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discipline

NEW STORY – Naughty Arabella Gets the Sack – A Krampus at Saint Clare Story

Posted on By Mija

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Foreword:

Every so often, a Saint Clare story arrives from an unexpected corner—this one came from an offhand comment on Bluesky about how “Arabella” is the name of a girl who is absolutely up to mischief. That joke blossomed into an open challenge to write a story with “Naughty Arabella” somewhere in the title.

https://bsky.app/profile/mija-again.bsky.social/post/3m754wu5vrc2n
This is my offering.

Naughty Arabella Gets the Sack – Winter 1925 at Saint Clare’s takes place firmly within the larger Saint Clare universe, but outside the Inez of the Upper IV arc. It introduces an earlier generation of girls—and a long-standing bit of school folklore involving a seasonal visitor who is, essentially, OFSTED with hooves. Krampus pays annual calls to Saint Clare’s, but this year he meets his match in Arabella Fairchild: blonde, brilliant, catastrophically charming, and overdue for supernatural accountability.

The result is part school-story romp, part institutional mythmaking, and wholly Saint Clare’s.

 STORY – Naughty Arabella Gets the Sack

Chapter I – In Which Saint Clare’s Watches a Drama Unfold

Saint Clare School for Girls slept beneath a frosty moon in the winter of 1925, its chimneys puffing industriously and its corridors stretching away into dim, draughty mystery. Most of the Second Form were fast asleep in their flannel nightgowns—except for those peering nervously from their beds, listening to the unmistakable CLONK—CLONK—CLONK of something decidedly not school-sanctioned approaching.

Arabella Fairchild, however, was not in her nightgown.

Oh no.

Arabella stood at the centre of the corridor, dressed in her full uniform—immaculate gymslip, snowy white shirt, hair ribbons neat at either side of her head—because Arabella firmly believed that if one must face the supernatural, one should at least look as though one were about to captain the lacrosse team.

She was, as the Headmistress had once remarked in a despairingly admiring tone, “the sort of blonde beauty who, in six years, during her first season, will oblige her father to consider hiring armed guards1Borrowed from Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather (I think). in addition to the usual chaperones.”

Arabella knew this.

Arabella relied on this.

But Arabella’s beauty had never yet faced Krampus.

Girls Who Watched

Behind her, in the rows of narrow iron bedsteads, half the Second Form crouched behind blankets, whispering furiously.

“She’s done it again,” hissed Primrose Pembury, who had once taken the blame for Arabella’s practical joke involving a frog in the Latin master’s hat.

“And she’ll get away with it again,” muttered Clara Dawlish, who had written one hundred lines after Arabella persuaded her to switch name-tags on the exam papers.

“I’d like to see her caught. Just once!” whispered Lottie, who had been given detention when Arabella accidentally (on purpose) set off a smoke-bomb during sewing.

Little Sally Billings (who had been framed for the “ink-in-the-cocoa” incident) clutched her hot-water bottle and breathed, “Look at her! Smirking like she owns the place!”

The girls’ resentment simmered in the cold air.

This was the year Arabella Fairchild would receive her comeuppance.

They could feel it.

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  • 1
    Borrowed from Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather (I think).

The Music of Discipline: Notes Toward a Sonic Saint Clare

Posted on By Mija

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Author’s Note: 

Classroom with piano

This post started in another space as I tried to explain why I’m listening, over and over, to a playlist made especially for the Saint Clare world, how it’s constructed and why having it is important to the way I write and my ability to recapture the story’s moods. I’ve been using some version of this playlist (it started with Appalachian Spring  something I’ve listened to and has been a favorite for as long as I can remember) since I returned to Saint Clare this past summer. For me, specific music creates and guides headspace, especially when it comes to writing.  So this post has become a reflection on how music, for girls historically and for me personally, moves between structure and freedom—discipline as both enclosure and release.

