The Chalet School Revisited

by Sheila Ray

  It was on a practical everyday level that things differed greatly, and the Margaret Roper School never enjoyed the phenomenal success of its storybook rival. For one thing, Elinor’s resources were limited. No chance for her, with no spare capital and endless wartime restrictions, to summon into being by one stroke of her pen a laboratory, or a domestic economy room, or even a couple of new chalets. And, as one former Margaret Roper pupil recalled with a slight shudder: “the school meals were awful!” (Shades of Marie Pfeifen — or Karen — and those mouthwatering dishes of which they alone knew the secret . . .)

  Besides, Elinor was plainly unsuited to being a headmistress. She had genuine gifts as a teacher and for making happy relationships with individual children (Hazel Bainbridge and others would confirm this), but the unremitting daily grind of running a school was simply not for her. Throughout her life she had tended to embark enthusiastically on new projects but then gradually lose interest in them, and as time went by the Chalet School began to claim an ever larger part of her time and attention. Thus, although some former pupils of the Margaret Roper School remember Elinor with much affection, others are less appreciative.

  However, the Margaret Roper School did at least one good turn to the Chalet School: it kept Elinor in touch with real children in a real school. The books she wrote during her much overcrowded years as headmistress include all the “Armishire” stories, as well as The Chalet School in Exile, and some of these deserve to be rated among Elinor’s best. Whether the gradual deterioration in quality, which becomes noticeable as the long series proceeds, was connected with the author’s withdrawal from active school life remains unproven. Without question many of the later books are inferior to the earlier ones; but then it would be hard to imagine any author, anywhere, who was capable of writing 59 equally good books about the same characters in the same school. Most writers wouldn’t attempt it. Arthur Ransome, for instance, in his stories of the Swallows and Amazons (and others) was content with only 12 titles. Even Enid Blyton, who must have busted more records than most, never produced a series of 59 books.

  But then the Chalet School, for its author, was not just fiction; and the writing of further stories wasn’t simply a matter of adding yet another book to a popular series. For Elinor it was far more a matter of chronicling actual events in the lives and world of characters who had, by this time, become absolutely real in her eyes. “Make no mistake . . . ” she wrote in the first Chalet Club News Letter.

  So far as I am concerned, the people are there, just out of sight, but otherwise alive and panting to tell their stories. I am merely the loudspeaker through whom they broadcast . . . It is they who tell the stories. I am merely the instrument.12

  That paragraph tells much about Elinor. In particular her choice of words is revealing; for she had already used many of the same phrases and images in a book she had written more than five years earlier — only in the book Elinor was not, at least not avowedly, writing about herself.

  “Oh I suppose a day will come [Joey Maynard explains to her adopted sister Robin Humphries] when . . .I’ll have to sit down at my typewriter and be a loud-speaker again.”

  “That’s what you always say,” Robin returned thoughtfully. “Do you really and truly feel that way about it, Jo?”

  Jo nodded. “Exactly that. The people in my stories are there, alive and kicking . . .They tell their own story. I’m just the — the instrument used for broadcasting it.”13

  The two passages are substantially the same. And interestingly, since it was the book that came first, Elinor in the News Letter is actually taking words from the mouth of a fictional character — not the other way round. Yet Elinor frequently and vehemently denied that any close connection existed between herself and Joey; so perhaps she was genuinely unaware of the extent to which she had been absorbed into her creature. And not only into Joey: Elinor, in later years — as a very old friend described it — “began to live more and more in Chalet lands”.14 Nor is it surprising if, as her life went by, Elinor came to prefer the glamorous fictional world she had created to her real everyday surroundings. In hard cold fact there were many discrepancies between the real-life woman, born Gladys Eleanor May Dyer in the industrial town of South Shields, brought up moreover in a broken home, and the successful author Elinor Mary Brent-Dyer — a figure whose gracious presence often seems to hover behind the Chalet stories. But Elinor’s perception of herself would seem increasingly to have taken on the fictionalised image — much the same amalgam of several parts Joey Bettany/Maynard to one of the younger Madge, combined with a touch of Miss Annersley, which had formed my childhood picture. So . . . what was she really like?

  The real Elinor Brent-Dyer? Unravelling the tangled webs

  Even her greatest admirer must acknowledge 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 highly esteemed virtue. But 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 — especially as she had always, until well into middle age, looked far younger than she was. Elinor did, however, go to the more unusual lengths of entering a false date of birth on an official form (one is in my possession where she stated it to be 6 April 1901). And her lifelong habit of romancing — which some of her friends enjoyed — did often cause her to mix fact and fiction and to make extravagant claims. To put it another way: Elinor seems to have retained throughout life the capacity, possessed by many imaginative children, first to create and assume a fictional personality and then to believe genuinely and absolutely in its independent existence. Or so it appears to me.

