Elinor M. Brent-Dyer - Chalet School, etc.

[floragord]

I used to love the Chalet School books, had the whole series long, long ago and greatly enjoyed all the adventures - our convent boarding school seemed decidedly tame in comparison to one based in glamorous Austria and Switzerland, with all the excitements of travelling across the continent back to school rather than Paddington to Didcot...

[timv]

I think the situation of older husbands and younger wives in the Monica Edwards series was partly due to ME's actual experience in life - her husband Bill Edwards,who was partly the inspiration for Meryon, was around ten years older than her.

'Len' was Elinor Brent Dyer's actual nickname, so she clearly gave this to a favourite character. EBD was said by her friends to be rather like Joey herself, ie enthusiastic, demanding attention, and constantly 'butting in', and her enthusiasms come over in her books (even where these read slightly oddly and even at the time might have put readers off, ie the religiosity of authorially approved teenage characters like the Maynard triplets and the Head, nicknamed 'The Abbess', telling girls to live the precepts of the Lord's Prayer by forgiving their enemies not just mouth the words). Unlike with Enid and many contemporaries' favourite characters, the Maynard/ Bettany/ Russell family tended to take over the later EBD books - rather too many of them ended up as Head Girls and EBD was constantly showing favouritism to them in the storylines, eg Joey's daughter Margot Maynard getting away with bullying and assault without being expelled as she'd have been in a Blyton book. (Margot's 'getting 'forgiven as she repents in tears' is parallel to Bobby in Enid's St Clare's, but Enid had Prudence expelled for similar calculated intimidation and so was more realistic.

The nearest parallels I can think of, with a strong character constantly reappearing as an adult in a long-running series even after she's left school and being talked of as a 'school legend', are Dimsie in Dorita Fairlies Bruce's 1920s-40s books and the Abbey Girls Joan and Joy (and Jandy Mac the New Zealander who was only at the series' school for one term) in Elsie J 'Oxenham' (Dunkerley)'s books. Enid never let one character take over a series, and at most had them running through it but not dominating it, eg Darrell at MT.

[Katharine]

I am currently reading one of the Chalet School books where 2 girls almost die after falling into a freezing lake. Both are presumably suffering from hypothermia and unconscious, although they are described as 'fainting'. They are whisked away, plunged into hot baths, then wrapped in hot blankets surrounded by hot water bottles and given Schnapps before having their chests massaged to bring them back to life. I've just done a quick Google and according to NHS advice, things to avoid are 'hot baths, massage and alcohol'. So in reality, the treatment the author gave them in 1929 would quite possibly have killed them!

Immediately one develops rheumatic fever, the other pleuro pneumonia. According to the internet, rheumatic fever develops approximately 2 weeks after a bacterial throat infection, no mention of being plunged into icy water. As far as I can see, pleuro pneumonia is an infection caught from cattle! Even 'normal' pneumonia appears to be caused by an infection either bacteria or a virus.

I find books like this fascinating in their misunderstanding of medical matters only a couple of generations ago.

[Courtenay]

Well, they didn't have Google back then, did they?

(I agree, though, it's fascinating sometimes to see how medical advice has changed over the decades. I remember once, some years ago, we were reading the handbook from my mum's very brief stint as a trainee nurse in Darwin in the 1960s. The quote I remember was this advice on pest control in the ward: "The liberal use of DDT is essential." )

[timv]

Elinor Brent Dyer's books are full of drama-laden cliches about illness, that were probably a mixture of intended 'upping the stakes' to make it more interesting for the readers and EBD's own vague and imperfectly understood memories of what she had come across in her youth in infection-hit and largely impoverished working-class Tyneside. (Like Enid she was herself from a precariously 'respectable' and financially OK middle-class family but a 'broken home' but would have known a number of girls from a poorer background; her brother died of an infection when they were children so this may well have affected her.)

