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

  ‘Miss Bettany was always careful to impress on the girls the necessity for good behaviour out of doors.’ And when, on a rare occasion, this ‘necessity’ is temporarily forgotten, Mademoiselle has only to remind the school: ‘ “You must not shout thus, but speak with gentle tones and softly. It is not well for you to make visitors think that we of the Chalet School are rude — rough — noisy.’ They stopped at once’ (The Princess of the Chalet School, 1927).

  Elinor as a child may not have been either rough or rude, but she was almost certainly noisy. Even her closest friends have remarked that her manner, although it did lose that actual loudness that so disconcerted the youthful Phyllis, remained throughout her life pronounced, not to say exuberant. And it cannot be imagined that the young ladies at the Misses Stewart’s school wcre encouraged to behave with exuberance: Elinor’s boisterous behaviour must often have brought her into conflict with the authorities. Still more important, she probably caused frequent embarrassment to her schoolfellows, since most children do abhor being made to feel conspicuous.

  Besides, there could have been another reason for her possible unpopularity. Elinor was undoubtedly a clever child who could have benefitted from a more high-powered academic education; she was perhaps better at her lessons than others who were considered by their fellow pupils and their teachers to be more socially acceptable. If so, being Elinor, she would not have hesitated to point this out: all her life she was to be ‘a very forthright person’ — and even, in the words of one acquaintance, ‘a very assertive person’.

  However it was mainly those in her own age group who were out of sympathy with her. A number of the younger children apparently liked her very well. One, Miss Kathleen Page, who was a junior when Elinor was a ‘big girl’, remembered her with much warmth; and particularly in connection with outings to the beach. In a letter Miss Page described how, during the summer, the school would often walk across the fields from the village, and go down the rough grassy path to a beach called Mans Haven — incidentally a distance of around two miles each way, and they, like the girls in the Chalet books, thought nothing of it. On these excursions Elinor was always ready to entertain the little ones: ‘I can see her now, sitting on a rock telling us stories which I loved’.

  Here too a pattern was gradually being established that would continue into adult life. Elinor often tended to get on better with people younger than herself. Perhaps they found it easier to accept her rather larger-than-life manner. Perhaps she just felt more at ease with them.

  CHAPTER IV

  READING, WRITING, MUSIC

  THE description of Elinor holding the younger children enthralled with her stories will undoubtedly remind Chalet School readers of Jo Bettany, who is often pictured doing exactly the same thing.

  Elinor and Jo both had the real story-teller’s compulsion, which in Elinor’s case seems to have existed from the time when she was first able to speak coherently. Thus when Nelly Dyer taught her four-year-old daughter to write she may not have been acting from purely disinterested motives. According to Elinor, anyway, her mother was ‘sick of being perpetually asked, “Will you write down a story I’ve ‘magined [sic], please?” ’; and Elinor continues: ‘Before that [i.e. learning to write], I had told the stories — to my little brother and the cat’. Most likely also to anyone else who could be persuaded to listen. To the end of her life Elinor was to remain a great raconteuse: ‘She could make a most amusing speech — just like that, anytime,’ a friend, Miss Rose Farr Smith, wrote of her in the 1960s.

  It is a pity that phrase about her little brother and the cat sounds rather twee, for the picture it paints is probably quite faithful to reality. Elinor and Henzell were very close in age, and they must have been thrown very much together by the circumstances of their early home-life. ‘Rex and I never say much, but we’ve been pals all our lives. I’m only eleven months older than he is’, Madeleine in Seven Scamps (1927) says of her brother (at this point he is in danger at sea during a violent storm): adding significantly, ‘I don’t remember a time when he wasn’t there’. And, although Elinor was fourteen months older than Henzell, that last must have been exactly true for her as well.