So…

Imagine I’m standing at the gates of Saint Clare looking in. The key to entering is letting go of my academic voice and reclaiming and embracing Mija’s — one that’s curious, playful, and unhurried, that knows this is far more about the journey than the destination. This post is a kind of meta reflection, written as a map as I try to find a path back into the Saint Clare world, imagine it leading to a different sort of writing practice, one that can generate hundreds of thousands of words. Writing fiction at this scale isn’t only about research or structure — I’m terrible at structure. Instead it’s about mood, and sound. For me, that begins with an album or playlist that I play every time I want to be in that headspace. 1That much, the need connect specific music to specific writing, is also true for my larger pieces of academic writing These notes on music and discipline are about creating a state of calm focus, a rhythm — one where research and scholarship become texture for Saint Clare rather than, as they would with academic writing, constructing an argument. In this space, joy and rigor can share the same page — one, ideally, of discipline, structure, and pleasure.

These days when I think about the world of Saint Clare, I don’t begin with geography, plot, or even period. I begin with a sound. Not the bell (though there are bells enough in Saint Clare’s world) but a bow against a violin string — specifically my grandmother’s violin. The two told stories of how, when they first married (in the 1930s) she played for my grandfather in the evenings after dinner. While there was radio available, they didn’t have one yet. Nor any sort of record player. There was only the music she carried from her girlhood. She wasn’t especially musically gifted, though my grandfather claimed otherwise. Her father had been the true amateur musician, trained at Eton and Oxford, an organist and choir director who played faithfully for every parish he served. From him she inherited not virtuosity but devotion: the belief that to play faithfully, however simply, was a kind of gift and prayer.

Less than a hundred years ago that was what one did in the evenings: read aloud,  practice music, keep culture alive by hearing it, playing it, creating it physically, and sonically. The bow against string, the pause before the note — gestures of steadiness, civility, and attention. Then too, in this world, silence still had somewhere to sit. I think of that quiet, live music as a discipline — the same sort that, in my imagination, fills the corridors of Saint Clare’s School for Girls.  These gestures of steadiness, civility, and attention are precisely the point where structure meets possibility: the body obeys, but the mind has freedom and space to wander and imagine.

The Sound of Education

As I’ve said before, I’m not a visual person or thinker.  Saint Clare manifested in my head as voices, music, not by what I imagined seeing, but hearing. The hum of a slightly out-of-tune piano before morning prayers mingled with the crack of hockey sticks on frost. The girls’ school, I realised, wasn’t merely an institution; it was an instrument, an intergenerational sonic landscape.

Victorians would have approved. When writing about education, they treated young girls and young, unmarried women as if they were violins in need of constant tuning to a pitch of virtue writ large. Erasmus Darwin (a less famous Darwin, quite enthusiastic about female education rather than beetles) proposed that girls could be improved through art and music.2 Darwin, Erasmus. A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, in Boarding Schools. London: Gale and the British Library, 1797. Nearly a hundred years later, his theory is further refined with Isabella Tod, suggesting that a good education should teach girls “self-government.”3 Tod, Isabella M.S. “On the Education of Girls of the Middle Classes (1874).” In The Education Papers, 230–247. London: Routledge, 2013.  An attempt to depict these ideals inspire and resonate in at Saint Clare, where musical and moral instruction have echoed one another across decades. Change comes to Saint Clare slowly.

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  • 1
    That much, the need connect specific music to specific writing, is also true for my larger pieces of academic writing
  • 2
    Darwin, Erasmus. A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, in Boarding Schools. London: Gale and the British Library, 1797.
  • 3
    Tod, Isabella M.S. “On the Education of Girls of the Middle Classes (1874).” In The Education Papers, 230–247. London: Routledge, 2013.
discipline

Honour’s Game, Part 3 – December 1938 – January 1939

Posted on By Mija

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The story of Inez de Vries’s experiences in the summer of 1955 unfolds through a series of documents – some official, pulled from the prim and unforgiving files of Saint Clare’s School for Girls; others are more intimate, drawn from the journals, letters, and scribbled notes of the girls themselves. Some will appear typed and orderly; others will retain the texture of handwriting, rendered in a cursive-style font. Readers are invited to step into the role of archivist, assembling the story from these traces, and imagining the lives that fill the gaps between pages—the tensions, the alliances, the secrets too dangerous to write down. Not everything will be explained.

