THE CHALET SCHOOL AND US

Whenever school stories are mentioned, Enid Blyton's St Clare's and Mallory Towers series seem to come foremost to everyone's minds. Everyone of my generation that is. I am not sure what passes for this generation's youngsters' reading material, or if they even read at all.

We have read our share of Enid's Blyton's school stories and enjoyed them for most part. But after SB unearthed Elinor Brent-Dyer and her Chalet School series in a used-book store, we never looked back.

For the uninitiated, the fictitious Chalet School is a boarding school run along general English lines (we think) set in the Tirolean region (though at one point it got shifted to England, then Switzerland). The stories are set in the time period from the early to mid 1900's, and even went through one of the world wars. The school boasts of quite a varied student intake, considering the time period where it was written, so we were able to read about American, English and many, many other European student influences. There was even a book about a girl from Kenya (which we are missing).

If one has only ever read Enid Blyton's school stories, where the cast is all too standard and predictable (popular girl, pretty but brainless fluff, mischevious trick-playing girl, standard French mam'zelle who always falls for the tricks etc etc), the formidable characterisation that is present in the Chalet School series can only be an improvement. With sixty to seventy books in the series, a few decades of development, returning alumni and new-comers to play with, Elinor Brent Dyer was able to make Chalet school three-dimensional and alive. The books are interconnected by a general time line and certain common characters, but the books can be read alone without missing much flavour. It amazes us how much has been written about the school without us ever feeling if any part of the stories have been recycled.

The "international" aspect of the book, such as it was, helped with the characterisation. The unconventional Americans were fun to read, and made a grand contrast with the gentle, housewifely European girls, and the English girls making a nice in-between buffer. Yet, the differences were never exaggerated or over-the-top, there was never anything derogatory or offensively written (at least in all the books that we have read). Brent-Dyer did not seem to have touched on much which she was unfamiliar with. It all read in a most believeable manner.

We read that Brent-Dyer herself was a teacher and perhaps her own experiences came in handy. Her familiarity with the Austrian region was came through in all her books. I would not hesitate to say that the Chalet School stories which prompted the Tirolean region to be number one on my list of places to visit. I feel as if I could almost visualise the Tiern See and everyone of the places the students visited at half term. When I visited the Rhine Falls years back, my first thought was that the Chaletians had been there before me. That was how real the stories had been to me. Enid Blyton tried to create memorable school stories, but the Chalet School just was.

One thing which amused us much was the insistence on forbidding "slang" in the school. The idea was that the school wanted to teach English in its purest form to the foreigners, to whom English was learnt as a second language. And guess who were the ones who were always fined for speaking slang? You got it, the Americans. In that Elinor Brent-Dyer exhibited pure English pride. It also hit on us how much the language has evolved in the decades past, for what apparently constituted slang in those times, are perfectly acceptable these days. I never knew calling a person "beastly" was slang. I wonder what Brent-Dyer would think of Singlish.

Sadly, the series is already out of print. We got our few books all used. The local libraries do not appear to own any copies. In fact, the local libraries do not appear to have many of our most beloved children's classics, more's the pity. A search on the internet shows that a paperback copy of a Chalet School book costs around USD 20 bucks. Books do appreciate in value after all. SB is on a crusade to collect the entire series, cost be damned. To us, the books are priceless, but in this case, Mastercard works too.