Jean of Storms, page 1
JEAN OF STORMS
B Y
ELINOR M. BRENT-DYER
Bettany Press
1996
First published in book form in Great Britain by Bettany Press 1996.
8 Kildare Road London E16 4AD.
This eversion published 2011.
Originally published in serial form in 1930 by the Shields Gazette.
Text © Elinor M. Brent-Dyer (1930), Chloe Rutherford (1996).
The right of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978 1 908304 07 0
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
I NEWS FROM INDIA
II THE DANCING CLASS
III FURTHER NEWS
IV ALLISON
V JEAN GIVES STORMS A SHOCK
VI “WELCOME HOME!”
VII THE FIRST TUSSLE
VIII JEAN MEETS THE DOCTOR
IX MRS TAYLOR
X AN ANXIOUS TIME
XI THAT NIGHT
XII “I WISHED WE ALWAYS LOVED THE SAME THINGS.”
XIII WHAT SUNDAY BROUGHT
XIV VARIOUS DISCOVERIES
XV MRS SEMPLE GIVES ADVICE
XVI GOSSIP AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
XVII KIRSTY COMES TO STORMS
XVIII MORAG SPEAKS HER MIND
XIX A REUNION AND TWO PUZZLES
XX KIRSTY
XXI AN UNFORTUNATE ENCOUNTER
XXII A FOLK-DANCE WEDDING
XXIII KIRSTY REMAINS AT STORMS
XXIV THE ARRIVAL OF ANGELA
XXV TROUBLE AND A RECONCILIATION
XXVI ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THE publishers would like to thank the following people, all of whom have contributed in different ways to this volume: Mrs Chloe Rutherford, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s heir, for permission to publish Jean of Storms in book form; Mr Ian Holland, editor of the present-day Shields Gazette; and Miss Doris Johnson of the South Shields local history library, who discovered the serialised novel and brought it to the attention of Polly Goerres of the New Chalet Club. For background information we are indebted to Fen Crosbie, Hazel James, Joan-Mary Jones and Helen McClelland. Sally Phillips played a major role in the book’s production, sharing the tasks of checking and editing the typescript and helping with the research and liaison. Joy Wotton did her usual professional editorial job on the Introduction and Afterword and advised on the manuscript itself. Elspeth Insch kindly drew the map of South Shields, showing where the story is set, and North Tyneside Libraries, the English Folk Dance and Song Society, Southampton City Heritage Services and Al Blunsdon loaned the photographs which have been used for illustrations. Finally, the book owes its existence primarily to the enthusiasm — and very hard work — of Polly Goerres, who initiated and sustained the project throughout. Her belief in the worth and interest of Jean of Storms has added another title to the bibliography of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer. We hope you agree with us that the enterprise was worthwhile.
Rosemary Auchmuty & Juliet Gosling
September 1996
JEAN OF STORMS
is dedicated with thanks to the memory of its author,
Elinor M. Brent-Dyer,
whose work continues to bring so much pleasure to so many readers today.
INTRODUCTION
POLLY GOERRES
JEAN of Storms first appeared as a serial between 5 April and 31 May 1930 in a provincial local evening newspaper, the six-times-a-week Shields Daily Gazette, which served the area now called South Tyneside and always carried one serialisation of a novel. At this time its author, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, was at the height of her powers as a writer of school stories for girls; this was the year that her eager schoolgirl readers saw the publication of The School by the River and Eustacia goes to the Chalet School. But Jean of Storms is not a story for schoolgirls at all, being a light romance for adult readers.
The heroine, Jean McCleod, is a 23-year-old woman (a lively soul who seems to owe a lot to the then teenage Joey Bettany), who lives a comfortable, middle-class existence with her 35-year-old aunt, Oona McCleod. When Jean’s widowed sister-in-law, Doris, dies in India, Doris’s two daughters, Jean’s niece Allison and her older half-sister Kirsty, are sent to live in England. Jean is to have the care of five-year-old Allison, while Kirsty goes to a paternal aunt on the south coast. During the near-vertical learning curve of child-rearing, Jean is wooed and won, not without some emotional discomfort, by a young doctor, Kenneth Errington. Her best friend, folk-dance teacher Mollie Stewart, is likewise courted by a local curate, Charles Benson. Interwoven into the love story plot are some well-drawn characters such as the fearsome Scottish housekeeper, Morag, Kirsty’s irksome Aunt Gladys, Mollie’s troublesome landlady Mrs Taylor, and the serene Moti-ayah from India.
Following its first publication, Jean of Storms lay undiscovered for 65 years, bound in copies of the Shields Daily Gazette in the local history vaults of South Shields Library. It did not come to light during Helen McClelland’s researches for the original edition of her biography Behind the Chalet School (New Horizon, 1981, revised edition published by Bettany Press, 1996). Neither did anyone who knew her at the time mention that she wrote for this newspaper, although it is thought now that Brent-Dyer penned a regular women’s column.
A column called “Eleanore — Mainly for Women” ran from 1924 to 1931; “Plain Jane” ran from 1931; and “A Shieldswoman’s Journal” began in the same year. There were also notes in the Gazette on society balls and dinners. On the surface, “Eleanore” could well have been from the pen of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, since it dealt with subjects as wide ranging and far sighted as “Using your vote wisely” and “Chemistry as a career for girls”. However, since Elinor had been living away from South Shields during much of the 1920s, it seems unlikely (although not impossible) that she had penned her copy from the other end of the country and sent it back every week to her home town.
Veronica Cheyne, who left the Misses Stewart’s school in 1929, recalls that: “it was assumed by us that the column signed ‘Eleanore’ was that of Miss Dyer, and ‘Plain Jane’ by a Patricia Docksey who had also been a pupil at our school, and the social column was written by a man.” However, Olga Hargreaves, who as Olga Sutherland had been one of the dedicatees of Rivals for the Chalet School (1929), thought that Brent-Dyer could have written either “Plain Jane” or “Mainly for Women”, but was certain that she had written the social column, recalling that whenever she and her elder sister went to a society ball, Miss Dyer was always there taking notes, so that they knew they would read reports of what they had worn in the following day’s newspapers.
It was only in 1995 that Miss Doris Johnson, who works in the South Shields local history library, was looking up a marriage announcement in the Shields Daily Gazette when her eyes fell on Jean of Storms — a full length novel serialised in Brent-Dyer’s own local newspaper. At about this time, I was passing through South Shields en route home from a visit to Scottish Chalet friends, and decided to call in on some of the people whom I’d met the previous year during the celebrations marking Brent-Dyer’s birth centenary (see The Chalet School Revisited, Bettany Press, 1994). It was purely on impulse that I did so, and quite by chance that I saw Doris who told me about Jean of Storms.
I immediately asked Doris if I might borrow her phone to tell Helen McClelland, Brent-Dyer’s biographer, about this amazing find. Helen rang to tell Brent-Dyer’s heir, Chloe Rutherford, and that evening I shared the thrilling news with as many of my Chalet friends as possible. As the book was so important to Chalet fans, I felt it was necessary that a copy be taken. This was not as easy as it might sound. For one thing, the photocopied print of the Shields Daily Gazette held at South Shields library was very tiny, and every line petered out for the last few words. Sometimes the order of the photocopies did not correspond to the order of the story in the newspaper, and on at least one occasion, paragraphs in the newspapers themselves were actually transposed. On two occasions the newspaper had omitted a chapter heading, so I had fun inventing a couple (Chapter X: “An Anxious Time” and Chapter XIX: “A Reunion and Two Puzzles”).
However, I was determined that other Brent-Dyer fans should be able to read Jean of Storms, and brought it to the attention of Rosemary Auchmuty and Juliet Gosling of Bettany Press. They considered that in marking an unusual departure for the author into the field of romance, Jean of Storms filled in a piece of the complex jigsaw that is the life and work of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, a piece that no Brent-Dyer fan had hitherto known was missing.
Once Bettany Press had decided to publish Jean of Storms as a companion volume to their three earlier books, The Chalet School Revisited (1994), Visitors for the Chalet School (1995) and a revised edition of Behind the Chalet School (1996), my typescript was checked by Rosemary Auchmuty and another Chalet fan, Sally Phillips, from original copies of the Shields Daily Gazette held in the British Museum’s Newspaper Library at Colindale. Although some of the episodes in the book, in particular the attitude of Morag to the unfamiliar black face of an ayah, are not politically correct by today’s standards, it was agreed that the book would not be edited and updated. Therefor
A little j’ography. I am very grateful to Joan-Mary Jones, whose family is from South Shields, and who grew up in the adjoining street to Brent-Dyer’s birthplace, Winchester Street, where her mother’s family actually lived, for providing me with a sketch map of the area. She has also researched Brent-Dyer’s fictitious place-names and their relationship to real-life place-names as only a local can. She writes:
To local residents, armed with old maps and reference books of the area, the problem of solving this puzzle becomes quite an easy task and a translation of place-names as follows:
Aulmbermouth — Tynemouth
Blyton Sands — Blyth
Hasnett — Cullercoats
Noviam — Newcastle upon Tyne
South Helling — South Shields.
As Joan discovered, Hasnett, like the actual village of Cullercoats, stands on a little circular bay on the north-east coast, and indeed to the south it “straggles and stretches” towards Aulmbermouth (Tynemouth). Hasnett itself, as Cullercoats, is part of the town of Whitley Bay. It has a long stretch of sand and low rocks and a steep bank of grass, the very rocks that Jean could have scrambled over. Until fairly recently the village was very well known for fishing, and a Cullercoats village fishwife, in a traditional costume, was a common sight.
A Quaker family called Dove owned a mill in the area during the sixteenth century, and they were responsible for the subsequent development of the village of Cullercoats. In 1682 (forty years before the date above the door of the fictitious house of Storms), Thomas Dove Junior built a mansion house in Backrow which he called Dove Cottage, but it became known locally as Sparra Hall. It was in continuous occupancy until its demolition in 1979, and there is every chance that Elinor knew this house and intended it for her Storms. Further details about the house are lacking, other than that it stood on the northern peak of a landlocked bay, not quite the north-east coast like Storms.
Around Sparra Hall (a northern corruption of “Sparrow” for “Dove”) a number of houses and fishermen’s cottages were gradually built, so that the village of Cullercoats developed and thrived with its smugglers, coal trade and finally fishing. By the 1880s, Cullercoats was a very small but distinct community with its own way of life, very much like the Hasnett in which Oona McCleod visits the poor fisherfolk with her bountiful basket. The North-Eastern Railway opened its new coastal line in the wake of the abandonment of the old local Whitley Waggonway route, and Cullercoats station was opened in about 1910. By this time, two tram companies provided a full service on the twelve-mile stretch between Newcastle Central Station and North Shields and on through Tynemouth to Whitley Bay, with an established tramline station at Cullercoats. As we see regularly in Jean of Storms, the tram cars are a well-used mode of transport for Jean and Mollie in particular: “Jean McCleod . . . hurried . . . to the car terminus. The run to Aulmbermouth was not a long one — twenty minutes or so — but the cars only ran every quarter of an hour, and she had set off late.”
Aulmbermouth, the seaside town, is very likely Tynemouth. It is within walking distance of Cullercoats and has fine old buildings like the Regency ones that Aulmbermouth boasts. It has a promenade and a Northumberland Square, which was the street in the fictitious Aulmbermouth where Dr Errington lived. The large private school, King’s School, at Tynemouth could well have been the school which Jean visited for her dancing classes. The writer Harriet Martineau lived in a fine old Regency house in Tynemouth in the 1840s. Like Aulmbermouth, the town boasted an air of refinement, with a promenade, and a mixture of Regency houses and shops in Front Street.
Joan’s research only enabled her to find one smuggler’s cave which fitted the location of the final episode, literally a cliff-hanger! This is at Cullercoats itself and she remarks that Elinor described it as the “short bents grass”, since the grassy area above the cliffs along the coast at South Shields and Marsden is still known as “the Bents”. Another place retaining similarities with the text is Blyth, the real-life Blyton Sands, a small coal port reached from Hasnett by taking the north road past the rabbit-infested fields that Jean mentions. South Shields was depicted, according to Joan, as South Helling; in both cases they were Roman towns famed for their exports. Noviam is of course Newcastle throughout the text, although an actual place called Newcastle is mentioned in Chapter X. Newcastle was the nearest large city to Elinor’s birthplace. When writing her not-terribly-revealing potted autobiography, “Something About Me”, for the Chalet Club News Letter, Elinor admitted to having been born “near Newcastle”.
That Jean of Storms is set in Elinor’s native South Tyneside is fascinating for any Brent-Dyer scholar. Apart from a passing reference to a WAAF from “canny Soo’ Shields” in Gay from China at the Chalet School (1944), a play, Polly Danvers — Heiress, written while living in South Shields, and the possibility that an early school story, Carnation of the Upper Fourth (1934), was based around the Tyneside area, Elinor’s works are set away from the area in which she grew up. Why, then, did she choose with Jean of Storms to write about it? South Shields has its picturesque spots, but even Tom Fennelly, Press and Publicity Officer for South Tyneside Metropolitan Borough Council, would agree that it lacks the appeal of Pertisau-am- Achensee. I would like to think that, being settled back in her home town, she wanted to write about it for a change. Such a setting could hardly have been more appropriate for a serial in her local newspaper.
Brent-Dyer is not on record as ever referring to Jean of Storms in later life. She appears to have rejected her past attempt at writing for the adult romance market, just as she rejected her “unfashionable” north- eastern roots. Yet Jean of Storms is as clearly her work as any of her school stories, and the same characteristics which have attracted thousands of readers to those books are present in this apparently very different work.
In conclusion, it is marvellous to know that at last Jean of Storms is available for present-day fans to read. We must be grateful to Doris Johnson for rediscovering it, and to Bettany Press for making it available to us. View it as you would an old and well-loved friend trying out a new hobby or indulging a new passion. Regard it with the affection that anything by Brent-Dyer rouses in a Chalet fan. There can be no more Chalet titles from Elinor’s pen, but here is something new and fresh to us. The plot may be as predictable as that of some of the Chalet books, but Jean of Storms is a warm and comforting read with strong characters and a happy ending. I hope you will enjoy it.
A LOCAL SERIAL
by a Local Writer
*****
The next Serial Story to be Published in
“The Shields Daily Gazette” is entitled
“JEAN OF STORMS”
*****
THE AUTHOR IS
Miss Elinor Brent-Dyer
a South Shields Lady,
an accomplished writer
