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

by Helen McClelland

  Probably she was right. After all the photograph, as Hazel points out, could have been obtained quite easily from the theatre. And the fact that Elinor ‘spent a lot of time that week in crotcheting a white silk evening scarf’ destined for Donald Edwards, does not provide evidence of anything but her own feelings and state of mind.

  In any case it seems quite clear that nothing came of the affair — if it can be so called. Except that Elinor did work harder than ever at her writing, producing three full-length books in 1932 — the first year with three since 1928. And in one of the three, Janie of La Rochelle, it is possible with hindsight to see compensation at work.

  With the best will in the world, Janie of La Rochelle could not be considered a very good book, even when every allowance is made for its type and period. Described in one review as ‘a love idyll’, it is not a genuine adult book nor yet a children’s story, but hovers uneasily between the two — being possibly intended at the time for the ‘older teenager’. But today a sympathetic reader who knows the background may perhaps find a touch of poignancy in Elinor’s descriptions of the newly wedded couple and their happiness, and even in the rather stilted little fragments of dialogue which they exchange. (To be fair, lovers’ dialogue is not often distinguished in real life for its originality.)

  ‘Oh, Julian . . . I am so happy that I want to burst with happiness!’

  ‘So am I, Janie — very happy, darling. This is the best day of my life.‘

  And at least Elinor does allow the happy pair to be ‘most unromantically hungry’, even if ‘there was no lack of sentiment in the looks they exchanged over the tea-table . . . ’

  Janie of La Rochelle was the sixth book in a series which had begun ten years previously with Elinor’s first story, Gerry Goes to School. And for almost twenty-one years it was not to have a successor — Elinor having in the mean time absorbed many of the characters into her Chalet series. Then in 1953, Janie Steps In appeared, and Elinor wrote to her friend, Mrs Phyllis Matthewman:

  Dearest Phyllis,

  Janie of La Rochelle was dedicated to the memory of Auntie Annie, who used to encourage both of us in our early writing days — I might say our earliest writing days. [Auntie Annie was Miss Annie M. Barton, and she was really Phyllis’s aunt, not Elinor’s. It was she who had first introduced Phyllis and Elinor — as described in Chapter III.]

  She never lived to see what we both accomplished [Phyllis Matthewman had also become a successful writer], but I think she would like to know that . . . I am dedicating this latest of the La Rochelle series to you.

  Elinor was keen on dedications and a majority of her books are provided with them. Some are quite elaborate, and many contain autobiographical touches. The dedication of Elizabeth the Gallant,referred to above, is one of these: ‘ . . . TO ALL THOSE FRIENDS IN THE WEST COUNTRY WHO HAVE GIVEN ME WELCOME TO MY NEW HOME AND HAVE HELPED TO MAKE IT PLEASANT TO ME’.

  In fact, at the time Elizabeth the Gallant appeared Elinor must have been living in her ‘new home’ for nearly two years; for it seems likely that her move from South Shields to Hereford took place some time during 1933. That, at any rate, would fit in with the recollections of a Hereford lady, who went away to study at college early in 1934 and is clear that Elinor had arrived well before that.

  The reasons for the move are not obvious. For Elinor it may have been a case of ‘needs must’: if her mother and stepfather were going to settle in Hereford, and she wanted to accompany them, that was that. But why Nelly and Septimus Ainsley, at the ages of sixty-four and rising sixty-eight, should have decided to give up their home in South Shields and go to live elsewhere is obscure. The most convincing reason to be suggested is that the climate in South Shields was considered too harsh for Mr Ainsley; and undoubtedly that exposed corner of the north-east could be trying for anyone in poor health, as Mr Ainsley appears always to have been. But there is no way of being sure about this. Nor as to whether the particular choice of Hereford was made purely for health reasons. Septimus Ainsley could have had relatives living in or near Herefordshire, since his family in the past had certainly had business connections in the district just over the Welsh border.

