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

  Probably by the end of 1928, when Judy was published, Elinor felt sufficiently well-established in her career to make the claim. Certainly she had advanced by nine books during the four years since that spring of 1924, when her third story, The Maids of La Rochelle was still not quite completed.

  An important milestone

  The Maids of La Rochelle had been in many ways an important book for Elinor, marking as it did a number of ‘firsts’ in her career. It was the first of her books that was not a school story; it was the first where the setting plays an integral part in the story: The Maids of La Rochelle could hardly take place anywhere but the Channel Islands, whereas in Elinor’s first two books the events could happen in any number of places. It was the first book to introduce Janie Temple (later Janie Lucy), who is the first of Elinor’s non-beautiful heroines. And it was the first of her stories to receive favourable notice from the national papers. The Times Literary Supplement, for instance, wrote:

  The Maids of La Rochelle lead quite a quiet life in comparison to some of their peers; [And since the story contains a fire, several deaths — one of them violent — two marriages, a witch, an escape from an angry mob, and a number of severe scarlet-fever cases, this tells much about Elinor’s peers.] . . . but Miss Elinor Brent-Dyer makes full use of the legends of the Channel Islands . . . she is really more concerned with character than with incident and has given to her three orphans a happy youthful grace.

  And if that seems only moderately enthusiastic, a glance further up the column reveals that authors far more established than Elinor was in 1924 are far less appreciatively treated. Many are upbraided for the impossibility of their plots, the monotony of their writing and the unlikeliness of their characters — one heroine being dismissed as ‘a particularly tiresome person, who talks stage Irish of the 1890s’. Into the bargain, one of the best-known writers is accused of having ‘filled the prescribed three hundred pages with folly, which, though not actually harmful, is folly’. After which Elinor’s review reads like a panegyric.

  All in all, The Maids of La Rochelle marked a milestone in Elinor’s life. But it was only a milestone. The important turning-point was still to come. By the spring of 1924 it was just round the corner.

  CHAPTER XIII

  ‘IT ALL GREW FROM ONE HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL’

  IN real life a decision with far-reaching consequences may appear unremarkable at the time. Thus when Elinor chose to spend her 1924 summer holiday in Austria she can have had no inkling that this choice would affect quite literally the whole future course of her life. Yet it is no exaggeration to state that it did.

  That year she had passed her thirtieth birthday on 6 April. And however little she allowed herself to remember this (her official age was still around twenty-five) she can hardly have escaped an occasional awareness that time was rushing past and leaving her without a great deal to show for it.

  Viewed in terms of career, her life at this point offered little to make her feel complacent. True, there were her books: two published and a third on the way. But by now the first thrill of getting into print must have faded a little, and neither Gerry Goes to School nor A Head Girl’s Difficulties had attracted much notice; they had been just two more small fish in the teeming pond of the school story.

  However, at least her writing was making some progress. Her teaching career, on the other hand, showed signs of becoming stuck in a backwater; for Western House, described in its advertisement as ‘An independent day school for girls and little boys’, was not an establishment of importance in the educational world.

  Elinor could of course have looked for another job. But, as she once confided to Marjorie Jewell, her qualifications were simply not good enough to gain her a top-class appointment, so her prospects for advancement in teaching were poor. Not to mention that her personality and social background would have been against her in the boarding-school world, as she may well have been aware.

  Financially, too, things cannot have been easy for Elinor at this time. Her salary as a teacher was modest: quite possibly no more than £150 per annum for someone in her position in 1924. And, as a comparatively unknown author, she did not earn much from her writing, either. On this point reliable figures were hard to find, but a possible clue exists in Jo Returns to the Chalet School (1936). Here part of the story concerns the writing of Joey Bettany’s first completed book (like Elinor, Jo has got many unfinished efforts behind her). The manuscript of this story has been posted to ‘a well-known firm’. Then one day a typewritten letter arrives for Jo:

  Two seconds later Madge Russell was startled . . . by a wild yell from her sister.

