20 Books of Summer: Rosemary at St Anne's by Joy Francis

 

 ”I’m rather looking forward to school,” Hazel remarked, dividing the last remnants of simnel cake among the three of us, Stella, Hazel and me.

Although I always absolutely loathed school and couldn’t wait to get away from it, I’ve always liked a good school story, especially one as far from my own experience as possible.

And as I was never at private school, never a boarder, never a twin, and never aspired to win any cup whatsoever – and especially not a sports’ one – Rosemary at St Anne’s ticked all the boxes for me.

It’s 1932, and Stella, Hazel and our narrator Rosemary are weekly boarders at St Anne’s. Stella and Rosemary are of course twins; they live in a comfortable house in the village of Heather Coombe, just ten miles from the school.  Their parents, ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’, are looked after by an army of maids, a cook, a housekeeper and a chauffeur. No wonder they can’t cope with having their children at home; the poor things must be exhausted.

Hazel Carmichael lives at the other end of the village, where her widowed mother is Officially Poor – but as always these things are relative, and Hazel, Mrs Carmichael and Hazel’s little sister Sheena still manage to occupy the dower house of a manor that’s been in Mrs C’s family for centuries. And surprise, surprise, they’ve managed to hang on to their dear old housekeeper Jane. After all,

‘She was really like one of the family.’

The new term begins. Miss Bentley, the Strict but Fair headmistress, implores the girls to make more effort to win all the cups and trophies that are available to the three fee-paying schools in the area. St Anne’s has of late been last in everything, and this will not do;

“To win honours should not be one’s chief ambition.” she told us gravely, “but lack of effort is weakening to the character. And I am afraid that it is through lack of effort that we, as a school, have not had one single success for nearly two years.”

Needless to say, the girls are all both consumed with guilt and fired with enthusiasm;

“If you all band together, and every girl does a little better than her best, I am convinced that St Anne’s will regain the prestige which, until the last little while, has been hers for three hundred years.”

Image (c) Watson Kennedy Fine Homes Seattle

Chief among the honours on offer is a tennis racquet autographed by none other than Miss Gatty-Thomas, former (and mystifyingly ‘adored’) games mistress and now a ‘tennis star.’ This will be awarded to;

“the form which plays the game the best.”

And if you can’t by now see what is coming over the next fourteen chapters, you, dear reader, have clearly never read Malory Towers, St Clare’s nor even The Naughtiest Girl in the School. But nevertheless I expect you will have your suspicions.

But before the girls can settle down to a term of being better than their best, along comes the terrible news that Hazel is now even poorer than the poor she was before. Mother has sensibly posted all her antique jewellery to a London saleroom on the very same night that a mail train is robbed by evil villains. Was it sent by registered post? What do you think?

“She sent it by post in a plain wrapper, because, well, you know how things get round in a village, and Mother was afraid that if she registered it, everyone in Heather Coombe would guess she was selling the jewellery and would pity her for being poor. But people will have to know now,” she (Hazel) finished desolately.

 (This reminds me of a recent incident, in which a friend in France tried to send me a book. She told the post office lady that she thought books could be sent at a reduced rate. ‘That’ came back the sharp reply, ‘Is only for serious books.’)

Of course the twins can’t lose Hazel, nor allow her to suffer the misery of having to leave the school, so off they go, planning how they will raise the money to pay her fees,

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way!”

says Stella. One can’t help feeling that, even in 1932, Stella is a tad over-optimistic if she thinks the prize that she hopes to win at the local flower show is going to fund two years at even the lowest achieving posh school. But hope springs eternal in the 1930’s schoolgirl’s breast. (Wherein nothing else springs, apparently – these are 14 year olds for whom boys simply do not exist, and in this book no-one even has a crush on a teacher, though they’re all madly competitive about giving Miss Bentley birthday presents.)

As the weeks pass and the various tournaments, recitals and competitions approach, everything the twins try to do goes wrong, and Rosemary in particular seems to bring the kiss of death to any promising scheme. She’s blamed by Miss Bentley for putting caterpillars in her lunch, she inadvertently causes the St Anne’s competitors to miss the bus to the Music Festival, she lets a goat into the garden and it eats Hazel’s nature notes while trampling all over Stella’s roses… The other girls are such saints that they not only forgive Rosemary for her endless muck-ups, they even think them funny, but of course Rosemary can’t forgive herself.

Then, left alone in the house when injury prevents her from attending the village event of the year, aka the church jumble sale, a visit from an old lady raises Rosemary’s suspicions. Can she foil the train robbers, retrieve the jewels, and return St Anne’s to its former glory?

I’m sure you can’t possibly guess.

Despite its predictability, melodrama and general nonsense, I enjoyed Rosemary at St Anne’s very much. Rosemary herself was an endearing character, and far more fun than any Blyton creation. There is no snobbery in this book – no talking down to servants or The Poor - and the twins’ horror at the idea of Hazel leaving the school is based solely on their wish to keep her with them.  When Rosemary thinks she is going to be expelled for her unintentional misdemeanours, she laments,

‘I had pitied Hazel; I envied her now. We should probably both leave at the end of term, but she would leave with honour.’

I loved all the talk of loyalty to friends and devotion to the school, and much though I doubt it, I still like to think that life was like this once.

I could find very little information about Joy Francis. The author's real name was Mrs Olive Sarah Folds (nee Hill); she was born in 1888, lived in Hertfordshire, and died in 1978. She wrote five girls' school stories between 1928 and 1936. And that's about it.  If anyone knows any more about her, please do share!