  As to the cat — the only surprising thing is that the noun should be in the singular, because it appears that Elinor’s family had a quite remarkable fondness for cats, and that there were always several of them around at 52 Winchester Street. Not one person describing the house (or, for that matter, Elinor’s later homes) has failed to mention those cats; and one friend, blunter than the rest, states that the animals did not always make their presence known by sight and sound alone: ‘Sometimes that house really did reek of cats,’ she recalls. And, years later, a lodger in Elinor’s Hereford house made a similar complaint.

  However there can be no question that, with or without a cat in attendance, Elinor continued to pour forth stories, since comments to the effect that ‘she was always scribbling away, all her life’ are among those most frequently made by her friends. Nor, seemingly, did her earliest efforts all go unrewarded, her first public success as a writer coming, at least allegedly, at the age of five, when she won a magazine competition with a moral little story entitled Lotty’s Fright: it was ‘all about a naughty little girl who borrowed her cousin’s new bicycle without permission and ended up with a broken arm as a result’.

  Here the particular choice of plot is interesting; for it suggests that at five years old Elinor was already fascinated by the idea that misdeeds could often bring their own, as it were, built-in punishment. This was to become a regular theme in her books: examples leap to mind. In Jo of the Chalet School Jo Bettany disobeys a strict order forbidding attendance at an ice carnival, slips during the festivities and sprains her ankle badly. Characters in various books, notably The Rivals of the Chalet School, disregard bans on skating before the ice is officially pronounced safe, and are involved in near-fatal accidents. Eustacia Benson, who (in Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School) is running away from school mainly as a gesture of defiance, also meets with an accident: this causes severe injuries to her back, condemning her (like What-Katy-did-Carr before her) to many months in bed. Joyce Linton (The Chalet School and the Lintons) is punished for her participation at a midnight feast, not with the conventional lines or French repetition but by a violent and frightening bout of sickness. In A Chalet Girl from Kenya, Emerence Hope disobediently leaves the path during a walk and . . . But the examples of people bringing punishment on themselves are literally too numerous to cite.

  Not that children in Elinor’s books are immune from penalties imposed by parents or teachers. Far from it. Scoldings, fines, docked half-holidays, confiscated pocket money, lines, repetition — some or all of these occur in most of the school stories. And in all the books people are frequently ‘sent to bed’.

  There is naturally no corporal punishment in any of Elinor’s school stories. The schools portrayed were just not that kind. However, in the various fictional families spankings do occur from time to time, and are described; and even in the Chalet series odd remarks, passed to the effect that such and such an insubordinate girl ‘could do with a good whipping’, tend to reinforce the impression that personal chastisement was familiar in Elinor’s childhood. Certainly the belief in formal punishments as an essential part of children’s upbringing was generally accepted at that time — enduring indeed until much nearer the present. And Elinor absorbed this notion along with many others now totally out of fashion.

  The idea of retribution features again in her second published story, to judge by its title anyway. ‘At twelve I sent a short story called ‘Jack’s Revenge’ to Sunday, a children’s magazine which we took in. It was accepted and paid for — 10s. [50p].’

  Now this is a little puzzling: not the event, which could well have happened, but the details, which do not match the facts. Yes, a story by Elinor entitled ‘Jack’s Revenge’ — Jack, by the way, being not a boy but a dog — did appear in Sunday (as the magazine Sunday Reading
for the Young was familiarly known). But the year of its publication was 1914. And in 1914 Elinor was not twelve but twenty years of age.

  However, the possibility that Elinor did contribute to another Sunday periodical at a relatively early stage has some independent backing from a contemporary of hers, Miss Mary Starling, who remembers being introduced to Elinor when both were in their teens, and ‘looking upon her with something akin to awe when I heard that she had had stories accepted and published in the Sunday Companion, a magazine which we at home took in regularly’.

