I’m glad I decided to re-read the ‘Chalet School’ books by Elinor M Brent-Dyer. It’s ten years or more since I last read through them, and while they’re not the greatest writing, they’re teenage favourites that I like to read every decade or so. I last read ‘The Chalet School goes to it’ in 2011, and all I recalled of it was that it followed on from ‘The Chalet School in Exile’. This time I’ve also read a couple of relevant fill-ins, so in fact this follows very closely from ‘The Chalet School in Guernsey’, which I finished about a month ago.
There’s a slight overlap between the Guernsey fill-in, including a section from this book where the school authorities decide to accept an offer of a large mansion on the Welsh border. Brent-Dyer called the area ‘Armiford’; experts suggest that it was probably intended to be Hereford. During the war years, this was considered much safer than the big cities, and also safer than Guernsey.
So the early chapters chart some of the move, although there’s much more in the fill-in book. This book also introduces Gwensi Howell, who is 13 and has been living in the house turned over to the school. It belonged to her much older step-brother, who adopted her when she was orphaned; but he has to go away to be a military chaplain and he wants her to be able to stay at the house if at all possible. She’s quite resentful about it, convinced the school will be awful.
But Joey Maynard with her common sense attitude, and Robin with her gentleness manage to convince her - gradually - that it’s not so bad. She could have been sent somewhere else; the house could have been requisitioned for military purposes. And she’s basically a nice child, who quickly makes friends with Daisy and Beth.
It’s partly a school story - there are episodes with the awful Fourths, although by today’s standards it seems almost ludicrous that the miscreants are considered ‘cheap’ for trying out nail varnish and lipstick. One of the girls is extremely rude, and the prefects aren’t quite sure how to handle her. It gets worse when her best friend, who has been her partner in crime for many years, starts to mature a little.
But it’s also very much a story of survival during the war years. The Armada version of this had the rather more appropriate title, ‘The Chalet School at War’, but I was fortunate enough to find a hardback version of the original in a car boot sale over twenty-five years ago. As a bit of social history, it’s very interesting. The girls plant potatoes and various vegetables in their gardening lessons, and they have regular air raid practices. There’s even one real air raid later in the book, and we see their preparations and the outcome, something which would have been familiar to the original readers of the book, which was first published in 1941.
It’s quite old-fashioned, of course - unsurprising for a book written over eighty years ago! - and there are hints of discipline methods and child-raising ideas that would raise serious alarms today. But at the time of writing, Brent-Dyer was quite forward-thinking, almost revolutionary in the way she expected parents to spend so much time with their children, and the freedom she gave her school students.
There’s so much continuity in the ‘Chalet School’ books that this wouldn’t really be a good place to start reading the series, even though there’s a bit of background given, as usual, for new readers. I would recommend reading some of the earlier books first, particularly ‘The Chalet School in Exile’, which is probably my favourite - and the most moving and well-written - of the entire saga.
Recommended to older children and teens who like this kind of school story, but it’s probably read mostly by people of my era and older, who loved these books in their own teenage years. Hardbacks and 'Girls Gone By' editions with the full text are hard to find and often expensive, but can sometimes be found in second-hand shops or marketplaces, on or offline.
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