by Sheila Ray
For when the whistle sounded time, against the one goal scored by Ravenscourt, there were twenty-six scored by Tudor House. And of these, twenty had been scored by Marigold Marshall . . . By the time Marigold Marshall had been at Tudor House a month, she was the most popular girl in the school . . . [She] was elected a member of the first netball team, and also showed signs of easily getting in the first hockey eleven.10
It is only fair to add that it is Marigold’s insistence on attending a Bible Class with girls from the school which is Tudor House’s bitter rival that almost shakes this happy state of affairs. She is even sent to Coventry for a while, but her Christian forbearance triumphs, and the episode ends in the wholesale conversion of the hockey team! For the most part, Marigold remains completely lifeless, a puppet of doctrine — and one does wonder whether it is absolutely necessary for every child who becomes a committed Christian to become an overseas missionary!
Miss Dennison’s books are noticeably better the further away she strays from her message, but she is still amongst the best of the post-Victorian evangelical authors. Dennison was writing in the 1920s, and several of her Victorian predecessors show genuine and deep insight into the spiritual thought-processes of young girls11, but by the 1950s the standard is consistently low, reaching rock-bottom in the books of Helen Humphries. The heroine of Prudence Goes Too Far (1966) declares:
My Dad could not make me do what I did not want to do, and you are only a servant in my Grandfather’s house. Ha, ha, wasn’t it funny to hear Grandfather on the rampage about those hot water taps, and it was such an easy thing to do, mph, they are just made for japing . . . 12
After nearly 130 pages in this vein, one feels that Prudence cannot go far enough.
It is ironic that authors who are attempting to give their readers something of fundamental and eternal importance cannot do so in terms of ordinary experience or even language. Humphries’ Margaret (e.g. Margaret the Rebel, 1957) who also, inevitably, becomes a missionary, prays for help before an important hockey match: “ere the game started she lifted her heart to her Heavenly Father for His help and strength for this task now before her”.13 Praying for help in an everyday task is fair enough, but one doubts whether a 14-year-old is really likely to do so in Authorized Version English.
This removal of religious experience from the plane of everyday existence is inexcusable in authors who claim that such experience is the mainspring of life, and sadly must do much more harm than good to the message they are trying to convey. We have already seen that Brent-Dyer’s specifically evangelical books do not evade reality in this way, but it is interesting that they, too, were published in the 1950s. All the texts give the impression of dating from an earlier period, and this was doubtless part of a rearguard action as children’s literature became much more secular and as the country moved into the “permissive” and anti-church 1960s.
Faith for living
By far the most successful authors are those who can be classified as religious writers only in the sense that a relationship with God is so fundamental to their lives that it cannot avoid being reflected in their work, and who think, not in terms of theological formulae, but of a living relationship with a real person. Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Elsie Oxenham and Elinor Brent-Dyer all come into this category; none of these authors is writing solely to put forward a message, but their own deeply held convictions about the meaning of life are inevitably present in their books. The faith of all these women is certainly simple; simplistic, however, it is not, as religious concepts are rigorously analysed. There is also absolute commitment, and this is worked out in the texts in the reaction of the characters to difficult and distressing events in their own lives.
Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Mary-Lou Trelawney is comforted after the death of her mother by the words of Job quoted by Miss Annersley, her former Headmistress: “though He slay me, yet will I trust Him”14; and several of the major characters symbolize their total self-giving concretely. Robin Humphries becomes a nun, Margot Maynard a medical missionary and when, in The New House at the Chalet School (1935), the girls hear that a former pupil, Luigia de Ferrara, has entered a convent, “it seemed to her [Jo] that if some of the elder ones had husbands and children, Luigia had taken an even greater step forward than they”.15 It might be noted that this taking of the veil in no way implies a sentimental retreat from life — Luigia eventually dies, with others of her order, in a Nazi concentration camp.
