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

  Such disasters are of course part of the school-story tradition, which Elinor was faithfully following. In real life she seems to have been far less prone to follow tradition, as witnessed by Miss Mary Starling, whose descriptions and comments have been quoted in several earlier chapters. Miss Starling, who like Elinor had chosen a teaching career, writes at some length of their acquaintance.

  When I came out of Training College and returned home to South Shields, I was posted to Baring Street School (which is built on part of the Roman Camp of Arbeia). To my surprise I found that May Dyer was on the staff of the Boys’ Department. We renewed our acquaintance [originally they had met through Elizabeth Jobling, Elinor’s school-friend and neighbour]; and as our paths to and from school lay in the same direction we had many happy journeys together. I found her a most interesting and cheerful companion. Altogether a very remarkable person whom I remember with pleasure.

  Her imagination was inexhaustible. And some of our conversations I can still easily recall. On one occasion she began to pour forth as soon as we met: ‘Last night I was at the Ingham Infirmary Ball’ (a big event in the social life of South Shields . . . ) ‘and, what do you think, three men proposed to me.’ (No names mentioned.) I replied: ‘How nice. And who is the lucky man? . . . ‘Oh, I refused all three,’ she replied. (By this time I always kept the salt handy.) . . .

  Another day she suddenly stopped and turned round, saying reproachfully ‘Oh, Miss Starling, how could you?’ . . . . ‘Why, what have I done?’ I asked. ‘You split an infinitive’ was the answer. (I had done honours English at College so realised my transgression.) [Chalet readers will note with amusement that the split infinitive was already a bugbear of Elinor’s; and all readers that, although the two friends were only around twenty-three years of age, they did not use each other’s first names.]

  Yet another time she came up the Baring Street bank panting after me. I remarked that she was late. ‘Yes,’ she said. “You see, I could not make up my mind which camisole to put on.’ (Around this time the ‘New Look’ many-gored and calf-length skirt was replacing the ankle-length hobble skirt. And most blouses were ‘see-through’, of Jap silk, crepe-de-chine, nun’s veiling, delaine, etc.; and under them girls wore coloured camisoles of crepe-de-chine with satin ribbon straps.) ‘First I chose a blue one,’ she continued. ‘It wouldn’t do. So I threw it out of the window on to the lawn. Then I threw out a green and a pink one as well. So I have chosen this.’

  I wondered what her neighbours can have said to see these pretty parachutes floating down — IF they saw them.

  Well, Elinor’s neighbours in Belgrave Terrace did include the chief constable of the borough and the vicar of St Thomas’s Church (now demolished). So they may not have looked on the eccentric Miss Dyer with as much humour and affection as Miss Mary Starling obviously did.

  At the City of Leeds Training College her fellow-students mostly viewed Elinor with a good-natured tolerance. There was a general tendency to laugh at her strange behaviour and unlikely tales, but the laughter was not unkind. However it undoubtedly was sometimes embarrassed, for Elinor, free from any restraining home influence, really did let down her hair during the time she was at the college.

  It was at this period in her life that she took to calling herself Patricia Maraquita — the latter name being one she could have learnt from the books of Mrs De Horne Vaizey, although there seems no obvious reason for this particular choice. Possibly Elinor took the name in an attempt to create an entirely different personality for herself. Possibly it made her feel more remote from Mr Ainsley and Belgrave Terrace. Not that it really can have helped much, for in the end Patricia Maraquita Dyer was little different from the May Dyer who had preceded her, or the Elinor Brent-Dyer who eventually followed.

  At any rate the new name did not induce more sober behaviour in Elinor, rather the reverse. And she certainly left an enduring impression on her companions. There was one particularly famous occasion: at the time Elinor had been been been suffering from ‘a perfectly ordinary cold’, but had suddenly caused great alarm by taking to her bed and exhibiting all the symptoms of delirium. A former student of the college, the late Mrs Isabel Miller, remembered volunteering to sit at her bedside, and being convinced even at the time that Elinor — or, rather, Pat — ‘was no more delirious than the Archbishop of Canterbury’. (But could she, just possibly, have been acting out events connected with Henzell’s last illness?)

  This same kind-hearted but realistic contemporary also recalled having been frequently scandalised by Elinor’s personal untidiness; in particular that ‘her underclothing was tied up with string’. Shades of the Chalet School . . . where girls suffer the most dire penalties if they have so much as a button missing, and are strictly trained by Matron in the most perfect tidiness. Perhaps ‘Matey’, that dragon for order and method, embodied for Elinor a kind of wish-fulfilment.

  Apart from untidiness and tall stories Elinor was chiefly renowned at college for the way in which she took violent crushes on other students. And here one thing is of particular interest: there was no slightest hint of anything that was not (as described) ‘perfectly harmless’. Indeed ‘Pat’ was considered rather undemonstrative and ‘certainly not the kind to be always wanting to hug and kiss you’. It seems that Elinor at twenty-one used much the same ways of showing affection as when she was a six-year-old schoolgirl, and ‘always under the feet’ of her adored Olive Mason. Only now the presents that she offered, with real if embarrassing generosity, were rather more elaborate than wild flowers; and the compliments which accompanied them were more extravagently phrased.

