Behind the Chalet School: A biography of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer Page 3

  It is not surprising either, with money going so much further, that most of the households in Winchester Street were able to afford a living-in maid — that coveted status symbol of the times; especially when her wages were only about 20p a week. Elinor’s mother, for one, seems always to have employed a maid-of-all-work, and most probably had other help in the form of a visiting washerwoman at least once a week; perhaps a sewing-woman from time to time, as well.

  No wonder that the idea of household help being always readily available, somewhere in the background, underlies all Elinor’s pre-war stories. It is more unexpected, though, that this impression should linger in the books she wrote during the war and post-war periods; for by this time she and her mother were struggling along in a huge house with little domestic assistance. But then it often happened with Elinor that the ideas acquired during her early life remained with her to the end.

  Indeed it becomes clear that Elinor was in so many ways the product of her early environment that, in order to understand her character or even certain aspects of her books, it is essential to have some picture of daily life in her childhood home. And here she herself has given no direct help. On the contrary, throughout her life she was always uncommunicative about anything that concerned her background. More than that, she was sometimes positively misleading. Nor did the most urgent pleas from her fans and her Chalet Club members ever succeed in drawing more from Elinor than three short and carefully edited paragraphs. This meagre account of her life story, which appeared under the heading ‘Something about Me’ in the Chalet Club’s newsletter for June 1963, begins: ‘I was born near Newcastle-on-Tyne and can boast of having lived under five monarchs’ — a sentence that is less straightforward than it appears; for, by 1963, Elinor had in fact lived under six monarchs, counting from Victoria to the present Queen inclusive. Perhaps she genuinely forgot one. Or perhaps she miscounted, arithmetic being always one of her weak points, as she herself was ready to confess and the books frequently confirm. (‘There were twelve [in the] Fourth . . . twenty-two [in the] Third . . . twenty-one juniors . . . six in the Sixth Form and eight in the Fifth, making up the school to the number of seventy’ — The Rivals of the Chalet School, 1929 — a sum that, after many attempts, would still seem to total sixty-nine.)

  But quite possibly that slip over the number of monarchs was not accidental, since Elinor did often tend to try and lop a few years off her age, in particular when her writing career was concerned. And nothing so unusual about that. It is much more striking that she should have taken such pains to avoid naming the actual place of her birth and upbringing. This might, of course, have been due to snobbishness: in part her own, for reputedly Elinor in real life was less free from snobbish ideas than are some of her fictional characters; but mainly to her long experience of other people’s. There can be little doubt that once she had encountered that exclusive world of the girls’ boarding-school (as a young teacher during the 1920s) Elinor would have found it best to forget her own comparatively humble North Country origins. Today many social ideas have been turned inside out; but at that pre-war period the boarding-school girl, in fact as in fiction, was not expected to come from a place like South Shields with its working-class image of shipyards, collieries and seaside boarding-houses.

  In any case Elinor had a far more compelling reason to fear being traced home: for, brought up as she had been, she understandably shrank from the possibility that outsiders might learn of her parents’ broken marriage and that her own home background had been so different from that of the happily united families she portrayed in her books.

  Maybe it appears extraordinary that anyone writing in the permissive sixties would bother to hide things so unsensational. But Elinor’s habit of concealment had by this time been established for too long to be broken; after all, evasion had formed an integral part of her life for sixty-six years — ever since those smoke-screen tactics adopted by Nelly Dyer at the time of Charles’s departure. And this may also explain why, in the course of a hundred published books, Elinor makes no use of her own Tyneside background, or of anything too closely connected with it. The one exception to this is the recently discovered Jean of Storms (a full-length novel which was serialised in the Shields Gazette during the spring and summer of 1930). And there were to be no autobiographies. Not even one as deliberately unrevealing as Angela Brazil’s My Own Schooldays (Blackie & Son, 1925).

  However, despite Elinor’s heavy silence on the subject, it is still possible to obtain the required picture of her upbringing, and to learn much about her turn-of-the-century childhood, because so many of her contemporaries in South Shields were eager to fill in the background. And, despite the passage of many years, Elinor’s memory had remained amazingly vivid in South Shields. But then, in the phrase often used by her friends and acquaintances: ‘Elinor was not the kind to be easily forgotten’.

  One thing emerges clearly from the various accounts: the children of Elinor’s generation led far simpler lives than do most children today. Thus it can be taken for granted that Elinor and Henzell went early to bed, and, like the girls of the Chalet School, at an absolutely fixed time, that was seldom later than 8 p.m. until they were into their teens. Long afterwards Elinor, whose childhood home was without electric light, would record a memory of bedtime journeys through the shadowy unlit house:

  How dark it was in the passage! She had to go past the stairs, and who knew what awful thing might not be lying in wait for her, concealed half-way up? Supposing a long, skinny hand came through the railings and clutched her hair! (Gerry Goes to School, 1922)

  Regular hours would also have characterised the day’s timetable, with simple home-cooked meals appearing at fixed times. No convenience foods, either; no cornflakes, potato crisps or Coca-Cola. All most wholesome, no doubt; but the gusto and frequency with which Elinor writes of continental menus might imply disenchantment with the more everyday type of English fare; and certainly remarks to the effect that, ‘English food’s all very well . . . but I love what we have here in the Tyrol’ (The Head Girl of the Chalet School, 1928) can be found in many of her books.