  On one point there can be no doubt: the move must have represented quite an upheaval, and especially for Nelly Ainsley after a lifetime of sixty-four years spent entirely in South Shields. But her new home, Stoneleigh in St James’s Road, did at least stand comparison with 5 Belgrave Terrace: it was a large, grey, semi-detached house with a pleasant garden. Moreover, in those pre-war days, St James’s was considered ‘a very select road’.

  Stoneleigh in St James’s Road

  It was also quite near the Cathedral and the Castle Green, where a footpath leads across the ancient ramparts, commanding a splendid view of the River Wye. Here, from the early days onwards, Elinor was often to be seen walking along abstractedly, ‘her very pronounced nose held high in the air’ and obviously (as described by an acquaintance, Mr Edward West, who was then a schoolboy) ‘deep in the plot of some book or other’.

  On these occasions Elinor would never notice Mr West, although he did eventually get to know her well — or, at least, as well as a schoolboy does know a woman of forty-odd. His mother attended the same church as Mrs Ainsley (St James’s Church of England, for Nelly always remained C. of E.), and when Elinor heard that the young Edward West was going to university to read English she immediately took a great interest. She would often invite him to come to tea and discuss literature — the metaphysical poets and the Elizabethans in particular, since these were his special subjects; but the conversation would range over all manner of books as well.

  Elinor’s study, where they always had tea, was ‘crammed with books’, just as her bedsitter at Belgrave Terrace had been. And it was filled with ‘Roman Catholic things, like crucifixes, and little statues, and pictures, especially pictures of Sir Thomas More’.

  (There would of course have been a great many pictures of Thomas More around at this time, in Roman Catholic circles anyway, for 1935 was the year when he and John Fisher were canonised. But Elinor did in any case take a particular interest in Thomas More, and this will be considered in the chapter which follows.)

  Edward West was among those who look back at Elinor with mixed feelings. That she was undeniably kind, is something that struck him far more forcibly as an adult than it did at the time. Then he, like others before him, tended to find Elinor’s manner just a bit overwhelming. She was positive to the point of being ‘assertive’ in her way of talking; her voice, too, was on the loud side. And there had been a rather embarrassing episode early in their acquaintance, when he was invited to take part in a Nativity play that Elinor had written. Edward West, still in his teens, was cast as Saint Joseph; Elinor, then rising forty, as the Virgin Mary. The play was given in the Percival Hall in Hereford, probably in aid of some charity; and the music was provided by the choir from St James’s Church — Nelly Ainsley’s parish church.

  The trouble arose because Elinor, in her boundless enthusiasm, over-acted violently. Her every sentence was invested with such depth of feeling and accompanied with such a wealth of gesture that the listening choirboys would giggle hysterically. And although, forty years on, Mr West could find the memory amusing, being at the time little more than a schoolboy, he had then found it all acutely painful.

  There is no doubt that Elinor did always tend to push things to extremes. Another of Mr West’s memories is of her singing in the Festival Choir, which she had joined soon after arriving in Hereford, at one of the Three Choirs Festivals. It was the regulation that women members of the choir should wear black, and Elinor interpreted this rule so wholeheartedly that on the platform she was hardly visible for her all-enveloping black garments, which even included a vast black mantilla — with the result that she looked, truth to say, ‘rather like a witch’.

  In the ordinary way there were two things about Elinor’s appearance that greatly struck the young Edward West. The first was the size of her n
ose: ‘it was really huge’ and apparently of an almost Cyrano de Bergerac type of prominence. The other was the extraordinarily riveting power of her eyes. The latter on the whole appears to have impressed him more.

  All in all — although in later life Mr West always returned to Elinor’s genuine kindness, it can be guessed that in his youth he found her rather too overpowering to be lovable.

  On the other hand, someone else, who first got to know Elinor at about the same time as Mr West did, remembers her not only with affection but without any reservations. ‘I liked everything about her,’ recalls an ex-pupil, Mrs Helen Colam — who in those days was Helen Griffiths. And this affection shines through everything Mrs Colam writes or tells of Elinor. But then Mrs Colam was only nine years old when Elinor first came into her life; and a happy relationship was to grow between them, akin to that enjoyed by Elinor and the ten-year-old Hazel Bainbridge.

