, since the melody in question is characterised by wide leaps, taxing even for a singer who is not climbing a 1 in 3 mountain path.

  This song, ‘Brittany’ could almost be called the Chalet School’s signature tune, for it recurs in book after book throughout the series. And yet, oddly enough, many readers have remained unaware that ‘Brittany’ really does exist, and that Ernest Farrar, its composer, was a real person (see the photograph on page 99). Perhaps this happens partly because, in the books, he is often described as a friend of the entirely fictional Mr Denny. And Elinor mentions his name on few occasions, usually preferring to give only an anonymous description. Just once or twice she lets slip a few more details; as, for instance, in the passage which follows the lines quoted above from Lavender Laughs:

  On the way home, Kitty told the rest that ‘Brittany’ had been composed by a young English composer who had been killed in the . . . [1914-18] war. He had known their own somewhat eccentric singing-master, Mr Denny, who had declared that if he had lived, he would have done great things. As it was, he had been shot down before his great gift had had time to mature, and England was the poorer by it.

  Strong words. And obviously it is Elinor speaking here, through her schoolgirl character. But in fact there is independent backing for the claims put forward. Musicians of repute, including Dr Herbert Howells and Sir Ernest Bullock (who was a personal friend and had been Ernest’s best man at his wedding), have paid tribute to Farrar’s gifts; and the composer Frank Bridge (teacher of Benjamin Britten) dedicated a piano sonata ‘To the memory of Ernest Bristow Farrar’. Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians also accords him a respectful entry. And earlier editions of T
he Oxford Companion to Music state that ‘the little music he left . . . is delicate in texture, and points to the existence of real talent’.

  Nor is it in doubt that the real-life Ernest Farrar was a highly romantic figure. Tall, pleasant-looking, likeable and outstandingly talented, he would have made an ideal hero for any novelist, for his whole career reads rather like a novel.

  Born in 1885, the son of a country vicar in Yorkshire, Ernest Farrar had won his own way by scholarships to the Royal College of Music. (This was more than forty years before student grants were generally available.) At the college he gained several important prizes and another scholarship, which enabled him to spend a further period of study in Germany.

  His first love was composition, but he was also a gifted organist. And when he returned to England it happened that his first appointment was as organist at the parish church of St Hilda in South Shields. Here he remained for about two years, before moving on to a similar post in Harrogate. Thus, although there is no absolute proof that he and Elinor were acquainted, there is every probability that they were.