  Children’s amusements were also simpler in those days. And with television still a number of decades away in the future the favourite indoor pastimes included Ludo, Halma, Beggar-my-Neighbour, and the other old-fashioned games often played by the families in Elinor’s early books; as well as jigsaw puzzles and the various paper-games and quizzes for which Elinor retained a lifelong passion.

  Out of doors, in the quiet streets around her childhood home, the local children played singing games, or ‘Hitchy-Dobber’ (the Tyneside version of hopscotch); and since the Winchester Street houses had no gardens, only quite small back yards, Elinor and her small brother must often have longed to join in, although in view of Nelly Dyer’s tendency to adopt middle-class prejudices it is most unlikely they were allowed to do so.

  More probably the two children had to content themselves with watching from the window of the front parlour. And at least there was plenty for them to see and hear. Every morning the housewives of the day, or in some cases the maid, would sweep the pavement before the house and carefully whiten the doorstep. Sometimes the women who sold the whitening material came round, carrying their wares on their heads in baskets and shouting out ‘Chalk, or Rubbing Stone!’ as they trudged along. Then there were the tradesmen who drove their carts slowly up and down the road, looking for customers to buy milk or vegetables or coal. From time to time a carriage, bearing perhaps the doctor or one of the grand folk from Westoe Village, made its stately way past, the horses’ hooves clip-clopping smartly on the cobbles. On certain days the organ-grinder’s music could be heard. And just once in a while came the sound of galloping horses, which would instantly have drawn everyone, children and adults alike, to the windows, for that meant a fire, an event that was always exciting — provided, of course, that it was happening somewhere else.

  The ordinary day’s routine for Elinor and Henzell would al
so have included the regular morning and afternoon walks that were later to be a feature of life at the Chalet School; and occasionally the two might have been taken for a trip in the ferry that chugged its way across the Tyne estuary between North and South Shields; or else to ride in one of the quaint-looking horse-drawn trams, which passed along the top of Winchester Street; though, oddly enough, this particular form of transport does not seem to have appealed greatly to the young of Elinor’s day: ‘We children despised the trams’, according to one of her contemporaries. ‘We thought they were only for old, old ladies, in black feather boas.’ But of course most people at that time were excellent walkers, as emerges in all Elinor’s early books where walking, even for long distances, is obviously taken for granted as the everyday thing.

  In many ways it sounds a peaceful time; and, despite its troubled beginning, daily life was generally ordered and peaceful for the Dyer children. Not that they can have failed to learn that life had other and far less pleasant sides: South Shields had a large share of poverty and unemployment, and during Elinor’s childhood there were often long queues to be seen at the soup kitchens that, from time to time, were set up in the town. Nor was it unusual to see people begging in the streets.

  Elinor did clearly grow up with some awareness of poverty; and she was to convey in her stories a strong feeling of the better-off person’s obligation to help those less fortunate. Perhaps her attitude does often sound a note of Lady Bountiful that is out of tune today, but this, to be fair, is something that must be judged in its period context. As must also her ideas on the subject of illness — a recurrent theme in all her books. Here it is essential to remember how many diseases which have all but vanished today were common throughout Elinor’s early life. Tuberculosis, for example, used then to cause literally hundreds of deaths each year in South Shields; diphtheria and scarlet fever were prevalent, and could often be fatal; even smallpox was not unknown. And, among the middle classes at least, illness was taken far more seriously than it usually is today. The most ordinary cold might have confined a child to its room for a week or more — as happens frequently in the Chalet School books; and measles, which many children now get through in a few days, would have meant for Elinor and Henzell about three weeks in bed, the first part of the time in a darkened room. Besides, in those days being ‘in bed’ meant exactly what it said; there was no larking around the house in pyjamas.

  Altogether illness played an important if unpleasant part in most people’s lives, and this may explain why Elinor developed a considerable pre-occupation with the subject, and why there are so few of her books in which someone is not ill, less or more seriously, in the course of the story.

  Her characters also suffer a good deal either during or in anticipation of visits to the dentist. Whether Elinor herself shared that dread of the dentist shown by Joey Bettany in the Chalet School stories is not known, but it appears that her early dental experiences were painful; and certainly she did not manage to keep her own teeth much past the age of forty. It would be hard to blame Elinor, or anyone else, for dreading the old-fashioned type of dentistry: without pain-killing injections and all today’s numerous other improvements, it must have been a grisly business. And people were just expected to grin and bear it. Children as well.