But Inez watches. And remembers.

This story takes readers back to 1938 and tells the story of Inez’s parents, especially Lady Gwendolyn “Honour” de Vries, a St. Clare Old Girl who notices far more than most people realize.

Note: Comments are read and much appreciated. Much as I like reading them on Twitter and Bluesky, I love getting them here and promise to respond. Moreover your responses and ideas are included in the archives and may shift and change the story’s evolution. Also, the observant reader may notice Honour has a new font. I hope it’s more readable. 

Having trouble with the handwriting? Try the plain text version. 

Greystone Abbey, January 1939

If you’ve followed Honour this far – through her first lesson, her first report, and her first taste of consequence – you’ll know how easily a game of observation can become something else.
The new year finds her far from Belgravia, shut in by rain and flooded fields, testing both her wit and her husband’s patience. The guests have gone; Darlington’s lessons continue.

This story follows:

Honour’s Lesson

Honour’s Game – Prologue

Honour’s Game – Part 1

Honour’s Game – Part 2

You might want to read them first. 

Part Three

From the Archivist

From the Lady de Vries Collection, Blue Room Archives, Saint Clare’s School for Girls

The papers presented here form part of what is now known as the Lady de Vries Collection. Though the correspondence was originally preserved among the private files of her husband, Edmund Alexander de Vries, 9th Earl of Darlington, its preservation and eventual deposit at Saint Clare’s are due to Lady Gwendolyn Randolph de Vries herself.

The exchange of initials — D. and H. — occurs throughout. Their precise origins are unclear; however, internal evidence suggests that these letters were both a private correspondence between husband and wife and, increasingly, a record of informal “exercises” undertaken by Lady de Vries during the late 1930s.

The editors have retained the original orthography and punctuation. A few later pencil notes in Lord Darlington’s hand are reproduced in grey type. Where the line between affection and assignment blurs, readers are invited to remember that the world beyond these pages was also shifting — toward war, secrecy, and a very different kind of education.

Recovered documents: December 1938 – January 1939

The following entries belong to that first winter at Greystone Abbey, when the young Countess was learning that discipline can be an intimacy of its own. The surviving pages are marked in her hand and his — neat pencil corrections threading through her typed reports. Both of them writing in their fountain penned script. What began in London drawing rooms now turns domestic, quieter and more perilous.

In these documents, the young Lady Honour de Vries continues working to master her husband’s “exercises”—tasks meant to discipline her curiosity and temper her impulsiveness. Yet what began as a private game of observation now reaches beyond the drawing room. A tea in Chester Square leads to the American Embassy at Grosvenor Square, and the world of polite conversation begins to tremble with rumours of the coming war.

Through reports, annotations, and private diaries, we see the gradual shaping of a partnership: his precision against her wit, his restraint against her appetite for understanding. Honour still writes to please him—but she is also beginning to see, to listen, and to turn the rules of his game to her own advantage.

The tone remains domestic, almost playful. Yet under its surface, something colder and more intricate begins to form.

Note: Comments are read and much appreciated. Much as I enjoy seeing them on Twitter and Bluesky, I especially love receiving them here and promise to respond. Your observations and ideas are entered into the Saint Clare archives and may subtly shift the story’s evolution.

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fiction

Melodrama by Post: Aunt Gladys, Lady de Vries, and Other Disasters

Posted on By Mija

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How to Read Inez of the Upper Fourth

Banner of "How to Read Inez of the Upper iV"The story of Inez de Vries unfolds through a series of documents—some official, pulled from the prim and unforgiving files of Saint Clare’s School for Girls; others are more intimate, drawn from the journals, letters, and scribbled notes of the girls themselves. Some will appear typed and orderly; others will retain the texture of handwriting, rendered in a cursive-style font. Readers are invited to step into the role of archivist, assembling the story from these traces, and imagining the lives that fill the gaps between pages—the tensions, the alliances, the secrets too dangerous to write down. Not everything will be explained. But Inez is watching. And she remembers.

