This week’s Book of the Week is Mabel Esther Allen’s Chiltern School. Regular readers will already be aware of my love of the classic school story and this one last week was a real treat for my sleepy post-nightshift brain.
Chiltern School tells the story of Rose Lesslyn – who has lived with her grandparents since her mother died and her father moved to work abroad to get away from his pain (as people frequently seemed to do in books in this era). Her father decides that she needs to go to school – much to her grandmother’s dismay – and she’s dispatched from her home on the Isle of Wight to a rather progressive (for the 1950s anyway) school in the middle of the Chiltern hills. There she struggles to fit in but eventually finds her feet, makes friends and (re)discovers a hidden talent.
Chiltern School was written in the 1950s – and sold to a publisher, but never published until Allen published it privately in the 1990s. And she was only able to do that because of the success of a reissue of another of her series – the Drina books in the 1990s. The Drina series (the subject of one of my very early posts on the blog) were written under one of her pen names – Jean Estoril. I had no idea about this until I read the forward of this book – I’d bought it because I’d really enjoyed another of her (many) other books The View Beyond My Father (about a young blind girl escaping from her domineering father in the 1910s) back in primary school days. I was thrilled to discover that my love of the Drina series in the early 90s had meant that Allen had money to do this in her old age – and that someone who’s books I’d liked so much had written so much more than I thought!
And Rose does have similarities to my beloved Drina (that series started 7 years later). Both live with their grandparents – with a stern grandmother and a kindlier grandfather, although both of Drina’s parents are dead as opposed to just one of Rose’s (there are a lot of dead parents in children’s books of this era). And trying not to give too much of the plot away here, Drina doesn’t know about her background at the start of the series but later choses to keep it secret – while Rose knows but doesn’t tell.
Both also feature the Chilterns – Drina’s ballet school has a boarding department there, where she stays in Drina Dances in Exile (the green book as it always is in my head because of it’s cover) and where she returns to several times in later books to visit friends. Now since reading Drina, I have acquired a boyfriend who comes from that part of the world – so I got an extra level of enjoyment from Chiltern School’s mentions of places that his family live or have lived and where we have been. And the area is a big feature in the book – it’s beautifully described – you can practically feel the wind rushing through your hair as Rose and her friends cycle around.
It’s not perfect – it is of it’s time and is not as diverse as you would (hope to) find a children’s book written now would be. But Allen’s writing style is charming and every readable – this is a fun romp that will make you wish you could have gone to boarding school (in the 1950s) with Rose and all her friends. That is if you couldn’t be a ballerina and be Drina…
My edition was published by Girls Gone By – who as I’m sure I’ve said before – specialise in republishing classic children’s stories that are now out of print. They do the same for my beloved Chalet School and for authors like Lorna Hill, Malcolm Saville and many more. Check out their website and see if they’ve done any of your childhood favourites.
I went straight on from this to Allen’s Ballet Family books (bought in the same spending spree back at the start of the year) which appear to have been published under Allen’s name and then reissued under the Estoril pseudonym in the 90s to capitalise on the success of Drina. I don’t know how I missed them at the time – but they are a cross between Drina and Lorna Hill’s Jane goes to the Wells – with a ballet school that’s not The Royal Ballet and a family of 4 ballet students – who’s mother is still a ballerina. And I really want to go back and reread the Drina series too.
Happy reading this week!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 