REREAD: The Girls of Chequertrees
Mar. 1st, 2017 07:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllGratis, a lesson you'd think I would have learned: when buying a second-hand book, it is worth checking the last page, not to scan the content - I'm no advocate of that! - but to make sure that it's there. The last page of a story has to be the most irritating missing page. This lesson did not come about as a result of the book I'm about to review.
The Girls of Chequertrees: Marion St John Webb Harrap October 1925
This is a reread because I accidentally purchased a second copy of this book, having forgotten I already owned one, and I’d forgotten the story too. I had a vague idea it was a boarding school story and Chequertrees was the name of the school. That is not the case.
What did strike me as I reread this was that there’s the germ of a stage play here, oddly enough. There’s also the promise of a far more gothic story than it turns out to be in the first chapter, entitled ‘The Window Opposite’.
Sixteen year old Pamela Heath and her family are shocked when a Mr Joseph Sigglesthorne, a man as remarkable as his name, pays a call to say that a distant relative, a Miss Emily Crabingway, has a proposition for Pamela. If she agrees to come to Miss Crabingway’s home, Chequertrees, in the village of Barrowfield and live there for six months, playing hostess of a kind to three other girls and abiding by certain conditions, she will earn £50 – a significant sum in those days. One of the conditions includes avoiding a locked room in the house and the others mean very limited contact with her family for the duration.
Curious, Pamela agrees, and in a few days’ time, meets her new housemates for half a year: snobby Isobel, stolid Caroline and over-sensitive Beryl. Pamela is the most normal and likeable of the lot, and a good choice as hostess, as she insists on a plan of action to keep them all occupied and tactful ways of avoiding squalls between the very different girls. Also living there are the cook Martha and maid Ellen – Miss Crabingway having taken herself off to Scotland for the six months. The three other girls are even more distantly connected with their eccentric benefactress.
There is the mystery of why Miss Crabingway set things up this way and tension over whether all four will keep their word and not break the conditions. The focus is on the development of the girls – Beryl is not as well off as the others, and Isobel, really, is a snob who is disdainful towards the lower classes, but the authoress plays it softly, softly around her, finding and pointing to Isobel’s good qualities and even showing how mixing with other girls who find her limited ways amusing if not taxing is good for dull Caroline. Meanwhile Pamela, who is artistic, befriends a local artist. Perhaps the story would have benefitted from not being about the doings of all four girls – the friendship between Pamela and Beryl isn’t as strong in the second half as you’d have expected from the first half, and the mysterious limping woman is far more peripheral than she should be, even up to the big reveal.
This is an unusual book, in that it borrows the mysterious benefactress trope and other suspense trappings, but tries to make the story as down to earth as possible. But yes, I could see the germ of a play about four such different girls brought together under one roof, relatively cut off from kith and kin, for a potentially claustrophobic six months; it could either be existential or melodramatic.
The Girls of Chequertrees: Marion St John Webb Harrap October 1925
This is a reread because I accidentally purchased a second copy of this book, having forgotten I already owned one, and I’d forgotten the story too. I had a vague idea it was a boarding school story and Chequertrees was the name of the school. That is not the case.
What did strike me as I reread this was that there’s the germ of a stage play here, oddly enough. There’s also the promise of a far more gothic story than it turns out to be in the first chapter, entitled ‘The Window Opposite’.
Sixteen year old Pamela Heath and her family are shocked when a Mr Joseph Sigglesthorne, a man as remarkable as his name, pays a call to say that a distant relative, a Miss Emily Crabingway, has a proposition for Pamela. If she agrees to come to Miss Crabingway’s home, Chequertrees, in the village of Barrowfield and live there for six months, playing hostess of a kind to three other girls and abiding by certain conditions, she will earn £50 – a significant sum in those days. One of the conditions includes avoiding a locked room in the house and the others mean very limited contact with her family for the duration.
Curious, Pamela agrees, and in a few days’ time, meets her new housemates for half a year: snobby Isobel, stolid Caroline and over-sensitive Beryl. Pamela is the most normal and likeable of the lot, and a good choice as hostess, as she insists on a plan of action to keep them all occupied and tactful ways of avoiding squalls between the very different girls. Also living there are the cook Martha and maid Ellen – Miss Crabingway having taken herself off to Scotland for the six months. The three other girls are even more distantly connected with their eccentric benefactress.
There is the mystery of why Miss Crabingway set things up this way and tension over whether all four will keep their word and not break the conditions. The focus is on the development of the girls – Beryl is not as well off as the others, and Isobel, really, is a snob who is disdainful towards the lower classes, but the authoress plays it softly, softly around her, finding and pointing to Isobel’s good qualities and even showing how mixing with other girls who find her limited ways amusing if not taxing is good for dull Caroline. Meanwhile Pamela, who is artistic, befriends a local artist. Perhaps the story would have benefitted from not being about the doings of all four girls – the friendship between Pamela and Beryl isn’t as strong in the second half as you’d have expected from the first half, and the mysterious limping woman is far more peripheral than she should be, even up to the big reveal.
This is an unusual book, in that it borrows the mysterious benefactress trope and other suspense trappings, but tries to make the story as down to earth as possible. But yes, I could see the germ of a play about four such different girls brought together under one roof, relatively cut off from kith and kin, for a potentially claustrophobic six months; it could either be existential or melodramatic.
