The Chalet School Revisited

by Sheila Ray

  Role models

  Brent-Dyer offers both the Chalet School pupils and her readers a wide range of role models. These consist of older girls, teachers and former pupils whom Brent-Dyer continues to reintroduce as adult characters throughout the Chalet School series. Pupils (and perhaps readers) are expected eventually to make the transition to role model status, beginning when they become seniors. For example, in The Chalet School and Jo (1931), Jo initially resists accepting the position of Head Girl because she does not want to take on the responsibility. Gisela, the school’s first head girl and now a wife and mother, tells her that it would be “cowardly” to evade responsibility and to refuse to grow up.

  Jo subsequently agrees to accept the post, and later admits that (p.284) : “In one way, you know I’m fearfully proud of being head girl; and — I suppose all that about being fed-up with it isn’t really true. I — I do like it, now I’m accustomed to it.” By the time that Jo has left school and returned temporarily to teach, the then Headmistress comments: “I only wish we might keep her here always. Her influence is excellent.”38 Of course, Jo does remain with the school for “always”, and continues to be the school’s most important role model throughout the series.In a later book, Tom Tackles the Chalet School, Brent-Dyer is more explicit about the function of older girls as role models when she has Matron explain to Tom:

  It’s a good thing for younger girls to look up to the Seniors; good for them and good for the Seniors. If an elder girl finds that younger ones are influenced by what she says and does, if she has any decency in her, it makes her careful. As we all need some sort of ideal as soon as we can think for ourselves, it’s right that girls should be able to find that ideal among themselves.39

  Brent-Dyer illustrates this with the example of Daisy Venables as an ideal role model for Tom.

  Daisy, with her fresh, pink and white face, well-groomed fair hair in its thick pigtail, and jolly grin, was just the kind of girl to appeal to any Junior’s imagination. She had showed herself uniformly kind to all the new girls. Above all, there was about her an air of straight dealing and uprightness that Tom was quick to sense and appreciate.40

  Detta O’Cathain, who attended a middle-class girls’ school in the early 1950s, recalls that she too regarded older girls as role models. She writes: “I remember when I was a youngster looking up to all these fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds and thinking they were gods — or goddesses. They were role models.”41

  Members of the Chalet School staff, who are often former pupils, are also role models for the girls. Because many of them, like Joey, are first described as teenagers, the distinction between staff and prefects is deliberately blurred. The very first role model is Madge Bettany, and the first to treat her as such is Juliet Carrick, who becomes Madge’s ward when her parents abandon her in The School at the Chalet.

  Juliet had not suddenly become an angel as a result of her present Head’s treatment of her. She was a very human girl; but she was deeply grateful, and since she was thorough in whatever she did, she was making valiant efforts to become the same sporting type of girl as that to which her headmistress belonged.42

  Later in the series Juliet tells Grizel that Madge is “the sort of person people do come to. She’s a dear, and I adore her”.43 By the time that Juliet returns to the Chalet School to teach, however, it is she who has become the role model — “when she came among them like one of themselves they all became her instant slaves”.44

  In reality, pupils at middle-class girls’ schools seem to have had a mixed response to the staff, or perhaps to have had different experiences depending on which school they attended. Evans, for example, recollects that by the 1950s “The very women who had battled for entry into this [patriarchal] world had made themselves unacceptable to us as role models because they seemed to have rejected men”.45 However, Julia Pascal recalls that her school was “weighed down in petty details of school uniform and model behavour, but a place where I saw that women could hold positions of power and authority”.46 And Sheila Rowbotham remembers that:

  Our teachers were the nearest guides because they had travelled these routes before us (though of course we wouldn’t teach). Their attitudes to literature, art, fashion and politics were seized upon, devoured, turned over, re-sited.47

  Perhaps the most interesting way in which teachers function as role models in the Chalet School series is in Brent-Dyer’s portrayal of their work and leisure time. Here teachers are seen as happy and leading a full life, with no sense of lack because they are not married. For example, in Carola Storms the Chalet School (1951), “the Staff, having seen all but the prefects safely to bed, were relaxing in the Staffroom, drinking coffee, eating chocolate biscuits, smoking, and otherwise refreshing themselves”.48 Their working environment is also shown to be attractive; for example, on one occasion Miss Annersley is pictured “gazing absently out of the open window at the flower garden, where roses still bloomed magnificently and the borders were aglow with tall spikes of gladioli and great clumps of cactus dahlias”.49

  Staff are often, though by no means always, portrayed as physically attractive. They are not teaching because they cannot attract a partner, but as an alternative or as a prelude to a relationship. For example:

  Hilary Burn, ex-pupil and former head-girl of the school when it was in Tirol, was a great favourite with everyone, perhaps because she so frequently forgot that she was grown-up. She was a very pretty person, with a “Bubbles” crop of golden-brown curls, wide blue eyes, and a rose-petal skin.50

