Ten Years On: A Celebration
of Fandom and Friendship Chalet School Crafts Ju Gosling opened the session by showing photographs of a wide variety of craft work created by fans of girls' school stories. This is available within her PhD website, Virtual Worlds of Girls, within the chapter on women fans. Alison Lindsay then gave the presentation below, before leading a practical session making Christmas cards while we had an informal discussion about the issues raised.
I wrote an article some time ago for the Journal of the New Chalet Club on crafts - Autumn 1999, if anyone's counting - that was simply a factual (and humorous) account of the many different crafts that were mentioned in the series. I'm sure you can all think of the stock examples - the Hobbies Club; the Sales, especially Tom Gay's house; Jo's proficiency as a knitter but her hatred of sewing; her jigsaw puzzle cutting, Sybil's embroidery; somebody's lace-making; somebody else's painting on china; the endless mending. I wonder, though - can you tell me the
first reference to handwork in the Chalet School? - It's actually
on the very first day, the day the school opens. On the first
morning, Madge does tests to assess each girl's abilities.
Then she asks the Tyroleans to bring some sewing for the afternoon
(p59).
Now, if you're going to say 'Oh that doesn't count', I wonder why you think that? Is it because it's part of 'schoolwork' so isn't done by choice and, therefore, can't be fun? That's one of the things I want you to consider - is handcraft only enjoyable when it's something you choose to do? Taught These extracts show that the first reason for a schoolgirl to learn crafts is she had to - she's taught how to. Indeed, in Dorita Fairlie Bruce's The Best House in the School, the girls of Springdale are asked to demonstrate what they have learned at school, and the display of needlework and housewifery wins over all the artistic, literary and scientific displays. Having read almost the entire canon over the past month, I can tell you that the sentence 'The Chalet School prided itself on its needlework' appears with depressing frequency. The tone in the final volume, Prefects, is slightly grimmer (p82): 'The School prided itself on its needlework, both plain and fancy. You might loathe the very sight and touch of a needle, but you were well and truly taught to use one.' This is something that's gone on for centuries - women have always had to learn to sew. Elizabeth I, as a girl of 11 or 12, made a New Year present for her stepmother Katherine Parr (they had New Year gifts in those days, not Christmas presents). It was a translation, in her own words, of Calvin's 'How we Ought to know God'. That showed her high level of education, befitting a princess - but the book was bound up in a beautiful cover she'd embroidered herself. Princesses, however clever, have also to display a mastery of the womanly arts. An interesting effect of this intense concentration on needlework and associated skills is that 'work' for centuries has been used as a synonym for needlework. Read Bess of Hardwick's letters or Jane Austen's - 'we worked all day' means 'we sat at needlework all day'. And Brent-Dyer uses it too. At the start of Bride Leads the Chalet School (p23) it's a cold wet January day. Bride says 'Well, folks, I don't think we're likely to be bothered with visitors this afternoon - not in this downpour. What shall we do?'. The reply - 'Let's get our work and books and have a cosy afternoon', Peggy said. 'I'll just run upstairs for my knitting. Shall I bring yours as well, Bride?'. So it's explicit - handwork, for women, is 'work'. Practical The prime reason for teaching skills like these is that until relatively recently many clothes were made at home. Remember in These Happy Golden Years when Pa brings home a sewing machine and Ma's eyes light up? The machine means they can make and alter clothes far more quickly and easily. And even after shop-bought clothes became more common, repairs mostly still had to be done by hand - and there were a lot of repairs. Ever read the labels inside your clothes? - if you don't, you really should! These give the fibre content (and incidentally, one of the things that really annoy me is catalogues, usually nightwear and lingerie, which say 100% satin - satin is a fabric, not a fibre). Side issue - sorry. Anyway, many garments these days have a small proportion, often just a few percent, of Lycra or other elastic - this is so that garments have a tiny bit of 'give' in them. Before Lycra was invented (in 1959) garments were much more prone to tear - and therefore to need mending. Gloves are a classic - someone in a novel in a hurry pulling on gloves is certain to tear one of the seams - because fingers are very small, you can only have a very neat seam allowance, and that's why they tear. The other cliché - and you must have come across it given the kind of books we all read - is someone whose gloves are old but well-darned. This is a masterpiece of compression to indicate a lady - she wears gloves, so obviously she's a lady, they're well cared for so she's not clumsy, she's skilled in needlework to be able to mend such a delicate item of clothing, she's not well off but she has no false pride about wearing