  For with Elinor it was by no means a matter of simply concealing her background or being evasive about her age. In her case it is arguable that a quite unusual degree of self-deception existed. How else, when describing (in the article quoted above) her own approach to the writing of her books, could she have used exactly those same images and words she had written five years earlier for Joey Maynard — and this apparently without any awareness on her part? Yet more striking; how else could Elinor have authorised a journalist who interviewed her in Hereford during the 1950s to publish an account of the early life and writing career of Elinor Brent-Dyer that contained so many inaccuracies as to be almost fiction? Maybe I too am deluding myself. Perhaps I am influenced by knowing in real life a few people who, while completely reliable in a professional capacity, can often relate their personal experience in a way that could charitably be described as fanciful. At any rate I would find it harder to believe that Elinor was deliberately making things up, than to accept that by this point she herself had come to believe entirely in the romanticised version of her story.

  Why had it happened? Opinions differ as to the relative importance of heredity and environment, and Elinor may well have been someone who would always have tended to take refuge in a fictional world from the harsher realities of life. But the curiously secretive atmosphere of her early years must inevitably have influenced the shaping of her character. Today it is unfortunately not possible to do more than speculate about that early period, nor is there any way of knowing about such crucial matters as Nelly Dyer’s attitude to her two children. Did Mrs Dyer perhaps, like many single mothers of only sons, incline more towards the boy in the family? Certain pointers might indicate this. Henzell is reported to have been nice-looking and he may also have inherited the charm his mother undoubtedly possessed (as related by so many people). Elinor on the other hand was considered plain as a child, rather plump in build and decidedly brash in manner. Clearly, too, Mrs Dyer was almost obsessively attached to Henzell’s memory; Hazel Bainbridge’s childhood picture of the household (related above) confirms this. And Hazel has another memory: she recalls vividly the occasion when she was to appear in a schoolboy role at her parents’ theatre and Mrs Dyer learnt that the company had no suitable clothes. A curiously macabre scene then took place
, with a grey flannel suit of Henzell’s being ceremoniously unwrapped from the tissue paper and mothballs where it had been preserved through at least 15 years and solemnly handed to her (Hazel being a great favourite with both Elinor and her mother).

  In any case, even had Henzell not existed, it seems unlikely that Elinor would ever have been her mother’s ideal daughter. Nelly Dyer was conventional in outlook; Elinor the opposite. And although in later life, when, according to Phyllis Matthewman, “she could look quite distinguished — when she took the trouble to get herself up properly”, Elinor could never have been called beautiful. That mattered a great deal in her early days, and perhaps Elinor’s mother shared the view of an old lady I remember overhearing in my childhood: “Don’t you think any mother would rather have her daughter praised for being pretty than for being clever?” This filled me with amazed incredulity at the time (I must have been about 11) but I think now that such an attitude was not uncommon among contemporaries of Elinor’s mother.

  Besides — and more important — Elinor also failed to pass another test that society imposed (and to some extent still imposes) on women. She failed to get herself married. And her claim — often repeated but never authenticated — that she had been engaged to a young man who was killed in the First World War was probably her attempt to forestall criticism, spoken or otherwise, of her single state.

  Marriage, in Elinor’s Chalet stories, was always to be the ultimate good conduct prize for her grown-up characters; moreover, there are definite indications that she herself thought of spinsterhood as second-best. Her wholesale awarding of the matrimonial crown to all but a handful of characters certainly suggests that she conformed on this point to the social ideas of her time. And there is a personal note of regret underlying the comment made by one of her Chalet School characters after a wedding: “So the last of our old quartette is married,” Frieda spoke softly, “I am so glad. Simone is too dear and sweet to spend all her life teaching [my italics].”15 What lends a stab of poignancy here is that Simone in the story is only about 23; Elinor, when she wrote the lines in real life, was a spinster of 47 and had been teaching on and off for nearly thirty years.

  Of course Elinor’s views on marriage, as reflected in the Chalet School series, were totally unrealistic. But her attitude to men, in particular to their dominating influence within the family, is not clear. The three leading men in the series — Dick Bettany, Jem Russell (respectively Madge’s brother and her husband) and Jack Maynard (who marries Joey) — all appear to be well in command at home, and major family decisions are generally left to them; even the irrepressible Jo being often held in check by her husband. On the other hand, it must be significant that Dick — not Madge’s younger brother but her twin — is shown to acknowledge at the beginning of the series that “all their lives . . . [Madge] had been the one to plan for them both. If she had determined to start this school, nothing he could say or do could prevent her.”16 Plainly Elinor had envisaged the possibility that Madge as a truly independent young woman would not share her brother’s anxieties about how she, Joey and Mademoiselle Lepattre would fare all on their own in Austria, without a man to look after them. And that Madge is able to achieve success in her independent enterprise (with only occasional advice from minor male characters such as Herr Mensch and Herr Marani) must also be considered noteworthy.

  Here Elinor could be seen as following, no doubt unconsciously, the pattern of her female forebears in the north-east, where seamen’s wives, who were effectively in sole charge of the family during their husbands’ long absences at sea, would frequently enter themselves on census forms as “Head of the House”. But the Chalet School women show no inclination to challenge another convention of the period: the moment Doctor James Russell has carried his bride off to the Sonnalpe and installed her in the pretty chalet, Die Rosen, it is simply taken for granted that Madge, as a married woman, is now debarred from working regularly in the school. And right through the series this same fate overtakes all the innumerable members of the Chalet School teaching staff who leave to get married — despite the fact that a high proportion of them marry doctors at the nearby Sanatorium, and hence live within easy reach of the Chalet School.