  And one scrap of evidence can be found — in Gay from China at the Chalet School (1944) — to show that Elinor was certainly familiar with the periodical in question: ‘Gay meekly handed over the magazine . . . Grandma . . . looked it through from cover to cover . . . “Lot of trash!” she snorted. “When I was a young girl I only read the Sunday Companion . . . And then my father tore out the serial first.” ’

  ‘Grandma’ in the above extract makes very clear her opinion of that 1944 girls’ magazine. But the sixteen-year-old Gay Lambert, or her real-life equivalent, might well have reacted in a similar way to the Sunday Companion — especially to those serials that were ripped out by the stern Papa. Good strong melodramatic staff they were; and if the Sunday Companion arrived regularly in Elinor’s childhood home she must have had a splendid time reading the weekly instalments — as read them she certainly did, given the opportunity, being apparently the kind of child to read anything she could put her hands on.

  Of course the children of her time had nothing approaching the sheer quantity of books being specially written for them that children have today. But they did not lack varied reading material. Even leaving aside all that might be labelled ‘adult literature’ and the acknowledged children’s classics — Treasure Island and so on — there was a wide choice among the works of 19th-century and earlier writers. Elinor often mentions affectionately Louisa Alcott, Mrs Molesworth and Mrs Ewing; and she makes clear her admiration for Charlotte M. Yonge, an author who is unfashionable nowadays but whose novels, both family and historical, did have a perceptible influence on Elinor’s own ideas and writings.

  In quite another vein there were such writers as Marryat, Ballantyne, Rider Haggard, Fennimore Cooper, Henty and Weyman: Elinor and her brother possessed many of their books; and the adventure stories for boys that Elinor wrote during the 1950s may owe something to her early reading among these authors.

  It is worth noting, too, that a number of children’s books which are now rated as classics were published during Elinor’s early years, and probably were included in her reading. Among them were Rudyard Kipling’s two Jungle Books and Stalky and Co. (a favourite book of Elinor’s); all the best known stories by Edith Nesbit; The Wind in the Willows; and both The Little Princess and The Secret Garden of Frances Hodgson Burnett (the latter another favourite).

  Perhaps Elinor, at eight years old in 1902, was temporarily beyond the age for Peter Rabbit, which was first published that year. In any case it was around this time that she was having her first introduction to the girls’ school story: here she would not at first have met books by Angela Brazil, that symbol of the genre, for Miss Brazil did not begin producing ‘The Works’ (as she herself often called them) until 1907; but L. T. Meade, who is usually given the credit for having orginated the whole thing, had been busy ever since her A World of Girls in 1886, and Elinor can hardly have escaped reading a number of these rather cloying books.

  Another writer whose school stories she encountered at this stage was May Baldwin. And possibly the idea which, twenty-odd years later, was to set going the whole vast Chalet School series could have grown from Miss Baldwin’s early books; for among them are several about schools on the Continent: A Popular Girl (1901), for instance, is a ‘tale of school life in Germany’; and The Girls of St Gabriel (1905) an account of ‘Life at a French School’ — one that seems nowadays of paralysing boredom, but perhaps Elinor at eleven found it entrancing.

  However that may be, the stories of May Baldwin are not included on any of the lists of recommended books which the adult Elinor compiled at various times for her Chalet Club members. These, selected mainly from established writers, contain no surprises; although it does rather date Elinor that G. A. Henty and O. Douglas (pseudonym of John Buchan’s sister, Anna) should be among the chosen.

  Apart from continually urging the club’s members to read as much as possible, Elinor was also anxious that they should get into the habit of buying books. Of course she, as a writer, might have been thought to have an interest in this; but in fact she was herself a lifelong collector of books. ‘I began collecting them when I was only seven’, she wrote in 1965; adding ruefully that, when faced with a house removal, she ‘had over 3,000 to sort out’. And in the 1970s enough of that collection survived to make Elinor’s estimate quite realistic, as well as to furnish evidence of her varied tastes.

  Her books also give every sign of having been well read. Altogether, what with all the reading and writing she did, it is remarkable that she ever managed to fit in any other interests. In fact she had many, and one in particular which, like books and writing, dated from her very early years: ‘On my fourth birthday I had my first music lesson and thereafter music was as important a part of my education as any other subject’, we learn from ‘Something about Me’. (Surprising, really, how much information those few lines do contain.)