patched items. And they must have been good gloves in the first place (back to being a lady) because you can't keep mending things of poor quality - it's not worth it. So all that is implied - and understood - by that simple little description. There are many chapters in the books which are set amongst the staff, in the staff room after work, and Brent-Dyer usually has the staff reading, smoking, eating chocolate biscuits and - knitting. In The Chalet School Goes to It, p9, when they're discussing the need to move from Guernsey near the start of the war, Madge is sitting quietly knitting a long grey scarf. Reading it now, most people would simply think - 'why choose grey, for heaven's sake? - such a dull colour'. People who lived through the war will know that wool, like everything else, was in short supply, so you couldn't choose just what you fancied. But if you read Elizabeth Craig's Needlework, which was published during the Second World War, you'll see that the patterns she gives for wartime comforts for the forces include a suggestion that garments for Civil Defence workers be knitted in grey. Economic In theory, having such skills should give you a way of earning your own living - but since back before Thomas Hood wrote The Song of the Shirt, there's never been much money in sewing. As JJ Bell once put it, 'I widna say an honest living canna be made in Tullypawkie, but there is very little in it besides the honesty'. The best-known example of someone making or at least supplementing her income with handwork is Phoebe in Jo to the Rescue. She can make money from it - but as the story she tells Jo proves, about the wedding present sent late because she was in too much pain to stitch, she doesn't make the money she deserves. Anyone who's tried it will agree with me - you can sell something you've made, but you don't always get the money you ought. I was asked by one of the cleaners at work to make a 40th anniversary card and I duly obliged. When it was finished, and had been praised, I asked what she thought she ought to pay. Two colleagues said, in a sincere effort to praise, 'Oh you'd pay £2-£3 for that in a card shop'. I said, 'Suppose I told you it took me nearly an hour to make, and there's about £1-worth of materials in it?'. The National Minimum wage I think is around £5 an hour now - but no-one's going to pay £6 for a card. In Jo Returns, p 89, we find that
Herr Laubach's wife is bed-bound and in pain. When the school
learn of this, after Herr Laubach's visit to the Hobbies Club,
they all pitch in to help. Jo cuts some jigsaw puzzles for
her, and 'Jeanne Le Cadoulec, brought down by Joey, showed
her how to make simple stitches in pillow-lace, till finally
she was able to weave great lengths of pretty lace, which
found a ready sale'. Do you know what pillow lace is? It isn't
lace that you find trimming a pillow, but lace made on a pillow
- a lace pillow, with those fragile beaded bone bobbins in
a complicated cat's cradle across the pinned pattern. It takes
approximately FOR EVER to do about an inch of it, so I've
always wondered if Brent-Dyer actually knew what she was talking
about.
There's a very useful website that I found through the Bank of England Archives, which converts money to present day values. It's not guaranteed accurate, but it certainly gives a helpful guide to prices. £5 in 1953, the year Bride was published, is valued according to it at over £88 today. Half that is £44 - yes, a big sum of money, but one that illustrates all too clearly the difficulty anyone has in trying to sell their work - people simply will not pay what it cost to make. In The Chalet School Does it Again, Joey pops across to say what her household is doing towards the sale: "Beth's knitted you what Len describes as a wizard twinset. You'll have to raffle it if you want to get its full value. And I brought all the odds and ends of knitting wool out and Anna has knitted them into squares and crocheted the squares together with black wool. It makes a simply gorgeous bedcover, and so warm and light. I don't know if you want another raffle, but if you do you could use that." Something like one of the many blankets I've knitted over the years - I think I'm currently on my 24th one. I once worked out that, at the national minimum wage of £5-odd an hour, plus the cost of the materials, it would cost £600 for one of my blankets - and no-one's going to pay that! Practical outlet Handwork is also a practical outlet for people unable to sit and do nothing (people like myself, in other words). In A Genius at the Chalet School, p55, Nina Rutherford is being given her timetable at the start of her first term. Miss Dene is speaking: "Handcrafts - you may please yourself whether you do these or not. I'd advise you to go to the first lesson or two and see how you like it. Most of the girls are very keen and it's always well to have something of that kind for recreation." She looked up at the girl. "You see, Nina, if things go as we all hope, you will probably have long journeys to take when you won't be able to practise. You couldn't do much of that on a train or a plane. No on can read all the time and it's soothing to have one's hands occupied at such times. So go and try it. That's my advice." - and very sensible