This deeply rooted faith is expressed very much in relation to the practicalities of everyday living. This is reflected even in fictional churches, for the ideal is always “a short service with plenty of hymns and a ten-minutes’ sermon full of common sense”!16 Both Dorita Fairlie Bruce and Elinor Brent-Dyer speak of God, and relationships with him, in terms which, particularly for their generation, are startlingly down-to-earth. The former’s Desda Blackett declares that:
There are occasions when a sense of common decency and good manners should drive one to church, if all higher motives are missing. The Lord puts us under such tremendous obligations that we have to do something in return, however small.17
God is a friend and should be treated with common courtesy, and Brent-Dyer frequently uses the concept of being “rude to God”. When in Joey and Co. in Tirol (1960), Ruey Richardson attempts to go to bed after a day without saying her prayers, Len Maynard remarks:
as for prayers, you must please yourself, but I think you’ll be jolly ungrateful if you don’t even say a “Thank you” to God after the decent time you’ve had today. Rotten bad manners, I call it!18
For these writers and their characters, religion is deeply related to ordinary life — God is not merely there to call on when balanced on a precipice or drowning in a cave. Because the books contain adventure elements, characters do land themselves in such predicaments, and certainly pray for help when in danger, but their faith is also very much involved in the fabric of everyday living. Miss Annersley, the Headmistress of Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School, prays before tackling difficult pupils19, and Mary-Lou Trelawney, soon to be Head Girl of the school, does likewise before trying to help Jessica, a younger girl, to face her stepsister’s imminent death.20 Even the treatment of erring pupils follows the theologically impeccable path of realisation of wrongdoing leading to repentance and ultimate forgiveness. Elsie Oxenham’s Mary Devine struggles to bring her life into line with God’s will21, and Dorita Fairlie Bruce’s Nancy discourses at some length on predestination and fatalism22; but these abstract theological problems, however fascinating to adults, are hardly likely to grip or inspire a child.
Brent-Dyer’s strength in this area is that she can talk of profound subjects in concrete, illustrative terms which a child can appreciate. Jo Maynard, for example, encourages her stormy daughter, Margot, to fight her “devil” in terms of tennis practice:
every time you give in to the devil, you’re making it easier and easier for him to talk to you and coax you into doing things even when you know them to be wrong. It’s like practising your tennis. When you first began, you couldn’t get a ball over the net unless you stood quite close to it. But you worked at it and now you can get it over quite well, even from the back line. Do you see? . . . Whichever you practise hardest now, you’ll go on doing when you’re older.23
Again, when Mary-Lou is trying to explain to jealous Jessica that real love is willing to share, she uses very down-to-earth biblical examples, reminding the girl how the first reaction of the disciples to gaining the Lord’s friendship was to go and tell their friends about him:
when Christ made friends all round . . . did the Apostles go sulking round about it and say and think He ought to be satisfied with them? . . . they were maddest with the people who wouldn’t have anything to do with Him — like those Samaritans that James and John wanted to call down fire from Heaven on.24
Because of their trust in a God who is involved in every part of life, these authors can deal with difficult and sometimes untouchable subjects. Death, a
difficult concept for post-Victorian children, is never ignored, but the attitude towards it is one of utmost confidence. Bruce’s Triffeny refuses to go and look at her dead great-aunt:
I’d hate you to think me unfeeling or anything but you see — I just don’t believe in death — especially where Great-aunt is concerned. She was always so extremely alive, and she is still, only now she’s quite well and happy and able for all the new experiences she has gone into. I can’t help feeling that — that what’s lying there is just the old clothes she’s slipped out of . . . We care for them because she has worn them, but otherwise they are of no great importance now.25
Elinor Brent-Dyer even allows the occasional character to contemplate suicide — only to reject the idea firmly as cowardice. In the Chalet series, Grizel Cochrane is returning home from New Zealand deeply depressed, as the man she loves has married her best friend, and wanting only oblivion:
“Oh, sometimes I wish I could just go to sleep and never wake up again!”
Her lips thinned to a straight line and her eyes were very sombre. Then she relaxed, firmly pushing to the back of her mind the thoughts which had given rise to the wish. No help was to be found that way, and though she was bitterly unhappy just then, she would never have done anything to attain that rest. Grizel Cochrane had too much in her for that. 26
The fact that suicide is a coward’s way out is emphasised by Godfrey’s attitude when he is captured by natives in The Condor Crags Adventure (1954). He is allowed to contemplate making an escape attempt so that the natives will shoot him with their poisoned arrows, thus killing him more quickly (a “quick if agonizing death”!), but he will not consider suicide — ‘I may be all sorts of a fool, but I’m not a funk!”27
Problems of faith
Very few problems of faith are ignored. Jo Maynard has to battle with the relationship between faith and healing when her youngest daughter is critically ill with polio, and the reality of grief and anxiety is acknowledged. When Miss Annersley tries to comfort Jo with the reminder, “Don’t despair. Phil is in God’s hands. She could not be safer,” the distressed mother can only reply, “I know, but it’s not a lot of comfort at this moment.”28
Again it is Jo who has to try and reconcile human suffering with her belief in a loving God when she meets a woman of her own age who is in constant pain from acute rheumatism (Jo to the Rescue, 1945); and these are all questions to which there is no easy answer, nor is one suggested. The principle is always that of “going deep”, of thinking through one’s beliefs and working towards true understanding rather than superficial acceptance, and Brent-Dyer is certainly not alone in this, though the subjects she deals with are usually more profoundly disturbing than those of her fellow-writers.