  There is, however, one important exception: Joey Maynard is never allowed to sink with the matrimonial ship. Though indubitably a married woman and with the impossibly large family of 11 children, Joey not only continues to be at heart a fun-loving Chalet School girl, she is pictured by Elinor as having an extremely fulfilling career as a writer. Of course it’s fair to say that writing is one of the pursuits that can, in real life as well as fiction, be successfully combined with running a home. Although whether Jo could really have produced such a “long line of gaily jacketed books”, even with the unfailingly splendid household help she always enjoyed, remains less certain.

  The links between Elinor and her favourite heroine were obviously strengthened by Jo’s writing activities. But Elinor could not match one achievement she allowed her fictional character: Jo Bettany is barely 18 when her first book is accepted for publication, whereas Elinor was 28 when hers first appeared. Not that she was ever prepared to acknowledge this. Officially it was always stated that she had been 21 at the time; and Elinor seems indeed to have attached surprising importance to this myth of early success. An outside observer might well find her many genuine achievements far more interesting: in particular the remarkable progress her career had made following Gerry’s first appearance. Elinor, in 1922, had been just an unknown school-teacher. By the time of her death in 1969 she was considered important enough to be given obituaries in many of the national papers, including that appreciative if rather inaccurate notice in The Times, mentioned earlier.

  Nevertheless it is true that the basic facts of Elinor’s story are not particularly impressive. A correct account for an updated reference book might read:

  Elinor Mary Brent-Dyer was born on 6 April 1894 in South Shields, where she was educated in a small private school. At 18 she began a teaching career of nearly 40 years, during which she taught in both state and private schools, working with boys as well as girls, and teaching at different times English, history, Latin and class-singing, also coaching hockey and running a folk-dancing group. Finally she founded and became headmistress of the Margaret Roper School in Hereford, which she ran herself from September 1938 to July 1948.

  Her first book, Gerry Goes to School, was published in October 1922 and during the next 47 years she was to publish more than a hundred books including the famous Chalet School series. Elinor Brent-Dyer spent the last five years of her life at Redhill in Surrey, where she died on 20 September 1969.

  Between 1915 and 1917 she had attended the City of Leeds Training College and in the late 1920s she was for a short period a part-time student at the Newcastle Conservatoire of Music (now defunct). Elinor Brent-Dyer was brought up in the Church of England but joined the Roman Catholic Church in December 1930.

  Not, on the surface, an eventful story: no lurid love affairs, no strong political involvement, no solo journey up uncharted rivers. As put by the first publisher to reject Behind the Chalet School: “the trouble is that Eleanor [sic] did not have a very interesting life”. And I would concede that what Elinor did, apart from her writing, was less interesting than what she was. To me it was remarkable that anyone whose working day was necessarily spent in the classroom would then devote her spare time to creating an imaginary school-world. But in 1979 the general attitude seemed to be (just as predicted) that nobody wanted to read about a woman whose main achievement lay in writing school stories for girls — a genre that was then considered at best foolish escapism, at worst positively harmful.

  Today things have changed considerably. But the different climate that slowly came about during the next decade was a long way off in the mid-1970s. At that time Armada, incredible as it may seem, was planning to let the Chalet series die, as they saw it, a natural death. Children’s tastes, so they claimed, had altered; and t
hey, along with other publishers, rejected outright any possibility that a significant number of adults were interested in the books.

  However, the Chalet School simply refused to lie down and die. In spite of general disbelief, and even a measure of disapproval, the level of paperback sales practically doubled during the 1980s; the demand for second-hand copies of the long out-of-print hardbacks also increased enormously (with prices rising at an alarming rate); and various programmes broadcast by the BBC after Behind the Chalet School had finally struggled into print brought countless letters confirming the Chalet series to be alive — not only in Britain but in many corners of the world. Most of the adult writers expressed surprise and delight at finding they were not alone in their Chalet addiction: in the words of a correspondent from Invercargill, New Zealand “[I had] been a fan of the C.S. books for years (I am now 23) . . . [but] living at the bottom of New Zealand, and not liking to admit to sceptical friends that I still read ‘children’s books’ . . . I had never realised how many other adults enjoy the stories.”17

  A softening in attitudes towards the school story was gradually to increase as the 1980s went past; and by 1989, when Armada decided to publish Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School, things had changed completely. No need with this, my second venture into Chalet territory, to search The Writer’s Handbook for a publisher: my contribution to the compendium was actually commissioned, and the book’s appearance heralded by live radio interviews (I had waited for 18 months for the BBC to take any interest in Behind the Chalet School!). And this time the whole experience of writing the material was unbelievably different. In the 1970s it had seemed vital to write Elinor Brent-Dyer’s story from a detached, even critical viewpoint; and with the expectation of socially conscious editors in mind I had deliberately highlighted for discussion the weaknesses of the books, being aware that anything enthusiastic would be instantly rejected. Not so in 1989, when I enjoyed the wonderful freedom of writing as I liked and no longer having to appear aloof.