Note: Comments are read and much appreciated. Much as I like reading them on Twitter and Bluesky, I love getting them here and promise to respond. Moreover your responses and ideas are included in the archives and may shift and change the story’s evolution.

(Writing this section of the story has me missing the ASS/SSS poster and story writer, the late, great Alex Birch 1Alex’s stories are other places on the ‘net, however I’m absolutely sure The Spanking Story Archive had his enthusiastic permission. So try there first.more than I can rightly say.)

Introduction – A Prefatory Word

At Saint Clare’s, it is a truth universally acknowledged (at least by Ronnie Elwood) that any girl seen in Inez de Vries’s company after lights out is more or less doomed. Thus Clarissa Charrington — (a character created by reader JustABoomer) a perfectly decent Lower IV with a genius for self-pity and a Jelly Baby happiness scale— was slippered for nothing more shocking than talking in slippers. And this was before her role in the “The Secret Letters” or with Lady de Vries and Headmaster Lewis had even been revealed. 

Trusting his indulgent understanding, Clarissa poured out her grievances to “Papa,” only to find he had abruptly transformed into “Father,” replying with all the ponderous dignity of the House of Commons. Clarissa, meanwhile, revealed a transformation of her own: the once devoted daughter emerged as a haughty, stroppy teenager, indignant at every turn and grandly refusing the hundred lines set for her. What might have remained a minor school punishment swelled into a correspondence campaign. Aunt Gladys, recalled from her Highland idyll with all the grace of a cat yanked from a sun-beam, contributed her tilted-halo irreverence by post, while Lady de Vries, with a deft flick of the foil at the Garden Fête, contrived to elevate the whole business into something resembling a diplomatic incident.

Thus, a few minutes’ chatter after lights out blossomed into an exchange of letters in which Papa became Father, daughter became adversary, and a melodrama about six slipper whacks on the knickers went speeding back and forth across the country by post — culminating in a command summons so imperious it required a telegram and sleeper train.

(Having trouble with the handwriting? Try the simple font version.)

 

 

Clarissa Elizabeth Charrington
Saint Clare’s School for Girls

Lower IV Dormitory
22 June 1955

Dearest Papa,
   You must prepare yourself — for I have suffered one of the most frightful injustices in the whole history of school.

   On Tuesday evening I was caught in the Upper IV common room after lights out. Yes, I own up: I was out of bed in slippers and dressing gown, with Inez. But what were we doing? Only talking. No feasts, no sneaking fags behind the lavs, no plotting to burn the place down — just talking!

   The punishment? One Saturday detention and six whacks with the house slipper across our knickers. Papa, it was beastly humiliating. As if I were some dreadful hardened case when my only crime was conversation. I know girls who’ve had nothing more than a ticking-off for worse.

   And everyone can see why. It wasn’t what I did — it was who I was with. Because it was Inez, the staff came swooping like hawks, and I was caught in their net. She can’t so much as sneeze without someone making a whole to-do of it. That I should catch it too seems monstrously unfair.

   I bore it like a soldier, of course — not a single tear, though the corridor was thick with girls craning their necks to see. Matron tutted and gave me a spoonful of cod-liver oil afterwards (as if that helped!). I can’t help thinking it was all absurdly over the top.

   Really, Papa, you must agree it was hardly tyranny beastliness. A detention and a slippering for twelve minutes after lights out? Mamma would have called it petty, I’m sure, and I daresay you might too.
  Please do say I’m right to be indignant. It would comfort me to know at least someone thinks talking after lights out is not the moral equivalent of mutiny.

   Your bruised but not beaten Darling, Daring Daughter,

Clarissa

P.S. On my Jelly Baby scale: 2½. Pride very sore, bottom less so (thank Heavens).