  To Isabel la Belle, With all the affection that she merits, from Patricia Maraquita. R.I.P.

  runs the handwritten dedication in a book presented in December 1915 to the current recipient of Elinor’s admiration.

  And this effusive way of behaving towards other girls must have been specially noticeable at the City of Leeds College since it was, rather surprisingly for the period, a mixed college. True, the male side was much depleted during those war years. But there was still a number of men among the students, so it could be significant that Elinor’s name was apparently never linked with any of them.

  Elinor’s true attitude to men remains obscure. Not that her books show any lack of male characters, numerically speaking, for the incidence of marriage among the staff and old girls of the Chalet School is high. However these men are nearly all versions of one basic type. Dick Bettany, Jem Russell and Jack Maynard, the three most important males in the Chalet School series, all fall into this same category: tall, fair-haired, pleasant-looking Englishmen; upright, kind, with a twinkle in the eye and a compulsion to tease. Probably much the same type as Elinor’s brother. The few men in her books who deviate from the pattern are usually found among the older age group; these, always peripheral figures, are often quite convincing.

  However if Elinor’s books are only limitedly revealing on the subject of men, they are clear about another matter: that of schoolgirl crushes — or ‘pashes’, or what the Gemans descriptively name Schwärmerei. At the Chalet School, swooning around is definitely out. Elinor’s schoolgirls inhabit a different world from those of Angela Brazil, who often protest their undying love for each other in passionate terms. And although Chalet girls may occupy less time, and fewer pages, in crusading against soppiness than do Miss Fairlie Bruce’s at the Jane Willard Foundation, they are no less ‘Anti-Soppist’ in spirit.

  ‘I don’t think she’d do a thing like that . . . she’d know that Len would be down on her like a ton of bricks. . . . Jack [female, short for Jacynth] wouldn’t risk that. The sun seems to set and rise on young Len so far as she’s concerned!’

  ‘What? Len! You surely don’t mean — ’

  ‘Don’t be such an ass! Of course I don’t! Len would never allow anything like that to happen.’

  (The Chalet School Wins the Trick, 1961)

  Nor would any true Chalet girl have allowed it. ‘Sentimental
grande passions were severely sat on at the Chalet School, which had contrived to remain remarkably free from such silliness.’ (A Problem for the Chalet School, 1956). And even before the Chalet School came into existence Elinor had dealt at some length with this question in A Head Girl’s Difficulties (1923). This on the whole is just a very ordinary school story, but it contains a lively account of how the prefects deal with an epidemic of sentimental letter-writing among the juniors.

  ‘Look here, you’ve got to collect all the idiotic notes you can find. When we’ve got, say, twenty, we’ll call a meeting of the whole school in the hall, and make the people to whom they are addressed read them aloud from the platform. How’s that for a scheme?’ The prefects were almost overcome by the thought.

  And the unhappy children are totally overcome when forced to read out such effusions as:

  You are my dearest friend, and I just love you. But you mustn’t be jealous if I tell you that I love Rosamund even better . . . You are lucky to be her sister. She kisses you good-night, I expect. I should almost die for happiness if she would kiss me.

  And so it continued. ‘One by one the wretched recipients of the notes followed [each other] . . . reading aloud such utter rubbish as startled even themselves.’ Elinor’s books leave no room for doubt that she was against ‘all that sort of thing’. But whether this was simply because she — as a teacher — deplored the silliness it induced, or whether she had deeper feelings on the subject, is not clear.

  Today it has become almost impossible to believe in the existence of any adult woman so innocent — and ignorant — that all sexual or homosexual undercurrents flow past her unnoticed. Yet such women did exist. Moreover it seems probable that they numbered among them many of those who wrote schoolgirl fiction in the pre-war days.

  Elinor, in a private handwritten book of her own poems, reveals enough to prove that she was at least not totally ignorant about sex. But she also shows in this oddly sad little collection how essentially innocent she remained.

  This emerges strikingly in a poem called ‘Wedding Eve’. Here the opening already poses a problem:

  Lie closer; in your arms let me forget,

  Just for one sweet brief hour, my joy to come . . .

  For, since this is Wedding Eve and not Wedding Night, who is being addressed? But it is in verse four that perplexity becomes astonishment:

  Dear understanding heart that holds me close,

  Oh woman friend, that never failed me yet,

  Say, do you blame me for the part I chose?

  Can your most faithful heart bear with me yet?

  Nowadays any schoolgirl would see that, in this particular context, the meaning of these four lines could be ambiguous — to say the least. However, after careful study of the whole poem, it eventually becomes clear that the girl here is speaking to her mother. And in fact Elinor’s poem bears an interesting resemblance to the German words set by Schumann, in a beautiful song Elinor could well have known. Here the verses by the minor 19th-century poet, F. Rückert, describe a bride’s outpouring of love and gratitude to her mother — to whom she owes the gift of life itself; and since the first words of the song are ‘Mutter, Mutter’, the entire situation is clear.