  Hilary later becomes Hilary Graves, one of the many former pupils who marries a sanatorium doctor. She thus continues to be associated with the school after marriage; Brent-Dyer’s way of getting around the contemporary dictum that married women did not teach.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, Brent-Dyer also positions married women with children as role models alongside single women. Many women did not want to have to choose between marriage and a career, although they commonly wanted to stay at home when their children were young. Elizabeth Wilson, writing about the post-war period to 1968 when Brent-Dyer was producing the final Chalet School books, quotes a letter from Margaret Stacey which said that “women older than me chose either a career or marriage . . . we said, I and my friends, we would be mothers and women in our own right”.51

  In reality, Stacey’s generation, Brent-Dyer’s readers, had far more opportunity to do this than Brent-Dyer — who “chose” a career — and the first Chalet School pupils, who inevitably gave up their chosen career on marriage. Beddoe writes that:

  In the inter-war years only one desirable image was held up to women by all the mainstream media agencies — that of the housewife and mother. This single role model was presented to women to follow and all other alternative roles were presented as wholly undesirable. Realising this central fact is the key to understanding every other aspect of women’s lives in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s.52

  This image enjoyed a resurgence after the war, continuing the pressure on Brent-Dyer to produce images of contented domesticity alongside positive images of independence. Wilson also points out that part-time work was seen as the ideal solution for married women in the 1950s as there was, as there is today, an underlying assumption that young children needed the constant presence of their mother.53

  It is obviously significant that Joey, who embodies all the most desirable qualities of a Chalet School girl, has a successful career as well as eleven children, including one set of triplets and two sets of twins (although her ability to cope is dependent on the employment of servants and is thus not a realistic option for contemporary readers). No one could accuse Jo of curbing her fertility for “selfish” reasons, as the 1950s media did to women with small families — in reality it is likely that she would have been accused of irresponsibility for having so many children — nor could she be accused of neglecting her family as she worked from home.

  Jo is thus able to have it all — a large family, a husband and a caree
r — without any contentious constructs of femininity, so it is perhaps not surprising that she remains so popular with readers today. Given that Brent-Dyer came to identify closely with Joey, it is possible that Joey’s domestic situation also represented Brent-Dyer’s ideal.

  Internationalism, religious tolerance and health in education

  Throughout the series, there are three characteristics of the Chalet School which distinguish it from other schools, both fictional and non-fictional. These are its commitment to internationalism; the fact that it takes both Catholic and Protestant pupils in roughly equal proportions; and its avowed function to protect the health and well-being of its pupils.

  Madge Bettany founds the Chalet School on “English lines”54, but of the first pupils at the school, only one-third are English or American and the rest are French, German and Austrian.55 With the exception of the years during and immediately following the war (when the school was situated in Britain), the school continues to take pupils of differing nationalities, the bulk of the pupils being European with others coming from America or the Commonwealth.56 While most pupils are white, one Asian pupil is mentioned, in Lavender Laughs in the Chalet School (1943). Although it was not uncommon for real English schools to be based in the Alps, anecdotal evidence suggests that this mix of nationalities would be highly unusual in reality, with the majority of pupils normally drawn from the UK.

  When the series begins, lessons in all subjects except languages are given in English. But within a fictional four-and-a-half years Brent-Dyer is writing that the girls “naturally had to be tri-lingual, learning French, German and English”.57 By the 13th book, The New Chalet School (1938), the school speaks and writes a different language each day, alternating between French, German and English (something which, in practice, it is difficult to imagine could work). This policy is abandoned during the war years, perhaps because Brent-Dyer felt that it might cause offence at a time when Germany was the enemy and France was occupied, but is reintroduced in the first of the post-war books (Three Go to the Chalet School, 1949).

  The school’s trilingualism is often highlighted in the books by the horrified reaction of new girls, who are reassured that “when you hear nothing but French round you for two days every week and nothing but German on two others, you’ll soon pick up words and phrases and begin to use them naturally”.58 Quite how they were supposed to produce written work in the mean time was never explained. These new girls were likely to be in the same position as Mary Evans and her school friends in the UK in the 1950s: “Confronted by real-life French or Germans or Spanish we were collectively confounded by the ability of these people to speak in tongues that we had only read about”.59 While most of the reported conversation in the series is nevertheless in English, French and German phrases are not uncommon. McClelland has noted that the trilingual policy of the Chalet School encouraged readers to emulate the pupils, although in fact Brent-Dyer’s own knowledge of languages was limited, leading her to make “glaring errors” of grammar in the texts.60

  The school also adopts some of the customs of its host countries (Austria, then Switzerland) when abroad, most notably with regard to meals and telling the time. The dining-room is the Speisesaal, breakfast (Frühstück) — consists of “coffee, hot rolls, butter and jam”, tea is replaced by Kaffee und Kuchen (coffee and cakes), supper is Abendessen. Time is told in central-European style (e.g.“Lessons begin in the afternoon at fourteen-fifteen, and finish at sixteen-fifteen”) for, as Headmistress Miss Annersley explains to pupils, “we are in Central Europe and naturally we must use Central Europe times”.61

