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Girls: Girls with Absentee Parents
http://www.the-cbb.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4763

Author:  jennifer [ Fri Jul 11, 2008 8:21 am ]
Post subject:  Girls: Girls with Absentee Parents

There are a number of girls with parents who are away for a significant portion of their childhood, in many cases due to work. What do you think of the portrayal of their family ties and relationship with their parents, and the way that the families structure themselves after the wandering parent returns home?

Author:  liberty [ Fri Jul 11, 2008 10:29 am ]
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On the whole I don't think these relationships are portrayed very realistically. The Bettany family is a good example of this. They are separated for years but then become a close, loving family. Off the top of my head (my books are packed to move), its rare (if we see it at all) for there to be problems when parents return.

Author:  Elle [ Fri Jul 11, 2008 11:01 am ]
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What irritates me the most (and I think I mentioned this in the discussion about Peggy) is the way the way that some parents expect their children not to age or change during their absence, and in the case of the Winterton's father, goes mad when they do not behave exactly the way he would expect after 10 years absence... I think if you abandon your child to relatives for 10 years or so, they cannot expect them to jump to their every whim when they finally deign to return home!

Author:  JayB [ Fri Jul 11, 2008 11:33 am ]
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We do hear of problems between Peggy and Maeve. And there were difficulties between Prunella and her parents when they first came home. Plus we hear about Mary Lou feeling guilty because she feels unable to grieve properly for her father. Carola and her parents seem to have grown apart, to the point where her father didn't even know how old she was, and she didn't feel able to write to tell them she wanted to go to school. And although it's not made explicit, Madge and Jem seem to do most of the parenting of the Robin, even when her father returns.

The Winterton family had problems, of course, but I think those were due to Mr Winterton's own character (him being a selfish, controlling bully) rather than to his having been away for so long.

I think a lot depends on the guardian the children are left with. Madge obviously kept in contact with Dick and Mollie herself, and no doubt kept them up to date with their children's progress, and would talk to the children about them. Kat Gordon's Aunt Luce also, absent minded as she was, helped to maintain a loving relationship between Katharine and her parents. Carola's Cousin Maud, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have bothered.

But I think these relationships have to be set in the context of the times when the books were written. Before air travel and easy telephone communication, and much less leisure time, many people would expect to be without close contact with family members for long periods; it was a normal part of family life. Even someone who moved, say, from Cornwall to London wouldn't be popping home for the weekend, or telephoning 2-3 times a week.

In less literate families, when relatives emigrated, sometimes they were never heard from again. Even a move within the same country could cause family members to lose touch.

And in the war (which was the reason the Bettanys were away so long) many children didn't see one or both of their parents for years, due to evacuation, military service abroad, being a p.o.w., travel difficulties etc. At the CS during the war, there were many girls separated from their families, and wives parted from their husbands. Some had suffered bereavement - Maria Marani, the Macdonald twins.

And many children were orphans with no close family, being brought up by unsympathetic guardians.

I think in those circumstances, girls whose parents were alive, and who maintained a loving relationship with their daughters by letter, as Mollie did, wouldn't consider their situation abnormal, and would probably consider themselves a lot more fortunate than many others.

Oops, seem to have written an essay here!

Author:  liberty [ Fri Jul 11, 2008 2:32 pm ]
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I take your point about considering the time the books were written in. However, if you look at the war, many returning evacuees struggled to fit back into family life and never had a close relationship with their parents again. Some even chose to remain with the people they had spent the war with. I know its not exactly the same with Chalet school girls but I would expect a few more problems with their parents.

Author:  Mel [ Fri Jul 11, 2008 8:27 pm ]
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Also, though Mollie is lovely, especially in 'Bride', why does she not know when they are reunited, that Bride wears glasses? Maeve doesn't even know which sister is which, though she must have seen photographs. EBD is a bit simplistic sometimes.

Author:  Alison H [ Fri Jul 11, 2008 10:32 pm ]
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As JayB's said, times were different then. People like Mollie and Peggy kept up a close relationship by writing to each other, as did many people who were separated from relatives and friends due to various sets of circumstances. I remember that my grandma always remained close friends with a cousin who emigrated to South Africa as a child: they never saw each other again but always kept in touch by letter; and I can think of loads of similar examples.

It must have been strange getting used to living together as a family in cases where the absent parent/parents returned home after years apart, but a lot of families would have been in that situation when fathers returned from the War.

I think that EBD shows quite realistically that how the families coped depended on the families themselves. Dick and Mollie, in the context of the times, were trying to do the best for their older children by leaving them in a "healthier" climate, and the implication is that they kept in close touch by letter. Carola's parents, by contrast, didn't even seem to realise that their daughter was growing up, and Mr Winterton just expected his daughters to be exactly as he wanted after having virtually no involvement in their upbringing.

There are a lot of cases of reunited families whom we don't see much of, if anyone fancies drabbling about them! Annis and Verity and their respective dads, the Maynards in Canada, David and Sybil meeting up with the rest of their family (including two new baby brothers) ...

Author:  CBW [ Sat Jul 12, 2008 7:46 am ]
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i wonder a little if we should also be taking into account how little even those kids who had homes and parents actually saw them.

As a general rule, the class that we are dealing with would have had nannies or mother's helps so, while they were very young, interaction with their mother's would have been somewhat limited and with their fathers even more so.

Then they would have been off to boarding school at 7 for boys, possibly a little later for girls only to return for a couple of weeks at christmas and easter and a month in the summer.

In some ways its quite a surprise that any of them formed any sort of family bonds at all.

Author:  Fiona Mc [ Sat Jul 12, 2008 2:06 pm ]
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Alison H wrote:
Mr Winterton just expected his daughters to be exactly as he wanted after having virtually no involvement in their upbringing.


I actually don't think he was crazy for expecting his children to at least be polite to their mother. That was a fairly major thing he was annoyed about and I would have to agree with him there as that's a pet hate of mine of kids being so rude to their parents without justifiable cause. The rest I think he got what he asked for by not being involved.

In regards to those who wouldn't have had as much to do with their kids and had nannies and went to boarding school from a young age I've heard a lot of kids say they were closer to their nanny or that it felt like everyone was on their best behaviour when they were home from boarding school. i guess if you grow up with it it probably feels normal

Author:  JayB [ Sat Jul 12, 2008 3:42 pm ]
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Quote:
In regards to those who wouldn't have had as much to do with their kids and had nannies and went to boarding school from a young age I've heard a lot of kids say they were closer to their nanny


Winston Churchill being a case in point. He adored his mother when he was a child, but it was very much a case of worshipping from afar. It was his nanny Mrs Everest whom he was close to on a day to day basis. (Although he and Jennie do seem to have been close when he was an adult, after his father had died.)

I do think we have to be careful not to assume that everyone in the past had the same expectations of family life as we have today.

Author:  Mrs Redboots [ Sat Jul 12, 2008 4:20 pm ]
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I think that by the time of the Chalet school books, much of the ethos of children only seeing their parents for an hour at tea-time had disappeared. My mother and her sister did have a nanny for a few years, but she appears to have had more the role of a mothers' helper than a Streatfeild-type nanny. My father and his sisters didn't have one.

And yes, families were enormously separated. My grandparents, having met during the First World War, were separated for five years during the Second; my mother went to boarding-school in Wales (a school that had been evacuated from Switzerland - sounds familiar????) and said that they never had exeats or half-term holidays; you weren't encouraged to travel, and usually both your parents were doing war work of one sort or another so you just didn't see them from term's beginning to its end. And you quite often spent your holidays with other relations if your parents were busy - my mother spent at least one summer in what was to become, ten years later, her home town! She didn't meet my father until 1951, but she already knew his home!

Author:  Pado [ Sun Jul 13, 2008 2:05 am ]
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Although I can't imagine not realizing your child had aged several years, I can (sort of) accept the scenario. My youngest, now 16, recently has gotten back in touch via facebook with several friends from a school she left at age 11...and I find myself thinking of them as they looked five years ago, even though I obviously know they have aged. So I can imagine in a less "connected" era how such a thing might come as something of a shock to the parent, especially if they weren't all that close to the child to begin with.

(Please don't let Miss Annersley see these sentences.)

Author:  jennifer [ Sun Jul 13, 2008 4:28 am ]
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It sounds like the methods and amount of attention vary too.

Some parents put a lot of care and effort into their children's upbringing, even if they weren't there to see to it personally - fostering with someone reliable and caring, exchanging letters with both the child and their guardians, getting school reports, making sure they were getting appropriate education and care and social interaction with others, sending photos, visiting when possible...

Other parents seem to be pretty clueless. Mr Winterton doesn't bother to make sure his kids are enrolled in a boarding school, after moving them away from any possible day school. He seems to basically abandon them for ten years, and is then put out because they've been allowed to run wild. When he comes back, he has no emotional connection with them, or them with him.

Dr Johnstone seems caring, but equally clueless when it comes to paying attention. He hasn't made any plans for a proper education, or a stable environment, or access to friends her own age, and is content to let his daughter be dragged around the world behind her aunt, with some intermittant governessing, and doesn't think of it until she runs away from home in desperation. They have an emotional connection, but not really a practical one.

Author:  Róisín [ Mon Aug 25, 2008 9:03 pm ]
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This is one of the things about the books that seems the most 'alien' to me and it took me ages to get my head around the huge separations between parent and child that seem to happen so naturally in the CS universe, and seem so normal to the participants. The only way I can understand it is to accept that it is *alien*. For example, Mollie. I cannot imagine letting yourself become pregnant, repeatedly, and after a minimal amount of years, sending the result to be raised by your sister in law. But in the books she acknowledges that it is hard, that it is an awful thing to *have* to do. There is a whole inherent set of attitudes there that I'm still detangling.

Author:  Pat [ Mon Aug 25, 2008 9:17 pm ]
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I thi9nk that for those living in India then it was a fact of life. If you had a family you sent the children back to England for education. It's something that people just accepted, in the same way that service families accept 'Marchout', where your home is insepcted extremely rigorously when you move to another unit. It's awful, horrendous, but you get on with it the best way you can.

Author:  Róisín [ Mon Aug 25, 2008 9:33 pm ]
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Absolutely. It's the 'it's expected' bit that I'm currently trying to process; that 'it's normal' attitude that the characters very much *have*. I wonder how much, at the time, that these ideas were criticised. Obviously they are not the idea *now* but when did this start to form? Was it a pre-war thing? An end-of-empire thing? The history of parenting attitudes would be interesting to take up!

Author:  JayB [ Mon Aug 25, 2008 10:02 pm ]
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Children were sent home primarily for health reasons. Diseases which had largely been eradicated in Britain were (and are) still prevalent in other parts of the world (cholera being the prime example) and there were no immunisations or treatments available then. Anyone remember the opening of The Secret Garden, when the whole household, except Mary, was wiped out overnight by cholera?

It was also believed that northern European children didn't thrive in very hot climates, even if they didn't catch something. People who didn't send their children home would be the ones criticised. Sending your children home was the unselfish thing to do. Insofar as attitudes have changed, it's down to improvements in medicine, rather than changes in attitudes to parenting.

Author:  Alison H [ Mon Aug 25, 2008 10:32 pm ]
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As Pat and JayB've said, it was considered the norm, and the right thing to do - even in the 1920s and 1930s the idea of India as "the graveyard of the British" hadn't really gone away. Also, although in the Bettany children's cases they were sent away when they were too young even for prep school, there was the idea that British schools were better than those in India (whether for education or for making "contacts" or both): even now you sometimes get wealthy families from various parts of the Commonwealth sending their children to British public schools.

The idea of British families in India sending their children to Britain (or, in the Bettanys' case, to Austria!) goes right back to the second half of the 18th century AFAIK.

There is some inconsistency with it from a CS viewpoint, though. Mollie was only 18 when she married Dick, and presumably they had known each other for at least a little while before that: I wonder if she'd been sent away to school and'd come back to husband-hunt :lol: , or whether she'd lived in India all along. There's no suggestion that Madge and Dick were sent back to Britain whilst their parents were alive and living in India, and we're told that Juliet attended a British school in India, so they all definitely lived there as children, health risk or otherwise!