advice it is too. When I was a child I used to get terribly bored with grown-ups' conversations. I couldn't read a book (rude) or leave the room to do something more interesting (very rude) but I quickly discovered that if I was sewing or knitting I looked like a pattern infant while at the same time getting something useful done. That's largely how I've managed to knit all my blankets - by making use of odd bits of time, like on a bus or even walking along the road. One of my colleagues once observed that all that was missing was a creel of peats on my back! Jo in 'Summer Term' knits on the train she's on with Erica before the crash. I always remembered reading that - we had an old hardback of Summer Term, one of the very few hardbacks around when I was a child - and I remember that that was something Jo did that I could do. Unlike almost everything else she did, which I couldn't hope to emulate. I have a book called The Girl's Companion, published by Blackie in 1947, though my edition is 1958. It says:
This doesn't of course work with paperbacks. And note the word accomplishment in that last sentence. In previous centuries, an accomplished girl might paint, play sing, speak Italian - or in the words of Lewis Carroll, study reeling, writhing and fainting in coils. By the mid-20th century, an accomplishment is being able to read and knit at the same time. Nowadays, the ability to walk and chew gum simultaneously no doubt also qualifies as an accomplishment. Creative outlet Handcrafts also offer a creative outlet for someone who couldn't do anything but work at what they love. The two classic examples of this as Tom Gay and Sybil Russell, each of whom is identified and referred to constantly in terms of her specialist skills in embroidery (Sybil) and woodworking and dolls'-house making (Tom). The Girl's Companion I mentioned earlier has over fifty chapters on every kind of leisure activity, but the first is on Embroidery. Knitting (which I've already quoted from) is very prosaic. But the first paragraph, of the first chapter? - A poet, it is said, embroiders the truth. That is, he embellishes it, enriches it. This seems to be a good definition of embroidery: embellishment, enrichment, the enriching of a material, the adorning of a background. And it may be said that, as in many things in life, the enrichment is twofold: to be an embroiderer is to enrich one's own life." And I don't think anyone would argue if I say that that does seem true of Sybil. Love Mending and other handiwork is a practical skill, but it also occurs in the books as a way of showing affection or love. Jo proudly announces that Anna does most of the mending but she Jo always darns Jack's socks herself. In A Problem for the Chalet School, Rosamund Lilley knits something for her sister's Dorothy's expected baby. Yes, she's in Switzerland, without much pocket money and with little chance of getting to shops to buy something for the baby - but Dorothy asks, and Rosamund is delighted to agree, that she makes something. Dorothy's letter, incidentally, ends 'make them blue and I'll send the money for them' - I always wanted to know, does that mean she knows she's having a boy or she just likes the colour blue?! The motto of the Benedictine order is ore et labore, prayer and work. Expressing love through work is a key theme of the books, often articulated explicitly in the Hobbies Club. The great goal of the Hobbies Club, certainly in the later books, is to create things to sell at the Annual Sale. The Club appears very early in the series - in Jo of the Chalet School, p279, Margia excitedly suggests that they have a club for 'c'llections' though it quickly becomes a chance to work on all sorts of projects. By Eustacia, the idea of such work having redemptive powers has taken a strong hold on the school, as Frieda suggests finding out what Eustacia likes and invite her to join Hobbies Club as a way of making her more like the others. The word charity is derived from the Latin, 'caritas', which actually means love. A Dominican friar, at the end of the 14th c, once preached in Florence on the subject of charity. He was praising the growth of the city states in Italy, which he felt were a sign of progress, and he said 'City and charity - civitas and caritas - sound so much alike because men love to live in them and be kind to one another'. The work of the Hobbies Club is, in the best sense, a work of charity. Everyone's skills are pressed into service, and every contribution is valued equally. The Chalet School girls work to fund a free bed in the Sanatorium, of course - but as it's Christmas, I'll read a passage you'll recognise, from Jo Returns, p 8
As Jo says to Margot at the start of A Problem for the Chalet School, 'Inasmuch as ye have done it for that poor child in Innsbruck ye did it for me'. Alison Lindsay Photos by Lesley Simpson |
I've
been asked to speak about the role of crafts in fandom - actually
I've been asked to concentrate mainly on my own work, but
I'm FAR too modest to do that! What I'm planning to do is
to explore some of the ideas, issues and contexts which surround
crafts in Brent-Dyer's books - particularly, of course, in
the Chalet School series - and invite you to consider some
of the questions that emerge.