  Here there are unmistakable echoes of the Chalet School, for the latter part of that statement cannot fail to summon up Mr Denny, the school’s eccentric singing-master. ‘He was a dreamy, irresponsible being who declared . . . that music should have the first place in every school’ — so runs the description in The Princess of the Chalet School. And in book after book all through the series it is confirmed that ‘if . . . Mr Denny had had his way, all lessons would have been based on music. He quoted what Plato had to say on the subject in season and out’ (Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School).

  Whatever Plato may or may not have said, it would seem hard to put Mr Denny’s ideas into practice in ordinary schools. Although Elinor for one might have enjoyed her maths lessons more if geometry theorems had been expressed in plain chant, and quadratic equations sung to fugues by Bach or Handel, two of her preferred composers. Bach was in fact always her supreme favourite; others whose music she mentions enjoying particularly include Beethoven and Haydn. At one point she described her musical tastes as ‘severely classical’; but since on another occasion she avowed a ‘love [of] the music of Ravel, and of Franck and all that school’, her definition of the term must have been fairly elastic.

  Anyway her books establish beyond doubt that music really did mean a lot to Elinor: her appreciation and enjoyment shine through in her writing. And her musical studies (of which more in a later chapter) also gave her something that is unusual among writers of schoolgirl fiction: a knowledge of just how much toil and sweat and grinding effort, never to mention talent, is required to make a concert performer. ‘At my age, and if I’m to make music my career as I intend, I simply haven’t time to waste’, fifteen-year-old Nina Rutherford (in the rather unfortunately titled A Genius at the Chalet School, 1956) explains to her guardian, ‘I ought to be doing six hours’ practice a day. And there’s all the theoretical side . . . ’

  Which is fine as far as it goes. But talented teenagers who aspire to six hours of daily practice can be found in other school stories. So it is more interesting to find that Nina had been warned ‘from her earliest days . . . about the hardships and disappointments she must meet if she went in for concert work . . . that there would never come a time when she might rest on her oars unless she meant to give it up for good . . . that it was a hard life . . . with perpetual travelling . . . requiring great powers of self-control so that no matter how unhappy or poorly she felt she should not disappoint her audiences’.

  Even this, although the points stressed were all worth making, does not prove that Elinor had any inside knowledge of musica
l matters. However there is, in a later chapter, a description of how Nina sets to work before a concert, and this has the authentic ring that comes from experience (albeit only at a far humbler level — Elinor herself being apparently no performer).

  She would, of course, play from memory on the Monday, but there were two or three cadenzas that were not clear enough for her liking and she set to work on them, reading the music first to fix them more securely in her memory, then playing them, at first, slowly, then faster, until they were right up to time and rippling from her fingers with perfect evenness, every note receiving its proper value.

  This took half an hour. Then she closed the music and proceeded to play the whole thing right through, listening to herself as she had been taught, with an ear alert for any slips. Twice more she played it. [Etc., etc.]

  Now that passage hardly represents lively writing for children. But it has deliberately been quoted uncut because it is the details which are important in this context. For they establish that Nina really does know the proper way to practise (two experienced professional musicians are prepared to vouch for that). As for the writing — A Genius at the Chalet School is the thirty-fifth book in the series, which by 1956 had been going on for more than thirty years. No wonder if the style had by this time become rather pedestrian.

  Elinor had not always lacked the ability to make a musical child come to life. When her presentation of Nina Rutherford in 1956 is compared with that of Margia Stevens, chief musical talent in the early Chalet School books, the contrast is striking. For one thing, that injudicious term ‘genius’ is not applied to Margia. unless occasionally by her contemporaries. Elinor is content with calling her ‘intensely musical’, and making it clear that she was ‘expected to do great things in later years, for she was gifted beyond the ordinary’. But the main difference is that, where Nina obstinately refuses to leave the printed page, Margia is quite a human schoolgirl, however talented. She can actually grumble when some enthralling ploy with her chums is interrupted because of her musical training: