So last night I started reading Lavender Laughs. I haven't read any CS for a while (I thought I really should read some other books ... ), so to go back to one of my favourite authors has been like coming home - a delight! Anyway, here we go.

First of all - I'm finding Miss Leigh's character brilliantly developed. She's not an attractive person, either physically or emotionally, but she's drawn so jolly well. Dressed in a big fur coat, flung open to show a scarlet dress, and wearing a heavy string of black and white beads, her mouth begins to tremble as she awaits (perhaps with bated breath) the Great Doctor's verdict. When told the doctor's opinion, her jaw drops and a flush of indignation comes into her cheeks. All in all, Miss Leigh is drawn in such a way that makes the reader feel very little sympathy for her.

She's 'anxious' about Lavender and believes that Lavender will 'break her heart' when she hears about Auntie's call-up, because she's never been parted from Auntie for a day since she was five years old. Now this is interesting, because Lavender certainly doesn't come across as someone who frrets when parted from her Auntie - and indeed, she doesn't. The idea that Lavender will fret comes across as a daydream dreamed up by Auntie in order to continue the fiction that she and Lavender are very close emotionally - perhaps this is part of her writing in her Lavender Laughs books?

Lavender at this point come across a little bit more like a comedy act, with jerky movements and continual twitchings, but this is contrasted harshly with the descriptions of Alixe - a Good Chalet School Girl, who has cheeks pink with health, thick hair, eyes of the colour of blue violets and is dressed in a simple brown frock. I wonder if in showing these two characters side by side Elinor was perhaps telling readers what was 'right' and what was 'wrong'?

At tea, Dr Marilliar asks Mollie to tell Miss Leigh about the Chalet School, with a view to Lavender's enrolement there, and Mollie says (among other things) that the school is a very good school, and awfully full, and that crwods of people are always rushing to join as pupils. Now, I know that this exaggeration is meant to discourage Miss L from trying to get Lavnder in (who Mollie doesn't like), but it's odd, given that we never hear of anyone who has tried to get in and can't (in Staff discussions and so on).

Miss Leigh after this visits the CS to discuss Lavender's admission. Nell Wilson has spent Christmas there alone (and it sounds so nice!) in peace and quiet. There's an odd little comment about Nell's personal circumstances - 'she had no home of her own except a little cottage in the wilds of Dartmore'. She can't use it at present because she's leant it to a cousin for the duration, but - she does have a home of her own!!! The fact that it's a 'little cottage in the wilds of Dartmore' doesn't mean that she's bereft of a home of her own, does it? Perhaps homes are only counted as 'homes of one's own' if they're large and spacious, perhaps?

Elinor develops Miss Leigh's character further in her interview with Nell Wilson, again using contrast with Nell Wilson to highlight the correctness of a Chalet School personality, against the 'wrongness' of someone who is very much different. By making Miss Leigh an unsympathetic character, Elinor manages to convince the reader that Miss Leigh is wrong, rather thana simply different. Very clever!

We also have a creed, attributed to Nell Wilson (but which perhaps is that of Elinor herself?) about how much, or how little girls of the time should be exposed to war news, and why, and what the role of young people will be after the war. It's a creed to which Miss Leigh does not subscribe at all but again, by making Miss Leigh sound 'wrong' we're slanted towards the 'correct' view. In fatc, thinking about it, Miss Leigh is made to sound far more than simply 'wrong' in expressing her views - her views are shown as weak in the extreme, so I think it would be a strong reader of the time who would say that perhaps they were more in sympathy with Miss Leigh's point of view of the world!

That's it for now. No doubt more will follow.

Just one thing: Perhaps the "home of her own" was intended to mean no family of her own, rather than the physical building in which she lived? Significant difference, especially at Christmas.

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Someone cooking meat at the den of a fox said: "One doesn't mention this in front of the mongoose" - Sumerian proverb

Outskirts Of The Twenties: The Problem Of Books

I always took it to mean that the cottage was a holiday home, not somewhere Nell could use as a permanent home. If it's in the wilds of Dartmoor she couldn't live there and still pursue her teaching career, and it probably lacks a bathroom, maybe even running water and an indoor loo. Not somewhere you'd want to go to spend Christmas alone, even if she hadn't lent it to the cousin.

Part of that scene is very specific to the war years. In most of the other books, there's no suggestion that the CS girls are made aware of world events (although equally there's no suggestion that they aren't), but Nell's point is that teenagers cannot be sheltered of the horrors of what's going on and that their generation will have to play an important part in the rebuilding process when the war's over. I think Miss Leigh gets a raw deal, though - it's only natural for an aunt, parent, grandparent or any other adult to want to shelter a child from harsh reality, and it's a case of finding the point at which it's no longer appropriate to do that.

I think EBD does present her own views very forcefully in this book. Not much sympathy is shown towards Lavender when she expresses disapproval of the Peace League, even though probably the majority of people in Britain at the time, who wouldn't have had friends in Germany and Austria, would have agreed with her.

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We really must stop eating like this ...

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.

Haven't read this in a while but I do remember thinking that Lavender had quite a raw deal from EBD. Her physical description - lank hair (I can sympathise with that one) and bony ankles (I wish!) all seemed meant to define her unattractive personality.

Yes, I think that I agree with this - it's a nice, cosy get away (and possibly a shrewd investment) but not a "home" in the same where somewhere full of memories and things and friends is.

And I think that this book possibly shows EBD's subtlety at its best. The way that she sets up our sympathies for two different sides at the same time and maintains it through the whole book is really quite breathtaking, and some of the strongest writing I know.

EBD almost certainly was trying to show 'right' and 'wrong', but she goes on to undermine that in the rest of the book by the constantly shifting loyalities - and the fact she uses pointers to show 'right' and 'wrong' instead of spelling it out is where the strength of this book lies.

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"His distinguished air, his handsome dark face, his composed attitude - for he stood perfectly still with one hand at his side - gave singular effect to the circumstance of his being without a hat." - 'Tales of Angria'

It can't be too bad though, if the cousin is living there for the duration. That would presumably mean all year around, and possibly for a few years.

I think that in the CS world a "home" is definitely somewhere bigger and more - middle-class, say?

It must have been in reasonably good condition if Nell's cousin - wasn't the cousin someone who lived in a big city and wanted to get away from it because of the air raids? - was living there on a semi-permanent basis.

I'm not sure how many of the mistresses, if any, would have had their own homes as opposed to staying with relatives or friends. It can't have been ideal going to stay with parents or siblings for weeks on end, but it wouldn't have been practical to rent somewhere for a couple of months over the summer and a few weeks at Christmas and again at Easter and, even if they were in a position to buy somewhere - unlikely for most of them, especially at a time when it was hard for women to get mortgages - it would have meant leaving the place closed up for most of the year, with all the worry about burglaries, pipes bursting in bad weather, etc.

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We really must stop eating like this ...

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.

It was inhabitied by the cousin from Portsmouth and her three small children, so it must have been live-able in generally. And if any of the children were of school age, near enough to a school.

I didn't mean to suggest that the 'home' would be near work that Nell could do, but that if she owns a property, that means she has a home.

Please can someone explain this sentence to me?



About what, please?

I found it interesting that New Girls had no choice about going to Joey's NG parties. Just a comment!

And I agree with ChubbyMonkey's view, that the writing in this title is particularly strong. Elinor manages to show, through her characters, two views of how war and the young should be handled.

That drives me mad . First of all, Lavender's told that being invited to afternoon tea with Joey is an honour, as if Joey were the Queen - and, anyway, it's not a great honour, just standard practice with new girls! I understand that turning down an invitation can be seen as very rude - when you're at boarding school, it's not as if you can come up with a convenient fib about having a prior engagement - but I don't think that forcing someone to go to a complete stranger's house is very polite either.

The way it's handled is all wrong: whichever prefect it is tells Lavender that she's got to go whether she likes it or not, rather than telling her that Joey is very nice and she'll have a good time.

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We really must stop eating like this ...

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.

This little debate about Miss Wilson's no home of her own made me think of a Ngaio Marsh book I re-read recently. In it Inspector Alleyn asks one of the witnesses for her address and she said "Town or country?". Perhaps in EBD's time and world you would have more than one property, if you were of a certain social standing so Miss Wilson only owns this one cottage which is why she has "no home except". This cottage is very rarely mentioned anyway so like other shave said perhaps it's not really a home for her in the same way that the school has become.
I'd love to be able to say "town or country?" if someone asked me for my address .

About making something of her, I assume. It's too late for them to 'make something' of Aunty.

As for the home of her own - personally, I thought that EBD was saying she had a home of her own - she used the word 'except'.

I think the character's are rather dismissive of Miss Leigh and I can't see that any of them have anything to be so precious about. She dresses stylishly but not to the CS teacher's taste. Tough, who appointed them arbiters of fashion? And considering they have been living in a backwater in another country for years how much exposure do any of them have to fashion and style?

Miss Leigh is a successful author and one would assume that given the worship of Joey they would be kissing her feet but no, they are snide about that. She clearly doesn't write the correct style of books for them either. Snobs.

As for Miss Leigh's relationship to Lavender, surely any human being who has had the charge of a child since she was five would have the right to be concerned about the place that she was going to be staying in, and the information about the war that she is going to be exposed to. She loves the girl, which is something that the snobs of the Chalet School don't appear to grasp. They assume that as strangers who have known the girl for all of five minutes they are suddenly the experts on her care.

I think the real villain of the piece is Bride. Her inability to quiet Lavender without manhandling her was the starting point for all of the consequent problems which Lavender had. In a supposedly open environment surely it was not beyond the capability of the teachers to listen to the Lavender's opinion and explain why they believed in the Peace League?

I'm pretty sure that other girls in that school may have held similar opinions to Lavender and would have appreciated the chance to express their views of it. But instead the CS rolls like a juggernaut over everyone and imposes its opinions on everyone without giving them the chance for debate.

Excuse me, but surely the War was against a totalitarian regime, was it not? So did the CS recognise this or was it simply a case of you must believe the same as we do or you are not a part of us?

I suspect that (as Finn says) EBD was very much meaning 'home' as in family. Nell may own a house, but that doesn't mean she has 'home' in the sense of having 'home people'. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying I'm going 'home' when I visit Dundee, although I've never actually lived in the house where my father is now.

And by the way, I'm absolutely NOT saying that people living on their own don't have a 'home'; I'm just saying that EBD was differentiating between 'home' and 'house'.

To be fair to Bride, I think she was concerned that, seeing as most people at the CS regarded the Peace League as some sort of sacred sisterhood, Lavender would be given a hard time if she were heard to criticise it. She was only about 10 at the time and just instinctively tried to shut Lavender up. Having said which, it's quite concerning that the environment was such that people were likely to be given grief for expressing views different to the majority's, especially as the majority of people in the country generally would probably have agreed with Lavender.

The way it comes across is that the Peace League is part of the school and that expressing a different view is tantamount to criticising the school. Doesn't Joey get in a strop somewhere on hearing that a new girl (it might even be Lavender) hasn't been told about the Peace League as soon as she arrived - she says something like "But, but, it's the Peace League," as if a new girl should be asked to sign up to it at the same time as she's told what form and dormitory she's in. I understand that it's important to Joey because she's thinking of the friends she left behind in Austria, but that didn't make it relevant to other people.

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We really must stop eating like this ...

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.

I also found it intriguing that NGs (and others who haven't signed the PL document) are told (in the first assembly) that they can go to Nell Wilson at any time in the first seven days of term to sign on the dotted line. While I can see that this avoids girls going to NW at any old time, I wonder if someone missed the boat for that term, if they'd have to then wait for the following term?

It comes across as very secretive - go to NW to sign, no-one knows who has signed and who hasn't. But what if someone when to Nell and another girl saw her go in to sign? I mean, how secret could it have been? I understand that it's a potentially inflamatory document, especially in war-time, but I wonder about the level of secrecy applied to the whole thing. Would girls be forbidden to talk about it amongst themselves? Not who had/n't signed, but about it generally?

I always assumed that was privacy, rather than secrecy - so that people who didn't want to sign it (or who did and didn't want anyone to know, for whatever reason) wouldn't suffer for it. I can't imagine that by the time they reached England there would be any actual need to keep it secret, and I don't think the girls were forbidden to talk about it - don't Bride et al discuss it after the hand-over-mouth incident?

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"And I'm sure there was blood in the gutter from somebody's head, or else it was the sunset in a puddle."

So This is School! - Review: JP of the Fifth by Margaret Griffiths

I'm always slightly disturbed by Nell's remark at the first assembly about how only she and Joey will know whether a new girl has chosen to 'stand apart from us' and whether someone 'has elected to pass us by' as regards signing the Peace League document. I mean, she does say it's not compulsory, but the choice of language from a senior member of staff speaking at an official assembly makes it very plain that someone who doesn't sign is setting herself apart from the rest of the school, and bypassing a solemn vow it's strongly implied everyone else, staff and pupils over 13, has signed up for... You'd feel as though you were a pariah if you weren't keen. Yet, despite the admirable sentiments of the PL, as others have said, the majority of the population would probably have agreed with the sentiments expressed by Lavender.

I agree about the distinction between owning a property and having a 'home' from EBD's point of view - when she says 'home', she seems to always mean either someone's parents' home (in the case of someone well into her thirties like Rosalie Dene) or a marital home - I know it would have been difficult for her single women characters to buy property, but the occasional cottages or rented rooms of her unmarried characters seem not to count as 'homes'. (Is Nell's cottage inherited, incidentally?)

Though I assume it's not a rental/bought distinction, though? Nell makes some remark in Goes to It about how Joey will hate leaving Guernsey because 'she loves her pretty home' - but I've always assumed Les Rosiers would have been rented...? (The fact that Nell is described as speaking 'shrewdly' when she says this always strikes me as a bit daft - surely no one, whether or not they loved where they lived, would particularly want to flee the Nazis all over again? )

No, I don't think that 'home' is about family specifically, nor about suitability - so Nell's cottage could be perfectly suited to be lived in, hence the cousin, but not be a 'home' for her. It's somewhere that you feel completely comfortable, which have good memories associated it for whatever reason (people in it, possessions in it, things which have happened in it) and where you feel that you can just be yourself. It is mostly about the memories and about a space being your own, where you're comfortable.

It's very hard to explain, but I know the distinction very well. Halls was never, ever home for me in the first two years I was here, and going home to Devon was 'home', but since I've been in my room a second year, and got more used to it, and made it mine, and done more growing up, I do think that this is rather more home now, if I have a home at all which I don't really. Devon isn't home because both houses (mum's where I live and dad's where I largely grew up) have changed too much while I've been away - but that's where family is, and I can kind of slip awkwardly back in when I'm there for an extended period.

So I think that Nell's home would be the school because that's where she's comfortable, where the memories are and where she's happiest. The cottage could be perfectly nice and contain lots of pictures of family/her less precious things from her personal belongings but it wouldn't be home because it isn't where her life is, I guess.

And I think it completely natural for Nell to talk the way she does - she, as much as Joey, has every reason to be so passionate about the Peace League. Anyone coming to the school must have known its background and ethos, and probably its views on the war because that kind of speech during the war surely wouldn't have gone unremarked in private school circles. And that's the crux of the matter for me - it's a private school, i.e. parents have a choice to send their children there or not. If they send them, it's because they in some degree support the views that the school has on the war. The school clearly make it quite plain, from Nell telling Miss Leigh how much information children are told, and it's then up to parents to choose their service or not.

I don't remember anything about the CS mistresses being dismissive or critical of Miss Leigh's tastes. I did a quick skim read, and all that I can see is that Bill gets fed up of her saying "of course" all the time.

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"His distinguished air, his handsome dark face, his composed attitude - for he stood perfectly still with one hand at his side - gave singular effect to the circumstance of his being without a hat." - 'Tales of Angria'

I'm beginning to realise that people see 'home' as somewhere invested with emotional attachment, and that if a dwelling has no emotional attachment, it's not 'home'. For me it's much more practical than that. It's a physical place that means one isn't homeless (and so on the streets). If the worst came to the worst and Nell was sacked from the CS, she'd have a home to go to, to live in - she wouldn't be dependent on friends to house her, or have to go into a boarding house. So - to say doesn't make sense to me, because she does.

What do people make of how Lavender is handled in the Great Classroom Fight? Lavender wanted to sit in the place that belonged to the Form Prefect. This is how the story develops:

Miss Slater is told that Lavender and Bride quarrelled.
Mollie tells Miss S that Lavender had thrown Bride's glasses onto the floor.
She then reports that Lavender went for Bride, and then Bride for Lavender, but that Lavender started it.
Mollie claims part of the fault - because Lavender had tried to take her place and she had told Lavender that she couldn't have it.
Bride went to pull (Mollie's word) Lavender to another seat.
Lavender hit Bride and grabbed her glasses and threw them on the floor.
Bride went for Lavender.
Bride says that she took Lavender's arm to get her to another desk.

Miss Slater tells Bride to try not to be rough in the future and Lavender not to take offence.

What do people think of Bride's actions towards Lavender? Elinor excuses Bride's rough treatment by saying that shes too young to be able to control her muscles and so is inadvertantly rough towards Lavender. Does this hold water, I wonder? Should Bride have attempted to physically remove Lavender from the Form Prefect's seat at all? See, I think that here, the first fault is Bride's. Mollie has no part in blame (in my eyes) and Lavender was wrong to react as she did to Bride's treatment of her, but if Bride hadn't touched her it probably wouldn't have happened.