  That they mostly did so was due no doubt to their tougher upbringing; for there can be no question that children then were expected to be more stoical, as well as being more submissive and obedient to their elders. A strict upbringing was the fashion of the day and, as put by an old acquaintance of Elinor’s, Miss Mary Starling, who grew up in South Shields at exactly the same time and in a very similar environment: ‘Parents were parents then and did not try to be just “pals”.’ Her own father and mother, to whom she was devoted, ‘were strict and demanded deference’; and she and her brother and sister ‘were usually obedient as most children were’.

  This lady recalls, too, the regular church-going that unquestionably formed as important a part of Sunday in Elinor and Henzell’s childhood as it did in hers:

  The Sabbath was strictly kept . . . We went to morning and evening service, and to Sunday School at 2.30 p.m. After morning service my sister, who was two years my junior, and I went to Grandmother’s. We had to tell her the text of the sermon and the headings of the preacher’s theme. We had a consultation at the gate before we went in!

  It is easy to picture Elinor and the little brother who was only one year her junior being catechised in this time-honoured fashion. That the family did go regularly to church, and that it was the Church of England to which they belonged is clear from the information supplied by various friends. However there are hints in Elinor’s one and only North Country story (Jean of Storms) of a more fundamentalist influence at work somewhere in her background. The eponymous heroine of this story is much concerned that her little niece shall learn to think of a loving God, and not grow up to fear hell and the devil lurking round every corner, in the frightening way that — we gather — she had herself been taught as a child. And there is a personal note beneath some of the descriptions in this story. Nevertheless there can be no question about the great importance of religion to Elinor personally; it is demonstrated throughout her writings. And the important role it plays in her books will form the subject of a later chapter.

  A final word on Elinor’s upbringing. All in all, the indications are that it was entirely typical of its period. Moreover, it can be seen that all Elinor’s most deeply rooted convictions were planted during the first two decades of her life, and that many of the themes which recur over and over again in her books had their origins during those early years.

  Which is why it has seemed so essential, in this chapter, to try and give some general impression of the period.

  CHAPTER III

  SCHOOL WAS A LIFE SENTENCE

  The sentence begins

  IT was around the year 1900 that Elinor began what eventually proved to be half a century’s personal experience of school. For that, give or take a few years here and there, is the impressive total when her own school-days are added to the time she spent as student, pupil-teacher, teacher and finally as headmistress of her own school. Moreover, this takes account only of real-life schools. In fiction, once her Chalet School was firmly established, Elinor was never really to leave school until the day she died.

  By the time that Elinor was old enough to be thought ready for school, two or three years had gone by since Charles Dyer’s departure. The household at 52 Winchester Street had settled into its new pattern. Nelly Dyer was in sole charge — although she did have the backing of her mother, Hannah Rutherford, until the latter’s death in January 1901. (The deep impressions made by this event on the six-year-old Elinor will be considered in Chapter VI.)

  Undoubtedly the question of finding a suitable school for Elinor was one that gave rise to much discussion between Nelly and Hannah. There was no lack of choice: quite close at hand they had Westoe Infant School and Ocean Road and Baring Street Board Schools. Many of the neighbourhood children attended these schools. But it seems unlikely that Nelly and Hannah would even have glanced at them; for, although not rich, they were sufficiently well-off thanks to Isaac Rutherford’s provisions to afford at least modest school fees. In any case, Mrs Dyer, as later reports make plain, was always anxious to maintain her family’s middle-class status. Hence her thoughts, and her mother’s, are likely to have gone straight towards the fair number of private schools in their district. One was only a few doors away from them in Winchester Street. However this one, along with many others, was passed over in favour of a small select establishment, run by the redoubtable Misses Alice and Henrietta Stewart.

  By 1900, the Misses Stewart had been directing their school for almost twenty years. Both were in their forties; and they were, in the words of an ex-pupil, ‘two very fine ladies’. Indeed who, looking at them in the school photograph could doubt it? One glance puts beyond belief any idea that either lady could ever have been ‘guil
ty of the slightest deviation from the strictest propriety’ (unlike poor little Miss Phoebe in J. M. Barrie’s Quality Street). Perhaps their school was smaller and, judging from advertisements in the local paper, offered fewer facilities than did some of the other private schools in Westoe. But it enjoyed a reputation for unimpeachable respectability, and was attended by many of the local girls whose parents had middle-class aspirations.

  Whether the school also offered a high standard of teaching is more difficult to establish. Elinor never referred directly to her own early education. But it is possible to read between the lines of her books that something, sometime, had caused her to have and retain throughout her life an outsize grudge against old-fashioned teaching methods. Time and again she brings her stories round to this subject, getting launched into it right away with her first published book, Gerry Goes to School (1922). This story tells how Geraldine Challoner, who has been brought up by two elderly great-aunts, comes at the age of twelve to live with friends, and is then sent to a modern high school. Here, on her first day, she is questioned about her work to date:

  ‘Now, Geraldine,’ began the young mistress . . . ‘what arithmetic have you done? . . . fractions, vulgar and decimal? Can you do proportion, or simple interest? What about percentages and square measure?’