The Chalet School at War by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It’s easy for me to be flippant about the Chalet School and, to be frank, it is a mode I adopt quite often when discussing this bizarre, brilliant and all too frustrating series. But it is not easy for me to be flippant about The Chalet School at War; a book full of ache and of pain and so, I shall not.
I didn’t think I felt like this about The Chalet School at War. I remembered it being slightly leaden, a piece of filler coming after the great The Chalet School in Exile, mostly considering of Welsh people being very Welsh, Gwensi being boring and only enlivened by the great friendship split between two key middles. That was, alas, about it, and so when I came back to it, I don’t know what I expected.
I do know that I did not expect this, this book that as ever with Brent-Dyer when she was at her fiery best, this book that is about one thing and yet wholly about another. Originally published in 1941 and titled ‘The Chalet School Goes To It’, The Chalet School at War is a book about love. It is a strange thing to apply, this sentiment to a series which resolutely stayed away from pashes and the like, but it is a sentiment I apply most wholeheartedly.
This book is about love.
This book is about family and ties and people being split from their homes and realising that none of that matters if they are together. This book is about women, banding together in the darkness and being brave and hopeful and furious against this war of men’s making. This book is about England and her ‘mettle being tested’ in these dark, dark times and it is a message to the readers that says – you will live through this. You will survive. You will endure. And this book is about marriage and happily ever afters; some given with near-tangible authorial grief to characters who are ‘too dear and sweet to spend their lives teaching’.
This book is about pain.
My God, it is so very much about pain.
The war is on, there are girls still inside Nazi Germany (not all Germans, Brent-Dyer reminds us, are Nazis, and again this fine distinction in this wild and so often ridiculous series makes me gasp at how good she could be). There are girls forced to live a life that they have not chosen with people that they have not chosen. There are women trying to do the best for the children in their care and there are these children who are growing up in these tumultous times and clinging to simple things. Hope. Honesty. Respect. Everything embodied in that painful, jagged little league of hope that’s called ‘The Chalet School Peace League’
And all of that is delivered in this school story about vegetables and about inter-form arguments and babies and I didn’t see it coming. Quite often, with Brent-Dyer, when she is this good, I don’t see it coming and it’s only when I finish and close the book that I realise what’s just happened. It’s only then that I remember just how outstanding an author she could be.
Daisy May Johnson 
The copy I had as a kid was the threesome – Exile, War, and Highland Twins. And those three together make you go through such highs and lows.
Your recent posts have made me want to go back to this series. I’m going home in a few weeks, and I have a feeling I’m going to be spending some time with these 🙂
I have that copy too! It’s so lovely. I love the front cover of it. And you’re right, it’s a collection of books that just make you feel *everything* ..!
It’s a worthy sequel to Exile. Have you read the uncut version because it is even more about love and pain and hope. I was 11 the first time I read it and just as in Exile I didn’t realise how important it was or how much EBD understood or even how far ahead of her time she was.
I haven’t read the unabridged, no. I’ve only got a couple of the uncut editions – and they make me so conscious of how much the Armadas were cut.
I have bought my daughter one of these for Christmas, wrapped it so can’t remember which 😂 I don’t remember them tbh, read a couple when I was little… Sounds v different to Blyton!