  ‘Joey! What on earth is the matter? . . . What’s wrong? Tell me this instant! . . . at once before I shake you!’

  ‘Oh, Madge!’ Joey was stammering in her excitement. ‘It — it’s from those people I sent . . . [my book] to Madge! They like it — they say so. They say their reader has reported favourably on it! And they offer me thirty-five pounds for the copyright! Think of it, Madge! Thirty-five pounds!’

  Now that was 1936. Elinor’s own first book had appeared fourteen years earlier. And it does seem unlikely that in 1922 Elinor would have been paid more than the £35 Joey is offered here. At this stage she might well have received less; but, since the contracts for her first three books have all disappeared, there is no way of being certain. It has now emerged that, three years later, Elinor was paid £40 for The School at the Chalet, and this was probably the going rate in 1925. But it does seem a little odd that in 1940, when The Chalet School in Exile was published, Elinor, despite having by this point nearly thirty books behind her, was still being paid only £40 for the copyright.

  Of course £40 was quite a handsome sum in the 1920s. It could, for instance, have provided a term’s fees for a girl at boarding-school. £120 a year is ‘only what most decent schools charge,’ Madge Bettany points out to her brother — in The School at the Chalet (1925). And Madge had ‘got some prospectuses to see’. So, probably, had Elinor; among them no doubt that of St Helen’s School, where the fees at this time were £120 per annum.

  All the same, even making allowances for the greater value of the pound in 1924, Elinor was undoubtedly not well off. And very probably one of the reasons she chose the Tyrol for her summer holiday was that Austria then was an extremely cheap country for British people to visit.

  Nowadays this seems hard to believe. But during the early twenties inflation had reduced the value of Austrian currency in an almost unimaginable way: by 1924, 10,000 Kronen — the equivalent of more than £435 before the Great War — was worth only about 21/2 pence. And, as one result, foreign visitors were able to tour Austria for incredibly little. Full board, for example, was offered by many of the best hotels for a 100,000 Kronen a day — which sounds staggering but meant less than five shillings in English money (25p). In pensions it could have been found for very much less, particularly in small places.

  Other prices were equally low. ‘Oh, look at those plums!’ Grizel Cochrane says excitedly to Joey as they stand waiting outside a shop in Innsbruck (The School at the Chalet); ‘Only six hundred Kronen the kilo! I must buy some!’ And with ‘those plums’ costing less than a farthing a pound her enthusiasm is understandable.

  Grizel’s remark is enlightening in another way, for it contains a reference to Kronen — and the early Chalet School books do frequently mention this form of Austrian money. Elinor, it is obvious, had failed to notice an important change which took place in Austria about four months after her visit. Then, on 1 January 1925, the now familiar Schilling was introduced to replace the Krone, which thereafter vanished from the scene.

  It took Elinor three years and four Chalet books to catch up with this change: only in The Head Girl of the Chalet School, published in 1928, do her characters begin using Schillings. But at least this small anachronism is helpful in one way, since it establishes definitely that Elinor’s own visit to Austria must have taken place no later than 1924.
/>   Any such confirmation is welcome for, as might be expected, there is little written evidence to be found about the holiday. Elinor never seems to have kept a diary; and if she sent either letters or postcards from the Tyrol they have long ago disappeared.

  However in this instance a wealth of information is given indirectly by the early Chalet School books; and with their help it is possible to learn a great deal about that momentous visit.

  First of all, the journey to the Tyrol. It seems a reasonable guess that Elinor would have travelled by the same route, and with the same strict economy, as the Bettanys and Grizel Cochrane do in The School at the Chalet. Not that an author is obliged to make her characters do exactly what she did herself. But it is noticeable in the Chalet School series that anyone going to Austria by public transport always travels in one particular way; which suggests that to Elinor this was indeed the one and only way. And it became so fixed in her ideas that even in the sixties, when the Chalet School was established in Switzerland, her schoolgirls are still travelling from England by boat and train, although by this time in real life, with the ready availability of student air-fares, they would more probably have gone by plane.