  But then, in Elinor’s case, the thought that her lines could be interpreted in any other way presumably never even crossed her mind. And yet, she was twenty-five years old when she wrote ‘Wedding Eve’.

  CHAPTER X

  WAITING TO BEGIN

  Square one again

  BACK in September 1915, when the newly created Patricia Maraquita first arrived in college, a rumour about her had been whispered among the students: this was to the effect that Miss Dyer’s school (the Misses Stewart’s?) had classified her as ‘not really suitable material for a teacher’.

  That rumour may or may not have been well founded but, considering certain aspects of Elinor’s personality, it cannot be ruled out that a school report on those lines existed. Especially if the head teacher who furnished it really was one of the formidable Miss Stewarts. However no proof is available either way, since all relevant papers belonging to the City of Leeds Training College were destroyed in an air-raid during World War II.

  This means too that the final reports by the college on Elinor’s work, and her potential as a teacher, have vanished as well. Here, though, it is possible to deduce that the authorities must have thought Miss Dyer’s teaching at least satisfactory, because one of her first appointments on leaving College was to the boys’ high school in South Shields, a post which carried a certain prestige. True this was at a stage in the war when men of all ages right up to the fifties were being conscripted; but, even so, a student who had received a bad report could never have gained such a position.

  Thus the autumn of 1917 saw Elinor enjoying promotion in her teaching career, and also the better pay to which her qualified status entitled her. But in other respects her life must have had a rather dreary back-to-square-one feeling. She was back to South Shields and teaching. Back to 5 Belgrave Terrace.

  Once again it is impossible not to wonder in passing why Elinor, having tasted comparative independence for a couple of years, did not make an attempt now to launch out on her own. Perhaps she did try. And of course she would probably have been obliged, following her training, to teach locally for a time. At any rate the fact remains that about four years were to pass before she again left home.

  From the biographer’s point of view this period represents the second largest gap in Elinor’s life. The other lies between 1927 and 1933; and although wider that gap is less barren. Of the years between 1917 and 1921 all that can be said for certain is that Elinor continued with her teaching; and was a regular member of the congregation at St Jude’s C. of E. Church in the Laygate.

  Nor is it possible to discover much about her writings prior to 1921. The only manuscripts to have survived are the collections of poems mentioned in the previous chapter. Anything else she may have written at this time has now disappeared. However in view of her later record — an average of two books a year sustained over nearly half a century — it is almost incredible that Elinor did not, at the very least, attempt a book of some kind. For one thing, she always showed throughout her life a sheer enjoyment of writing. And undeniably she possessed great natural facility as a writer — too great, perhaps, for her own good.

  Something that does seem clear is that Elinor had not yet found her bent as a writer for schoolgirls. The stories she reportedly sent to magazines like the Sunday Companion are remembered as ‘not school stories but more of a romantic nature’. And many of the poems she wrote are also highly romantic in character.

  It could be that her writing energies at this time were mainly directed towards poetry. There is some evidence in the various notebooks to suggest that she considered making a selection from her verses: one page contains a list of titles in two columns, headed respectively ‘Lullabies’ and ‘Love Songs’ (the proposed name of the collection); and the poems listed are marked in the manuscript with asterisks, while others are crossed out. So perhaps Elinor may have hoped to interest a publisher in some kind of anthology of lyrical verse. Not that all the poems she wrote were of a romantic kind. Several were inspired by the 1914-18 war, and a few of these show a surprisingly stark realism.

  In any case, quite apart from all this activity, which may have delayed her start in fiction-writing, there could have been another reason for the tardy arrival of her first book: a very old friend of hers put forward a theory that ‘although Elinor managed to write all those books, and it may sound odd to say this about her, she did in a funny way lack persistence’.

  Initially surprising, this idea nevertheless fits in with remarks Elinor made in some of the Chalet Club newsletters. Here, in giving advice to would-be authors, she often emphasises the need for perseverance; and on at least a couple of occasions she confesses to having lacked this virtue herself. ‘To those who claim they find it easy to begin, but difficult to continue, I can
only say “Stick to it!” I’ve been through all that myself in my time, so I speak from experience,’ she writes in the issue for September 1966. And she is even more explicit in an earlier number, that for November 1963, where she describes the publication of her first book, Gerry Goes to School, and how excited she felt: ‘For one thing . . . though I’d begun quite a number of stories before, I always got tired of them and left them unfinished. Gerry was the first I really wrote to the bitter end.’

  Perhaps the use here of the last cliché is significant: plainly Elinor recalled that it had been a real struggle to get through a full-length book (incidentally quite an undertaking then in terms of sheer length, for at that time children’s novels were commonly expected to contain a good 60,000 words). And it is possible that even Gerry Goes to School might never have been finished if the Bainbridge family had not come to live in South Shields. Elinor had needed some incentive, something in her own phrase to make her ‘stick to it’. The Bainbridges, and in particular their small daughter Hazel, were to provide exactly the stimulus that was required. And in this way they were so important in Elinor’s career as a writer that it is worthwhile to describe them in some detail.