The Chalet School - Link to Radio 4 programme

The Chalet School

The crime writer Val McDermid on her love of the Chalet School boarding school novels. She credits them with inspiring her to go to Oxford and becoming a writer. So what did they have that the other boarding school books did not?

Nearly sixty Chalet School novels were published between 1925 and 1970, written by the South Shields novelist, Elinor Brent-Dyer. The school was initially located in Austria, but moved to Guernsey following the Anschluss. It relocated again after the Nazi invasion of The Channel Islands. The books centred on Madge Bettany, the founder of the school, and her young sister Joey, its first pupil. The books dealt with financial hardship, illness and politic, which Val argues, is absent from most other boarding school novels of the period.

Donating to the Seven Stories National Centre for Children's Books

As our reading group has confirmed, the UK has a wonderful heritage of writing and illustration for children and British children’s books are among the best known and most widely read in the world.  Seven Stories is the National Centre for Children's Books, based in the beautiful Ouseburn Valley in the north-east of England at Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 2PQ.  It describes itself as "custodian of a unique and ever-growing national archive of modern and contemporary children’s literature".

 

One of our book group members has recently made a contribution to the national collection at Seven Stories.  She was excited to discover an incredible cache of beautiful, uncut printers' proofs of pages and book covers designed for (circa) 1930s children's painting and alphabet books in the loft of her Victorian house in Bath during building works.  The pages were being used as lining underneath a layer of very old insulation material and had been spread out over the lathe and plaster between the beams.  She contacted the Collections Director at Seven Stories, who was delighted to accept them.

Seven Stories collects original artwork, manuscripts and books by British writers and illustrators for children from the 1930s to the present day. Since its foundation in the 1990s, it has established a nationally important collection documenting the richness, diversity and innovation of modern British authors and illustrators for children. Many of the original manuscripts of the books we have been reading (including Philip Pullman, Lucy M Boston, Geoffrey Trease and Joan Aiken) are already held at Seven Stories.

 

If you would like to support the Seven Stories in building the collection and preserving our literary heritage, there are a number of ways to get involved.  They're on Twitter as @7Stories and here's a link to their website.

Seven Stories: UK National Centre for Children's Books

Allan Ahlberg : interviewed in 2008

Link to BBC Radio 4 - Allan Ahlberg interviewed on Desert Island Discs 2008

Allan Ahlberg and his poetry

Allan Alhberg reading from his poems

http://childrenspoetryarchive.org/poet/allan-ahlberg

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome (1930)

This choice of book prompted at least one member of our group to overcome her phobia of Ransome's books - prompted by her local library's editions of plain hardback editions (without their coloured slip-cases).

The large amount of specialised sailing language (tacking, painters, reefing) for anyone not born and bred on the waters of Lake Coniston can form a barrier to Ransome's books. However, our readers decided (on the whole) that it was worth perservering, and that the story and the characters - as well as Ransome's illustrations - evoked a rich child-centrered world in which imagination and reality weave in and out of one another.

The degree of freedom, independence and responsibility accorded to the children in Swallow and Amazons is remarkable by modern standards. Their father's telegram, permitting them to go on a camping trip on Wild Cat Island in the Lake District reads:

BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON'T DROWN

Ransome's many fans have been inspired by his books to promote exploring, camping, sailing and a more adventurous approach to life.

While he is best remembered as a children's author, Ransome also spent time as a foreign secretary in Russia over the period of the revolution and even married to Trotsky's secretary, Evgenia Shvelina.

Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild (1936)

Born in 1895, Noel Streatfeild was the author of a great many books, the most famous of which is Ballet Shoes.

Ballet Shoes tells the story of three adopted sisters - Pauline, Petrova and Posy - and their training at The Children's Academy of Dancing and Stage Training.

  

The sometimes sickly-pink modern covers of more recent editions of Ballet Shoes might put off potential readers, but the Fossil girls are presented as rounded characters and the details and worries of their everyday lives are beautifully evoked by Streatfeild.

Group members enjoyed the period detail of the story, and those who had not read it before were pleased to discover that there was more to Ballet Shoes than dance lessons and stage school antics.

Crown of Acorns by Catherine Fisher (2010)

Following our group's enjoyment of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising, we decided to try another fantasy writer - this time Catherine Fisher.

Fisher, like Cooper, draws on myth and folklore. Several books are based on Welsh myth and landscape (Fisher was born in Newport), while the Oracle Trilogy blends Ancient Egyptian and Greek mythology to great effect.

Crown of Acorns was chosen by our reading group as it is set here in Bath, and centres around John Wood's beautiful eighteenth century streetscape, The Circus. Fisher splits her narrative between a troubled teenager, who has moved to Bath to start a new life, and a fictionalised account of John Wood (the elder) and the building of The Circus in the mid 1700s.



Fisher's writing is vivid and elegant and her other existence as a poet shows through in her prose.

Our group enjoyed this book, with some favouring one storyline and some another but we all agreed that it made us look at the streets and buildings of Bath anew.