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    Alex’s stories are other places on the ‘net, however I’m absolutely sure The Spanking Story Archive had his enthusiastic permission. So try there first.
fiction

The Secret Letters – Part 1

Posted on By Mija

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Banner of "How to Read Inez of the Upper iV"The story of Inez de Vries unfolds through a series of documents—some official, pulled from the prim and unforgiving files of Saint Clare’s School for Girls; others are more intimate, drawn from the journals, letters, and scribbled notes of the girls themselves. Some will appear typed and orderly; others will retain the texture of handwriting, rendered in a cursive-style font. Readers are invited to step into the role of archivist, assembling the story from these traces, and imagining the lives that fill the gaps between pages—the tensions, the alliances, the secrets too dangerous to write down. Not everything will be explained. But Inez is watching. And she remembers.

Note: Comments are read and much appreciated. Much as I like reading them on Twitter and Bluesky, I love getting them here and promise to respond. Moreover your responses and ideas are included in the archives and may shift and change the story’s evolution.

Introduction

The Secret Letters exchange began when Clarissa Charrington slipped a note into the post for her aunt Gladys, with Beano clippings and a sly message from Inez de Vries tucked inside. Gladys, amused and willing, forwarded the enclosure under her own respectable cover. In this way, the girls’ words travelled by official post — yet hidden in plain sight, a letter within a letter.

Placed between the correspondence between Lady de Vries and the Headmaster and the memoranda of The Elwood Files, this packet shows another face of Saint Clare’s: the smuggled confidences, the dodges, the clever workarounds that made school life both dangerous and delightful.

It also helps explain one puzzle of the summer term: how Lady de Vries came to know of her daughter’s punishment almost at once, when other attempts at posting letters — Ronnie’s, most notably — were intercepted and handed over to staff. For Gwen, the way was cleared by her niece-by-marriage, and the Headmaster and faculty were left wondering how she learned so quickly.

Those who remember school will recognise it straightaway — the thrill of knowing your secret was out, the conspiratorial tone (“if you’re not too greedy”), the Beano page folded in like a wink, the sense that one joke could topple into disaster if an adult opened the wrong envelope.

Having trouble with the handwriting? Try the plain text version.

Clarissa Elizabeth Charrington

Saint Clare’s School for Girls

13 June 1955

Dearest Glad,

Thanks awfully for your last — and for the gossip about Cousin Margaret’s fête. I can just see her trying to look queenly with jam on her gloves and nose. How long was it before someone told her? Or maybe no one dared!

Everything’s much the same here — prep, bells, and the usual scramble for hot water (honestly you’d think we were fighting for it like rations). I’m sending you two Beano clippings that gave us a proper giggle in the dorm. Minnie the Minx in the second one is the spit of a certain Upper IV girl — you’d know the sort, can make a Latin lesson feel like the build-up to a jailbreak.

IdV has the staff muttering and the rest of us craning our necks to see what happens next. That’s why I tucked in the second clipping — if you like it you might pass it along to someone who’d appreciate the likeness (you know who). Just keep it under your hat — not everyone here has the right sense of humour, and I’d be in the soup if it got round.

Buckets & buckets of love,

Clarissa

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books

Saint Clare Prehistory, Part One – In which The Luggage steals my sources

Posted on By Mija

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This post will (hopefully) evolve. It’s intended to be a living bibliography of boarding school books, stitched together while my brick-red school trunk goes off into an alternative universe to have adventures without me… because every great school story begins with a missing kit and misplaced books.

There are still several days of Oasis Party posts (first and second) waiting in the wings, and more than a few Inez entries stranded halfway through editing. In theory, finishing those should have my full attention for this Friday morning’s blogging. In practice, however, my AuDHD brain—already juggling post-COVID fog, the occasional energy crash, ridiculous Southern California late-summer humidity and heat, unanswered emails, and an overwhelming number of personal and professional to-do lists—has staged a coup. It looked at the careful queue of half-finished projects, waved politely, and declared: what we really need right now is to get a boarding school bibliography posted.