The episodes of people falling in cracked frozen lakes in the Tyrol in the 1930s books were the most notorious of these; though she seems to have had an exaggerated idea of how susceptible to cold and instant collapse into pneumonia someone with a weak chest was. In some winter books in the Tyrol series there is a major panic if a girl with a weak chest, most notably Joey Bettany, stands at an open door for a few minutes! Later on she seems to have learnt a bit more sense, as in the 1950s Swiss books Joey's equally 'fragile' triplet daughter Margot is OK after falling in icy Lake Geneva and spending around 10-15 minutes in the water before one of EBD's famously omnicompetent hunky doctors (whose dog has been holding her up with his teeth) rows over and pulls her out. She just has to be rushed to a nearby hospital for a hot bath, and naturally for EBD the doctor then falls for and married one of the Chalet School mistresses (Biddy O'Ryan, I think) who was in charge of the party of girls that day and helped to pull Margot out. She seems to have been obsessed with health dramas (was she working out issues from her childhood?), though many of her Chalet School pupils were explicitly 'delicate' and had relatives at the CS's local sanatorium, usually with TB. In 'The CS Triplets' the teachers' first reaction after the school is caught in an unexpected blizzard while ski-ing and has to rush back to the buildings is to get them dosed with hot drinks in the refectory not hold a roll-call so three girls (incl two of Joeys' daughters) who are still out in the blizzard aren't missed and nearly freeze!

Dorita Fairlie Bruce was another 1930s author who made exaggerated and unlikely medical dramas out of girls getting caught in extreme cold - less believable as her heroine 'Dimsie' (Dorothy Isabel Maitland) is a sturdy country girl from a rural home in a village near Dunoon on the Clyde estuary and known for her athletic enthusiasm and muscle-building gardening even as a teenager. After she gets caught in a snowstorm , aged around 18, on an icy hillside while retrieving a runaway protege from an unwanted adoption she goes down with pneumonia and is ill for weeks, which is unlikely as (a) it would be hypothermia in these circumstances (b) she is pretty tough. Similarly a little earlier she 'collapses' and is 'seriously ill' a couple of years earlier after straining her muscles while holding up a (smaller) girl who has fallen over a cliff in Kent for a couple of minutes until helpers run up to aid her - exaggerated again. I suppose that , as in a modern soap opera, over-dramatising the incident was part of the commercial appeal and the authors were encouraged to 'ramp up the tension' - and they had only vague medical knowledge .

The 'pneumonia' as opposed to 'hypothermia' issue was however a common one for the era - even in the US, the (Western local) ranch/ horse books author Mary O'Hara in the 1940s 'My Friend Flicka' series has her hero Ken McLaughlin catch pneumonia after being frozen sitting outdoors in the wet at night looking after his sick filly Flicka in a storm!

Enid is a lot more sensible and realistic - eg, Tassie is OK in 'Castle of Adventure' after getting frozen crawling up the water-ridden tunnel into the castle to find out what has happened to the Mannerings and Trents, when Jack just wraps her in a blanket!

[Katharine]

Thanks Tim for the info about other books and illnesses. You make a good point about them being the soap-operas of their day.

I haven't got very far into the Chalet School books yet, but was aware of Jo has triplets. Assuming she didn't adopt them, I find it very surprising that someone with her history of illness would be able to carry and safely deliver a multiple birth!

I realise that medical treatments were limited compared to those of today, and that many illness have been eradicated, but I was surprised to find (yet another) panic at the end of the book I was reading. This time for chicken-pox. As far as I'm aware, it has always been a very mild disease in the vast majority of people. I also thought it was odd that the matron had to call for the doctor to come and confirm it. Surely a matron would have seen chicken-pox before?

The doctor is very concerned that his young son may catch it, and is also worried about The Robin as she is only 9, and he had hoped she wouldn't get chicken-pox until much older. So different from today's attitude where parents allegedly hold chicken-pox parties for their little ones to get it over and done with.

I think that the books I own have been abridged, so maybe the originals have more detail, but if not, the chicken-pox episode seems very poorly written. One minute the staff are panicking about how to contain the situation, and working out who to isolate etc etc, the next they are packing off half the girls home to their parents, and presumably infecting anyone they come into contact with on their journeys!

[Anita Bensoussane]

Interesting posts. It's strange to read that the doctor thought The Robin wouldn't cope well with chicken pox at the age of nine, and that he'd hoped she wouldn't get it until she was much older. I know two people who had chicken pox in their late teens. Both had a particularly bad dose and both were told that they would probably have got off more lightly if they'd had it at a younger age.

My sister and I had chicken pox together, and the same with measles, which pleased my mum as she'd been advised that it was a good thing to get those diseases over with at a reasonably young age. However, when my sister and the children next door (whom we played with every day) went down with mumps, I didn't catch it despite continuing to play with the others. I suppose that means I could still catch mumps, though if I wasn't susceptible to it as a child that may mean I'm still not susceptible to it now.

[Katharine]

I agree Anita, the people I know of who suffered the most with chicken-pox were adults or teenagers. The majority of children didn't have anything worse than a slight temperature for a couple of days, plus of course all the itching.