  Elinor’s introduction to the Griffiths family had come about shortly after her arrival in Hereford. One of her new acquaintances, Miss Mary Middleton, who later became a great friend, had heard that Mrs Griffiths wanted a daily governess to teach her two daughters, aged nine and twelve. Miss Middleton recommended Elinor as being a qualified experienced teacher; and after an interview — at which both Elinor and Mrs Griffiths appear to have taken each other’s measure with some shrewdness — Elinor agreed to accept the post.

  The Griffiths family lived then at Albion House in Peterchurch, a village about fourteen miles from Hereford in the attractively named Golden Valley. In other words, in that same district towards the Black Mountains and ‘on the English side of the Welsh Border’ where Elinor would place her Chalet School during the war years.

  Their home, now demolished following a fire in the 1960s, was a large rambling house, in part very old, which stood near one end of the village. ‘It wasn’t really beautiful from outside,’ according to its former owner, ‘but a lovely house inside. And it had a very beautiful old oak staircase.’

  Perhaps Elinor had that staircase in mind when she wrote, many years later, in Three Go to the Chalet School: ‘The morning sun streamed through the . . . window on the landing above [the entrance hall] . . . A beautiful oak staircase ran up to it, and then turned and went on to an upper corridor.’ At any rate, Elinor must have gone up and down the Albion House staircase literally hundreds of times, since she was to spend more than four years acting as governess to Sybil and Helen, the Griffiths children, and their schoolroom was on the top floor of the house.

  Another thing that became part of her life between 1933 and 1938 was the journey to and from Peterchurch: ‘Miss Brent-Dyer came daily to us by bus . . . from Hereford. She arrived about 9.15 and went back at 3.30.’ And later this journey would turn up regularly in the Chalet stories of the early 1940s. A few names of places and streets were to be altered, just as happened in the Tyrolean books. Hereford, for instance, becomes Armiford (a name that could have been chosen because, according to some authorities, the word Hereford originally signified ‘Army Ford’). But the disguises are flimsy, and anyone who has visited Hereford and the district will not fail to identify them in passages such as the two quoted below (both from The Highland Twins at the Chalet School, 1942).

  In the first Joey Maynard has left Plas Gwyn (her home in the Golden Valley) at a very early hour and is driving in to Armiford Station.

  It was just twenty-past six when she entered the built-up area of Armiford . . . [and drove] down the long road with its houses on either side which began below the railway bridge [still there, although this line is no longer in use]. She made the sharp turn where the Sors [anagram of Ross, i.e. Ross-on-Wye] road runs into what is known as Fairmount [Belmont] Road, crossed the old stone bridge which has seen eight centuries, and turned into King Street, and thence through Broad Street, past the cathedral — largely spoilt by ‘restoration’ at the beginning of the present century [but a lot of people might not agree with Elinor that Hereford Cathedral is spoilt] — and then through the bottle-neck of High Street, and across the fine quadrangle of High Town where most of the best shops in Armiford stand. Past the Old House — a Jacobean house once kept as a museum of Jacobean relics and now used for the Citizens’ Bureau — and so down narrow St Stephen’s Gate [St Peter’s Street] into the magnificent sweep of Broome Road [Commercial Road] with the big chapel and bus-station at one side [both still there, exactly as describedl, and then up the station approach, till she drew up at one side of the station square.

  Probably the most striking feature of that passage is the almost obsessive accuracy it shows. And when, only a few pages later, Joey has collected her visitors from the station and the homeward journey begins, Elinor is ready to oblige with further details. First the party drive ‘through the now busy streets of Armiford. Then they flashed under a railway bridge with a train on it and into a country road with fields and hedges on both sides, and, in the distance, the long gentle slopes of the Black Mountains. Jo . . . swung the car round a sharp corner, past the aerodrome, and so up the slope of a steep hill. . . . [From the top] . . . they coasted down another slope, with the land rising on either side.’

  And accounts similar to the above are given in several other books. Some of the descriptions are more detailed than others; but nearly all mention certain features of the journey which do exist in real life. That railway bridge, for one (it appears in both the passages quoted above); also the ‘sharp corner’ near the aerodrome (the latter still there, although oddly enough it is not shown on ordinary maps); and the ‘steep hill’, which is probably that known locally as the ‘Batcho Hill’.

