This was one of my favourite books as a child; it combines two of what I thought as a child were the best settings for girl’s stories: boarding schools and the second world war. The fact that the second world war is a really good setting is probably just due to growing up with children’s literature in the 1970s and 1980s when it was a fairly major sub genre probably because many of the people writing children’s books at the time had been children themselves in the war. This book is different to others I read because it is actually of 1940 vintage.

Brent Dyer began the Chalet School series in 1925 and kept adding books to the series through to her death in about 1970. For the most part you can’t much tell when the books are set, or I couldn’t as a child. They are in some earlier part of the 20th century than I lived in but I couldn’t have paced them any closer to their time if it wasn’t for this book in the series. The original Chalet School was set in the Austrian Tyrol and by the late 1930s it was untenable for Brent Dyer to continue setting contemporary books in Austria because of the Nazi invasion. And so this story of the school leaving Austria and heading to safer climes was written. Unfortunately Brent-Dyer picked Guernsey as the new home of the Chalet School and had to move the school on again when the Nazi’s invaded the Channel Islands.

The reason I was rereading this book is not just because it was a childhood favourite but because I read an Armada paperback version produced in the 1970s which I later found out were heavily edited versions of the original stories and this episode was one of the most heavily edited. There’s a full summary of the changes on the Friends of the Chalet School website. The book has recently been reprinted in it’s original form and I wanted to see what I’d missed for myself.

I’d always felt that the middle of the story was missing something and I’m pleased to find an entire chapter had been cut where I felt that there had been a gap. After the main characters make a madcap escape from Austria to Switzerland in the paperback we are suddenly plunged into ten months later in Guernsey. There is still this ten month gap in the hardback but the expunged chapter covers the short period spent in Switzerland and I agree with the FOCS article that this “doesn’t half fill some gaps!”.

On the whole it was enjoyable rereading the book even if I did find some of it a bit cringeworthy and not all of the things that offend me as a 21st century adult are things that weren’t in my paperbacks. Everybody seems so much richer and posher than I saw them to be as a child and it’s stated several times in the book that they school has mostly “cured Biddy Ryan of her Kerry brogue” which winds me up no end. Also the way that Jem Russell could buy up a nearly new 150 room luxury hotel on the off chance of relocating the school to it had me in hoots of laughter. Especially since he didn’t ask his wife (who sort of runs the place) about it until afterwards. The general attitude of men towards women in the book is pretty condescending for the most part.

I don’t think I’ll be running off to reread the whole series but I did enjoy the time I spend with these old friends and I will be keeping an eye on what else Girls Gone By are reprinting.