I think I've mentioned before that I find the portrayal of The Robin rather sickly in the books. She's constantly referred to as the baby of the school and the school-pet. She's 9 years old!!!! Not a toddler.

The chicken-pox plot may have been a convenient way to quickly finish off the book.

I do find some of the geography in the Chalet Books very confusing. I thought that in one of the previous books Jo and her friends had endured something like a 3 hour climb to the hospital, and once were unable to go because the journey would be too exhausting in the heat of the summer. In the current book though, it's the depth of winter, with snow blizzards and frozen ground and yet the doctor is popping down to the Chalet School every couple of days, and when chicken-pox breaks out, arranges for The Robin and little David to be taken to the hospital for safety. (Not sure I would think a sanatorium presumably for TB patients would be a safer environment than an outbreak of chicken-pox!)

Maybe one day I will have opportunity to visit the location where the Chalet School is believed to have been based, and get a better understanding of the landscape.

[Debbie]

After she gets caught in a snowstorm , aged around 18, on an icy hillside while retrieving a runaway protege from an unwanted adoption she goes down with pneumonia and is ill for weeks, which is unlikely as (a) it would be hypothermia in these circumstances (b) she is pretty tough.

Tbf, my eldest dd has only really been ill once in her 19 years and that was with pneumonia. She had chicken pox and scarlet fever so mildly you wouldn't have noticed without the spots, rarely had anything else, even colds or d&v. She's missed 6 days of school over her whole 14 years- 3 of them were pneumonia aged 9yo. (she would have missed more but it was end of term!)

But for her, she didn't appear ill at all. She had no temperature, no breathlessness, no coughing. Just complained her shoulder was sore. She did 3 ballet shows, and a swimming party over the weekend, and was walking to school (40 minutes away) when she suddenly went grey and sat down. The doctor confirmed pneumonia. She had 3 lots of antibiotics concurrently (first one the pneumonia had some resistance to) and was ill for weeks. She lost so much weight in the first week that she was lighter than she'd been for 4 years, and she had weekly, moving to monthly, health checks by the doctor for a year because they were so worried about her. After that she has been hardly ill since, and missed no more school.

On Chickenpox. I had it as a student aged 20yo having been through goodness knows how many epidemics at school and even my sister having it. I was fairly ill with it, although not as ill as my college nurse, who said her husband had it so badly in his 40s he caused a smallpox scare as it was just after they thought it was eradicated!

[Katharine]

Gosh, that sounds a scary time.

It reminds me of another point I noticed in the pleuro-pneumonia episode. After 6 weeks or so, Jo returns to the Chalet School, looking thinner (understandable) and having grown an inch and a half! Firstly, I think it would be almost impossible for a child to grow that much in only 6 weeks, secondly, I would have thought that if anything, such a severe illness might restrict someone's growth, albeit temporarily.

I appreciate the books are only works of fiction, but I do think at times they border on fairy tales rather than bearing any resemblance to real life.

[Daisy]

I've been following with interest your impression of the Chalet books, Katharine and you make some interesting points. I think Elinor did exaggerate at times but as those books were written in the late 20s and early 30s that was before modern medicine had such aids as penicillin and antibiotics - and ailments which now are thrown off relatively easily, were much more risky back then. I've read elsewhere of children growing taller after a while in bed but I do think it was usually more like a year than the 6 weeks or so mentioned in the book!
Robin being referred to as 'the baby' always jarred with me too!
As far as the time taken to get from the school to the sanatorium is concerned, I believe I remember that Dr Jem once came down on skis.

[Katharine]

Thanks for your comments Daisy.

I appreciate it is difficult sometimes to read a book in the time/context that it was written. I've recently been reading a book called The Victorian Pharmacy and it was a real eye opener about how little knowledge there was about illnesses and their causes and treatments, even at the turn of the last century.

I can see the sense in the 1920's attitude of prevention as there was a limit to how much of a cure was available before the discovery of antibiotics.

I could have understood Jo having a growth spurt during a long period of convalescence and and inch and a half for a teenager wouldn't be unusual, but not over 6 weeks, especially as for almost a whole week of that he was at death's door!

I haven't noticed a mention of Dr Jem coming down on skis, although that would certainly make sense. I was more concerned about them taking the supposedly extremely fragile Robin who isn't even up to taking more than a short walk by the lake, and an infant who wasn't more than about 18 months old, on a long journey in such harsh conditions!

I wish I could have got into the Chalet School books when I was younger, maybe I would have enjoyed them more and not seen the glaring inaccuracies, but the only book in the series I possessed as a child, I gave up after the first chapter or two.