Author:  Abi [ Mon Aug 25, 2008 11:38 pm ]
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Juliet and the Bettanys would have been in the minority though - in general, it was the parents who kept their children in India who were seen as selfish. Also, it was generally thought that this was harder for the parents than the children (I sometimes wonder whether children in that era were seen not to possess strong emotions; so often their suffering was not so much ignored, as simply nobody thought they would suffer).

Vyvyan Brendon's book 'Children of the Raj' tells the stories of the children who were sent back to England and of those who remained in India - a really interesting read which clearly shows these attitudes.

Author:  Mrs Redboots [ Tue Aug 26, 2008 5:03 pm ]
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Mollie and Dick were very lucky that they had Madge and Jem to provide a loving home for their children in a healthy climate with good education available nearby. It was not always so, by any manner of means - look at poor Rudyard Kipling, boarded with strangers who disliked him and mistreated him.

At one stage, some of my grandfather's aunts ran what appears to have been a boarding-house for such children; my mother and I both hope they treated them rather better than poor Kipling was treated!

Author:  JayB [ Tue Aug 26, 2008 5:42 pm ]
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Quote:
Mollie and Dick were very lucky that they had Madge and Jem to provide a loving home for their children in a healthy climate with good education available nearby. It was not always so, by any manner of means - look at poor Rudyard Kipling, boarded with strangers who disliked him and mistreated him.


Although Rudyard Kipling's mother did have sisters in England; IIRC one was married to Edward Burne Jones and another was the mother of Stanley Baldwin. A biography I read couldn't offer any reason why Kipling and his sister were sent to strangers rather than family.

Author:  Mrs Redboots [ Tue Aug 26, 2008 6:59 pm ]
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And in his autobiography Something of Myself he says he can't understand why he didn't tell his relations - whom he saw a couple of times a year - how unhappy he was![/url]

Author:  Loryat [ Thu Aug 28, 2008 4:16 pm ]
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In School at Juliet's school is referred to quite disparagingly, so EBD doesn't seem to have thought much of Anglo-Indian schools. It's surprising that the Carricks didn't take the opportunity to ship her off to England, but maybe there were no convenient relations and the 'hill' schools were very cheap?

Presumably Mollie came out to her parents at about fifteen or sixteen to 'husband-hunt' (or maybe just to be with her family after years of separation). Judging by her accent she seems to have a strong connection with Ireland.

I think it's a shame that EBD didn't deal more with the issues of reuniting families, as it would have been very interesting for us - maybe she didn't want to harp on about it too much? Has anyone read Saplings by Noel Streatfield? That is about the upheaval caused by the war and its effect on four children, and shows very well how damaging separations and so on could be for the children, although in fact it is not one of the worst causes of damage - the worst is the failure of adults around the children (it's one of the books Streatfield wrote for adults) to provide any stable environment for (often) their own selfish reasons. Maybe CS parents felt the stable environment was more important than a family environment.

I have always felt that Mr Winterton is to some extent justified in his disapproval of his children, though he totally fails to try to understand things from their persepctive. (Maybe the long separation has affected him as well?) Mrs Winterton gets off far too easily IMO - she doesn't seem to have any idea of providing her daughters with the ability to provide for themselves later, which shows a bit of a 'leave it to the men' qattitude I think.

Author:  Jennie [ Fri Aug 29, 2008 1:09 pm ]
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I always thought that Mr. Winterton was an overbearing, 'Know best' type of man. He moved the family around for his own reasons, without consulting anyone in advance, and so his daughters ran wild for lack of an education. To me, they sound like chips off the old block, just as heedless as their father, and just as lacking in consideration for others, and they've grown into the sort of young women he doesn't like, because they aren't feminine and pliable enough. Hestill has the 'Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.' attitude. If he wanted them to be educated and disciplined, he ought to have done somethig about it long before his return to the UK.

Author:  Tor [ Fri Aug 29, 2008 7:26 pm ]
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Quote:
they sound like chips off the old block, just as heedless as their father, and just as lacking in consideration for others, and they've grown into the sort of young women he doesn't like, because they aren't feminine and pliable enough.


Jennie, I never thought of Lala and Polly like that, but you are right! They do share many of their father's personality traits!

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