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I very much appreciate the extra, somewhat random information in these books. This one explains about the school which the author herself ran for some years, as well as giving general information about the locations of the (fictional) Chalet School, and some of the publication history. I didn’t think much of the front cover, although it’s apparently the one used in the first edition of ‘Three go to the Chalet School’. Not only is the colour of the uniform incorrect for the three girls pictured, but none of them look anything like the ‘three’ who are introduced in this book.
However, that’s my only gripe. The book opens by introducing us to a ten-year-old girl who lives with her mother and grandmother. Mary-Lou has been friendly with the neighbouring children Clem (who’s a little older) and her brother Tony. Clem and Tony’s parents are artists, very bohemian and lax, and ‘Gran’ has just heard the father swearing and shouting at the local butcher, because he didn’t like their sausages.
So Gran tells Mary-Lou to be less friendly, and Mary-Lou, not unreasonably, objects. However she learns that they’re soon to be moving, and that she will go to school.
Action moves to the village of Plas Howell, where Mary-Lou meets the Maynard triplets, Len, Con and Margot, playing in a meadow at the end of their new garden. Naturally, Mary-Lou is to be going to the Chalet School, and she quickly settles in and makes friends.
In her form is another new girl, Verity-Ann. The other girls make much of their both having double-barrelled names, but Verity-Ann is quite different from Mary-Lou: she’s quiet, stubborn, and determined not to demean herself (as she sees it) to racing around or behaving like a ‘hoyden’ in free time. She also refuses to speak German…
Much of the action takes place in the classroom, as we see both new girls struggling to learn the ‘modern’ methods of teaching that the Chalet School practised. Neither of the girls had been to school before, but whereas Mary-Lou is determined to work hard (too hard…with consequences) Verity-Ann has a misguided loyalty to her past governess and it takes much longer for her to settle down.
There are other threads in this book, which lift it beyond some of the later, run-of-the-mill books in the series. Both new girls, in a somewhat unlikely coincidence, have fathers who have been working in the Amazon for the past six or seven years, and don’t really remember them at all. Verity-Ann has no other relatives; Mary-Lou does, at least, have her mother and grandmother. There’s concern about the expedition, since nothing has been heard for a long time, and this subplot is an important one running through the book.
There’s also a romantic thread for one of the staff, something that was entirely missing from the abridged Armada edition, and one which I thought was sensitively done. The young man concerned isn’t even a doctor.
While some of the Chalet School books are only slightly abridged in Armada, and the later ones not at all, it’s well worth trying to find a hardback or GirlsGoneBy edition of this one, as so much has been taken out in the Armada paperback. Still, it was better than nothing, and I’m glad I was able to buy the Armada books at a time when the hardbacks were out of print.
Recommended if you like this series, or if you’re interested in school stories in general. This book might make a good introduction to the Chalet School series; while it has a lot of characters that I know from previous books, we meet most of them through Mary-Lou’s eyes, so it could stand alone better than many. Unfortunately it's out of print again, and second-hand editions of either the hardback or GirlsGoneBy version are both rare and, in general, expensive.
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