  The School at the Chalet provides a blue-print for the Journey, and certain details can be filled in from other books. It begins at London’s Victoria Station. Here Grizel Cochrane’s father, suffering a belated ‘feeling of regret that he meant so little to his only child’, gives Grizel ‘into Madge Bettany’s charge’; and Madge, Joey and Grizel proceed to the coast and thence across the Channel to France. ‘Even the draughty, prosaic douane of Boulogne, where everyone had to go in queue with their cases, was invested with a certain pleasure glamour for [Grizel]’, who ‘had never been out of England in her life before’. Neither, perhaps, had Elinor, with the exception of her visit to Guernsey the previous year; although, since her one and only passport was applied for in July 1922, there is at least a possibility that she had already travelled somewhere abroad that year.

  Once through the customs ‘they settled down in their second-class carriage’; Grizel is intrigued by ‘the unusual trains with their funny, high engines and little steps up into the carriages’. ‘A little later they produced sandwiches and milk.’ Never any dining-car meals in those pre-war days.

  ‘It was five o’clock — or seventeen, if you cared to take French time — by the time they had arrived [in Paris]’; and on this occasion they go to an hotel, ‘a quiet one, not far from the Madeleine’. However a stay in Paris is not an obligatory part of the proceedings, and Elinor may or may not have made one.

  ‘Half-past eight saw them at the Gare de l’Est, climbing into the Paris-Wien train express.’ Or — to take another version (The Head Girl of the Chalet School) — ‘It was nearly nine at night . . . [as they] walked down the long platform of the Gare de l’Est, where the Paris-Wien express was standing, and quickly found the carriage.’ Second-class, naturally. And no question of sleepers: ‘Joey and Grizel did as they were told . . . rolling themselves in rugs, and curling up on the seats which had been widened by the pulling out of a kind of underseat.’ A detail that surely was learnt from experience,

  ‘ “We shall be in Switzerland, I hope, when you wake tomorrow . . . we reach Basle about six in the morning.” . . . And . . . before long all three were fast asleep, while the great train hurled onwards through the darkness.’

  ‘It was half-past seven on . . . [the following] evening when the Vienna express slackened speed before entering the Innsbrück Station . . . an hour late”, observed Madge . . . “We’ve missed the last train of the mountain railway, so we’ll have to go to an hotel somewhere for the night.” ’

  And that presents no problem, for Madge’s brother Dick Bettany is there to meet them, and he has got ‘rooms booked at the Europe’.

  Outside the station then, and ‘into the big square, where carriages intended for two horses, but drawn by one only [presumably no one could afford the second horse], were waiting for hire; while the coachmen . . . in their short open jackets, full skirts, and little green Tyrolese hats with the inevitable feather at the back, leaned up against the wheels, shouting chaff to each other, or smoking their long china-bowled pipes. Beyond, they could see the great snow-capped mountains, towering up on all sides.’

  And so at last, after a day of sight-seeing in Innsbrück, to the final stages of the Journey: up into the mountains above the Inn valley, to the beautiful Achen See and the village of Pertisau. In the books this is to be renamed ‘Briesau’, while the lake becomes the ‘Tiern See’. Here, Elinor would spend the holiday of her lifetime; and in fiction Madge Bettany would open the Chalet School.