  So many identifiable places are mentioned in the stories that this has led to much speculation among readers about the locations Elinor may have had in mind for ‘Plas Howell’, ‘Plas Gwyn’ and ‘The Round House’ — the houses which accommodate, respectively, the Chalet School, the Maynard family and the Russells during the seven books that are set in Herefordshire/‘Armishire’. Various ideas have been put forward; and two ardent Chalet School fans, Beth and David Varcoe, have gone beyond mere speculation.

  They have devoted much time and ingenuity to research in the Golden Valley area; and have painstakingly co-ordinated their theories, both with the books themselves and with the Ordnance Survey maps of the district. In their opinion, the fictional site of ‘Plas Howell’, where the Chalet School was housed from the early chapters of The Chalet School Goes to It (1941) up to and including Three Go to the Chalet School (1949), corresponds exactly with the real-life site of Michaelchurch Court at Michaelchurch Escley; the ‘White House’ at Vowchurch occupies the situation of Joey’s beloved ‘Plas Gwyn’ (which of course means ‘White House’); and the original of the ‘Round House’, home of the Russell family, is ‘Poston House’ on the other side of Vowchurch.

  The Varcoes have made a good case to back their conclusions — in so far, at least, as concerns the actual sites. However, just as with the Alpenhof Hotel in Pertisau, the real-life buildings on at least two of these sites have little in common with the houses Elinor describes; the one possible exception, ‘Poston House’, with its famous Round Room, does fit the descriptions reasonably well. All the same, it is important to remember that Elinor was writing not a travel guide but a story. And plainly she enjoyed the fiction-writer’s prerogative of letting her imagination embellish, or even alter, the real-life landscape; and perhaps allowing it to combine in one house the features of several she had known at various times. At no point did Elinor herself reveal whether she had exact places in mind for ‘Plas Howell’ and the other houses; or, for that matter, for the house, ‘Sarres’, near Jerbourg in Guernsey, which provides a temporary home for the school during parts of The Chalet School in Exile (1940) and The Chalet School Goes to It (1941).

  Nevertheless it does seem indicated that Elinor drew some deep satisfaction from bringing real-life places and landscapes into her stories. Perhaps it gave her a feeling of ‘belonging’ in her own fantasy world. Whatever the reason
s, she was also — and increasingly as time went on — to share personal experiences with her characters. For instance, it can hardly be a coincidence that when Elinor, for the first time in her life, is working as a private governess, Joey Bettany (in Jo Returns to the Chalet School, 1936) should soon be having a similar experience: ‘ . . . Jo could certainly coach Polly in history . . . [remarks Miss Annersley, then Senior Mistress at the Chalet School], geography . . . and essay writing.’ And thus Jo, barely eighteen, and just out of school, is launched into teaching.

  ‘It was not without some qualms that Joey . . . the next morning . . . made her way downstairs to a small class-room that was generally used for private coaching.’

  So far, so good: every reader will appreciate how Jo was feeling. But from the next sentence onwards a curious shift of emphasis can be noted: ‘[Jo] would not have turned a hair if she had been asked to take on an entire form; but to face one girl, and have her all to herself for an hour and a half, required some doing.’

  And this is odd. No doubt Elinor herself, with around twenty years’ experience of class teaching, might have been more at home facing ‘an entire form’ than she was at first with an individual pupil. But it is straining credulity to suggest that Joey would have felt that way. She, after all, had never taught in her life; and most students at teacher-training colleges will testify how apprehensive they felt before first standing up in front of a class. Altogether there can be no question that much of this chapter, which is fascinating reading in itself, tends to demonstrate not Joey’s complete inexperience — as by rights it should — but the wide experience and undeniable teaching gifts that Elinor herself possessed. This impression is strengthened by the lesson that Joey proceeds to give her pupil on the Cluniac Reformation — ‘a model in miniature of how it should be done’ is the way one reader, a teacher of many years’ standing, describes it.