The girl that books built

I am who I am and what I am needs no excuses……………………yeah, I’m a fan of musical theatre too. But mainly what I am is a bookworm. That’s the adjective most frequently used to describe me in my old school reports certainly. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes less so. Anyway - it was true. And it still is today. This blog will mainly be about the books I read from this moment on, but with occasional diversions for remembrance of things past, and hardy perennials.

When I was 7 or 8, I moved from being keen on reading to being utterly obsessed with reading. There were three series of books responsible for this development:
The Narnia books
The Target Doctor Who books
The Chalet School series

The first two will doubtless be revisited sometime soon (I’ve got lots of trips coming up and lots of work to procrastinate in order to avoid, so I’d say it was inevitable, actually). Right here, right now, I’m going to talk about The Chalet School (and alienate anyone reading this, probably!).

The Chalet School series, by Elinor M Brent Dyer, consists of approximately 61 books (I’m writing this in the car while I wait for Beanie to finish her recorder and piano lesson., so I can’t check). The first book - The School at the Chalet - was published in the early 1930s, the last book - Prefects of The Chalet School - was published in the late 1960s.

The first book told the tale of a plucky young woman, Madge Bettany, and her school age sister, who had been orphaned and who had decided to set up a boarding school for young ladies in the Austrian Tyrol (as you do) for reasons which escape me now (actually, I think it was because Jo Bettany, the school age sister, was sickly and needed mountain air. TB hung like a black cloud of doom over all the books - much as it hung over the lives of swathes of people at the time the series began, before the discovery of an effective treatment). The first few books in the series had the theme of the school becoming established - we see time and time again the pride the pupils took in the number on the school’s roll growing term by term. For the first few books, the reader ‘knows’ all the pupils, and all the staff too. Madge marries, and starts a family. The head-ship passes to another original staff member, but Madge continues to be very involved in the school. Gradually, as the school grows, then eventually merges with another (the unfortunately named Saint Scholastica’s) this changes, and the books become more formulaic - the reader follws that term’s exploits of the main stars, and possibly some new girls (who are normally naughty but ultimately nice girls).

The series might have fallen into the Enid Blyton trap of just being about one or two girls and their progress up their school punctuated by jolly japes and midnight feasts, but it avoided that, probably because the focus was never just the girls. Jo was the main heroine, of course, but there was something even bigger than her - the school itself. In addition to the focus on the girls - and the careful interviewing of storylines from several ‘years’ within the school, each book also included the staff - over time many old-girls came back to teach, which was nice to see - and the TB Sanatorium which was closely linked with the school, mainly because it provided a nice source of marriageable men for the staff and pupils! ;) Madge’s growing family, and the families of other key characters are also usually involved. Eventually, we have a cast of - well, hundreds, if not thousands. The exotic setting also helped to raise this series above the run of the mill school books, and it provided a wonderful opportunity for the series when war broke out in Europe.

EMBD reflected what was going on in the real world, in her books. So, the Chalet School was affected by the anschluss. Several pupils and staff were caught up in a Christalnacht type incident in Salzburg. The school was forced to close, and relocate - and the main ’stars’ - Jo (who actually left school a couple of years earlier but hung around as you do when there are lots of nice unmarried doctors on your doorstep), her adopted little sister, some of her closest friends, and (Doctor) Jack Maynard, who was about to become her husband - are forced to effect a Von Trapp stylee escape over the mountains into neutral Switzerland. The school relocates first to Guernsey, then to Wales when it all goes tits up in the channel islands. It’s easy to dismiss the books set in the war as simplistic children’s books - but many of the events are very moving. From the start, the school had had a multi national (although predominantly European) membership. Several of the girls whom we had come to know and love died, as did many of their fathers and brothers. Some of them were real heros. Just typing this, and remembering who lives and who dies, I have tears in my eyes. I think the war books, and the immediate post war ones, were the highpoint of the series, truth be told. Over the years the stories did tend to recycle at bit and the stories became less original. There was also an undeniable snobbishness about some of the later volumes - but despite that, they retained a degree of charm. And it was always good to see an old favourite turn up as a teacher, or get married, or send her kids along to the school (which eventually relocated again to the Bernese Oberland. So much more exotic than Croydon, which was where I was when I was reading them).

So, why did I like them so much? Why do I credit them with turning me into the person I am today (sort of)? They introduced me to the delights of collecting. There are 61 of them - and they were almost all out of print in the mid - late 70s. I spent years scouring second hand book shops and jumble sales, searching for those elusive volumes. It was brilliant. My lifelong love of those sorts of places can be directly traced to the quest for the Chalet School.

My favourite things about the Chalet School books are:

1. Joey Maynard (nee Joey Bettany) had 11 children. 11. Herself. Out of her own bits. 11.
2. Madge had 7 children which is nearly as impressive
3. Almost everyone played a musical instrument
4. I learned lots of French and german vocab from the books at a time when I had no use for it. Thus it was knowledge for its own sake. Result!
5. The old fashioned attitudes were very comforting
6. Many of my copies are gorgeous old paperbacks with beautiful covers.
7. Through those pages I travelled extensively in middle Europe.
8. Some of the names were brilliantly bizarre.
9. Good always prevailed.
10. There is no number 10.