  ‘The journey from Innsbrück to Spärtz [Elinor’s name for Jenbach] is of no particular interest, with the one exception of the old-world town of Hall, famous for its salt mines now, though in olden days it had a great reputation as the centre of plots and wars.’ True about Hall — or Solbad Hall, as it is sometimes known. But apparently no one had told Elinor that a few miles short of Jenbach/Spärtz a dramatic glimpse may be caught of the monastery of St Georgenberg, unbelievably perched above a ravine at a height of more than 2,000 feet. However, anyone would agree with the next part of her description:

  The little mountain railway, which carries you up to a height of three thousand feet and more above the sea-level, is something to remember. Higher and higher they climbed, now and then stopping at a tiny wayside station, till at last they reached the great Alp, or rather Alm, as they are called in the Tyrol, and there before them, dark, beautiful, and clear as a mirror, spread the Tiern [Achen] See, with its three tiny hamlets and two little villages round its shores; and towering round on all sides the mighty limestone crags and peaks of the mountains.

  The railway terminus is known as Seespitz, and here the steamer was waiting for the passengers. Dick was there too, ready to help with the parcels.

  ‘It’s a jolly walk round the lake,’ he said, ‘but to-night I think we’ll take the steamer. It’s about a quarter of a mile nearer from the [Pertisau] landing-stage than it is from here . . . ’

  The little steamer waited ten minutes, then her whistle blew, and off she went — first to Buchau at the opposite side of the lake, and then to . . . [Pertisau] . . . From the landing-stage to the Chalet was a good ten minutes’ walk, and then they saw the welcoming lights . . . They were . . . [there] at last.

  Naturally there can never be proof that the above synthesis provides an accurate picture of Elinor’s own journey to the Tyrol. But the first Chalet School story, from which most of the quotations come, was begun, at a guess, within a few weeks of her return to England and was certainly completed by Easter 1925, only seven months later. It would be impossible to believe that, with everything so fresh in her memory, her own experiences were not incorporated in her writing. There is, too, something about the type of details supplied in all the early Chalet School books which proclaims their origin in real life. And later, when Elinor began to fall back on guide-books for local colour, the difference is unmistakable.

  The sheer quantity of small details is bound to strike a reader of today; and now any writer would hesitate to include so many. Here, however, Elinor was accurately gauging her audience: the schoolgirls of that pre-television era possessed a fair amount of reading muscle; and there is plenty of evidence that they actually enjoyed having every little detail spelt out. In particular anything to do with foreign lands was fascinating, for it was then only the tiniest minority of children who ever went abroad themselves.

  School-story writers were obviously aware of‘ this; and many of them sent their characters off to the Continent or the far-flung Empire. Angela Brazil in The School in the South (1922) chose Naples as the destination for the Beverley family; and the differences between their mode of travel and Elinor’s Standard Chalet School Journey exactly reflect the difference in financial status between the two authors. It is implicit, though not stated in so many words, that Angela Brazil’s characters trave
l First Class; they ‘sit in comfortable padded armchairs, eating fish or ham and eggs, and watching . . . the deft-handed waiters nipping about with trays or tea-cups’; and for the ‘thirty-eight hours’ journey from Paris to Rome [Curious how anyone in schoolgirl fiction travelling to any place abroad always seems to go via Paris — perhaps something to do with all foreigners being Frenchmen?] . . . they had engaged two sleeping compartments, wagons-lits as they are called on the Continental express.’ (Readers will note that Miss Brazil works into her stories just as many informative details as Elinor into hers.)

  Angela herself always travelled in comfort, according to her biographer (Mrs Gillian Freeman, The Schoolgirl Ethic), and stayed at good hotels. Elinor, on the other hand, almost certainly chose somewhere cheap for her stay in Pertisau — not that any of the hotels there would have been expensive at this time. But, true to form, she never revealed exactly where she had stayed; and her short account, written for the first Chalet Club newsletter, refers only to ‘a Chalet beside the lake’. And this description, with its implication of a private house, is probably a piece of poetic licence. Old photographs of Pertisau show clearly that there were then (as now) only two houses, as distinct from hotels, directly on the lakeside; both have been working farms for many generations back. And although it is not absolutely impossible that Elinor stayed as a paying-guest in one or other of these houses, living conditions there would have been so primitive at the time as to make this quite unlikely.