In Kathleen McLeod’s Julia of Sherwood School (1947), the girls are praying about the election of prefects:
Rhoda prayed very earnestly that Julia and Hilary might be chosen. She owned to the others that she had put the election in her prayers.
“It will be awkward if somebody else is asking God to let Addie Baron or someone else be chosen,” said Sunny, trying to face a problem that has puzzled and distressed wiser folk than junior school-girls.29
The above-mentioned Triffeny finds the same problem when she prays to win a competition:
Up till that morning she had prayed for success, and then she had suddenly stopped, silenced by some vague confused idea that it wasn’t, perhaps, quite playing the game to ask for special favours under the circumstances. Triffeny did not find prayer an easy matter; she felt it couldn’t be if one thought about it at all.30
None of this can be classed as sentimental, and the analysis continues into areas of emotional difficulty. Forgiveness, for example, despite its cosy sound, is sometimes very difficult for human beings to achieve, and its treatment by Elinor Brent-Dyer is searching and austere. In A Genius at the Chalet School (1956), Nina Rutherford, a very talented and dedicated pianist, has her wrist injured because of the clumsiness and carelessness of another girl. Nina totally refuses to forgive the penitent Hilda, and is taken to task by her Headmistress:
[Nina] had no pity for Hilda’s real unhappiness and all the Head could get out of her was a sullen, “It serves her right if she’s miserable. She was warned and she didn’t bother to remember. I can’t practise and I couldn’t have my lesson this morning.”
“There are more important things than music, even,” Miss Annersley said sternly — “I hope, until you feel differently about Hilda, you won’t try to say Our Father, Nina. Have you ever thought what a terrible condemnation of yourself you are calling down if you ask to be forgiven your trespasses exactly as you forgive those of others? Think that over, please, and ask God to give you the grace of pity.”31
Brent-Dyer’s faith was too deep for her to be able to ignore its implications in any context and, on a rather lighter note, she is the only author to find a conflict between her beliefs and one of her plots. The Highland Twins at the Chalet School (1942) is set during the war, and, during the course of the book, Jo Maynard’s husband is reported missing. Fiona, one of the twins of the title, has the Celtic power of second sight and suggests using this to bring Jo news of Jack. Brent-Dyer was no whit concerned with the credibility of this, but she was worried that it was wrong from a religious viewpoint. Ultimately she compromises by keeping the action going, but providing a touchstone in the person of Miss Wilson, the Deputy Head, who is disgusted by the whole proceeding:
In a few words the Head explained, and “Bill’s” face grew disapproving. “I don’t like it, Hilda. It’s meddling with powers best left alone.”
Miss Annersley, with very uncharacteristic lack of logic, claims that she also disapproves, but is willing to try anything to bring comfort to Jo. Miss Wilson reluctantly agrees, but with caveats, which were designed to ensure that none of Brent-Dyer’s impressionable readers rushed out to emulate the proceedings:
Well, on your head be it, then. But I don’t agree with it at all . . . you will forbid it for the future, won’t you, Hilda? I do feel it’s wrong . . . I’ve got a “free” for the next two periods, so I’ll go to my room and say a rosary for Jo and Jack. And that’s better than any amount of “seeing”, even if it is second sight.32
Faith in a post-Christian society
We now live in a post-Christian society, where church-going is no longer the acceptable social norm, where traditional moral values are not necessarily accepted and where Christianity is no longer the major cultural medium (many children are completely ignorant even of the basic Bible stories which their grandparents took for granted); and it is interesting to see how Elinor Brent-Dyer, the only author whose long writing life spanned the divide, adapts to this.
In the major part of the Chalet series, certainly before the 1950s, basic Christianity is the norm and is referred to only fleetingly, but as the social climate changes, the religious element in the books becomes much more specifically stated. By the 1960s several girls have arrived at the Chalet School with no religious background or interest, and they and the school regard each other with mutual incomprehension. The decision of Naomi Elton’s aunt to let the girl decide on her own religious affiliations “caused a hubbub in the Staffroom, for such an arrangement had never before been heard of at the Chalet School”33, and Mary-Lou has never before met an unbaptized person!
In 1960 Len Maynard is trying to persuade Ruey Richardson to say her prayers before going to bed, but Ruey, though ready enough to oblige, does not know how to pray.
Religion had meant very little in her life so far. It had been rather a shock to her when she saw Len kneel down, night after night. It had been quite as much of a shock to Len to see Ruey tumble into bed without . . . Ruey mumbled the Lord’s Prayer to herself and followed it up with a somewhat incoherent word or two of thanks for her new clothes and the new friends. That done, she remained kneeling, wondering what more she could say. She could find nothing, but she stayed there until Len got up. Then she rose too, and
gave her friend a grin.
“I hope you’re satisfied now?” she remarked.34