  Perhaps this would not have appeared so “natural” to real English schools based abroad. Evans has written that the pupils attending her middle-class girls’ school in the UK in the 1950s were “children of a culture which had already inculcated belief in the superiority of the British and the benefits of British influence”.62 However, Evans goes on explain that:

  Access to “abroad” was a mark of real status: anything French had the immediate effect of sending us into the kind of haze of veneration that some of our parents obviously shared . . . our definition of what was worth travelling to (France, Italy, Spain and India) corresponded exactly to the limits of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Grand Tour and the most obviously civilised of the ex-colonies.63

  It is probable that readers interpreted the inclusion of such details as references to “abroad”, increasing the appeal of the series for them, rather than believing that a real English school would adopt “foreign” customs.

  However, Brent-Dyer’s genuine commitment to internationalism is demonstrated in the books written during the war years. Before the German and Austrian pupils are forced to leave the school by the Nazis in 1938, the girls “had solemnly formed a peace league among themselves, and vowed themselves to a union of nations, whether they should ever meet again or not”.64 The founding document, signed by “every girl there”, pledges:

  We swear faithfully to do all we can to promote peace between all our countries . . . we will try to get others to work for peace as we do . . . we will always remember that though we belong to different lands, we are members of the Chalet School League of Peace.65

  The founding of this league is one of the causes of Joey and Robin’s subsequent flight from the Nazis. Later in the book, when the school is in Guernsey, Miss Annersley tells the girls:

  If war should come, remember that to many of those whom we must call the enemy it is as hateful as it is to us. In our League there are girls of German and Austrian nationality, as well as those of British, French, and Polish birth. They are our members, and we must never forget them.66

  The Peace League plays a small but significant part in the series until the war is ended. For example, a member helps the husbands of two Austrian girls to escape from a concentration camp67, and the German brother of two other former pupils drops a message of support for the Peace League from his aircraft and later deliberately crashes to avoid taking any further part in the war.68 Later Joey, Robin and Simone explain to new girls that one of the aims of the League is “to remember that whatever our nationality may be, we are all Chalet School Girls”69 — the implication being that the membership of this all-female community is more fundamental than nationality. Brent-Dyer is also careful to distinguish between Germans and Nazis: “‘It isn’t the Germans who are doing it,’ said Robin. ‘It’s the Nazis.’”70

  Given the school’s commitment to internationalism, it is probably not surprising that from the beginning pupils and teachers from both main Christian denominations are seen to be members. In addition, when the school changes to having two Headmistresses following an accident to Miss Annersley, one is a Catholic, Miss Wilson, showing that the author really did treat the two denominations as being of equal status. This would be unusual in real English schools for middle-class girls; Evans claims of the 1950s that “what did constitute social deviance and marginality in those far-off days was largely constituted by two factors — having a mother with a job, and belonging to a religion other than Church of England”.71

  In the Chalet School, Catholicism is seen as quite natural, and in the Austrian books Catholic girls outnumber Protestants. Religious services are taken separately, but on some occasions Protestant girls attend Catholic services. In an early book Eustacia Benson, shown by her actions and authorial comment to be an undesirable character when she first arrives at the school, questions this and is told by Joey, the series’ ultimate role model:

  it’s only one of the roads to God. If you think that way, then it’s best for you. If you think another way, then that’s best. But they all go to the same end.72

  Jo later grows up to marry a Catholic, Jack Maynard (although in one of Brent-Dyer’s characteristic errors he has been referred to as a member of the Church of England in an earlier book), and her children are brought up in the Catholic Church. Although there is no reference to Joey’s conversion in any published manuscript, she is describ
ed as attending Mass in Jo to the Rescue (1945), so presumably she is by then a Catholic.

  Brent-Dyer was herself formally received into the Roman Catholic Church in December 1930, having previously been a practising member of the Church of England.73 Thus it is probable that she had already taken her decision in principle at the time of writing Jo’s speech to Eustacia. Nevertheless, Brent-Dyer continues to promote the idea that both denominations are equal, and while the school is set in Herefordshire stresses that the school’s two chaplains “were great friends”.74

  Perhaps it is understandable, given Evans’ recollections, that Brent-Dyer never extended the school’s concept of religious tolerance to include Jewish girls, although girls from other Christian groups such as Quakers are occasionally mentioned (see The Chalet School and Richenda, 1958). However, Brent-Dyer does make plain her opposition to anti-Semitism. The incident which precipitates Joey’s flight from the Nazis is her defence of an old Jewish jeweller who is being tormented by a mob (he is later murdered). Later Joey deplores a state where there are “such horrors as concentration camps and protective detention, and beating up of helpless people just because they are Jews”.75