And so here we are.

I’ve been meaning for ages to pull together a proper list of books and studies—especially those centered on British girls’ schools. Partly as a research tool, part a nostalgia trip, and, of course, partly an excuse for muttering, “Can you believe this was actually published… for children!?” As a research resource, it’s also slowly taking shape in Zotero, where I no longer have to depend on memory (unreliable), BBEdit, my favorite writing space, on random pages of notebooks, or on the chaotic space that I call my desk.

FedEx account of The Luggage’s journey. Clearly there is a portal somewhere in the LA sorting facility.

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fiction

The Lady and the Headmaster

Posted on By Mija

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How to Read “Inez of the Upper IV”

Banner of “How to Read Inez of the Upper iV”The story of Inez de Vries unfolds through a series of documents—some official, pulled from the prim and unforgiving files of Saint Clare’s School for Girls; others are more intimate, drawn from the journals, letters, and scribbled notes of the girls themselves. Some will appear typed and orderly; others will retain the texture of handwriting, rendered in a cursive-style font. Readers are invited to step into the role of archivist, assembling the story from these traces, and imagining the lives that fill the gaps between pages—the tensions, the alliances, the secrets too dangerous to write down. Not everything will be explained. But Inez is watching. And she remembers.

Note: Comments are read and much appreciated. Much as I like reading them on Twitter and Bluesky, I love getting them here and promise to respond. Moreover your responses and ideas are included in the archives and may shift and change the story’s evolution.

Introduction

In which an Old Girl writes, and luncheon invitations become articles of surrender.

Most Fourth Form girls, after receiving a tawsing, a detention, and a caning, learn to keep their heads down. Inez de Vries, however, reached out to her mother. Her account of the affair travelled through the post as a stowaway, arriving at Hollingwood Hall with the stealth of a midnight feast.

Lady Honor de Vries — Head Girl by record, an Old Girl to her fingertips — writes on monogrammed blue paper, her words as precise as they are perilous. They reach Saint Clare’s Headmaster like a perfectly timed volley on the hockey pitch: elegant in delivery, devastating in effect.

Poor Mr. Lewis, veteran and Headmaster, responds on cream bond, summoning every Edwardian circumlocution to defend his flank. He insists that Saint Clare has “ever been jealous of its reputation” — a dangerous protestation, given that his previous post at a boys’ school ended, rather suddenly, and without fanfare. Here there lingers scarcely more than the whisper of a whisper, yet Lady de Vries has contrived to hear it.

The duel proceeds with the utmost courtesy: “your obedient servant” meets “with every good wish,” and each line conceals more sting than any prefect’s detention book. Meanwhile, Inez herself is counselled by Mummy in terms worthy of a field manual: play for position, win gracefully, reform from within, and, above all, guard your hands if you value your skin.

Having trouble with the handwriting? Try the simple font version.

Lady G. Honor de Vries

 

15 June 1955

Dear Headmaster Lewis,

     I hope this letter finds you well and that St. Clare continues to uphold its fine tradition of cultivating young ladies with discipline, character, and common sense. I am writing in connection with an incident involving my daughter, Inez.

     I have received a somewhat dramatic letter from her which I have chosen—very deliberately—not to share with our solicitor.

    According to Inez, she received not one but two separate rounds of corporal punishment over the matter of a late essay, along with a most curious document involving the exchange of caning for academic credit.

     While I understand and respect the School’s codes, I sincerely hope this “contractual” arrangement was not sanctioned at the administrative level. If discipline is now to be treated as a competitive sport, I trust the girls are at least being awarded points and prizes accordingly. I need hardly remind you how swiftly such matters, once whispered, can alter the tone of a Headmaster’s tenure.

     Please reassure me that your staff understand the distinction between correction and coercion. Further, that Inez is studying the violin at my request. To strap a budding musician’s hands seems uncalled for, though perhaps your present geography master prizes percussion above bowed instruments.

      Yours sincerely,
      Honor de Vries née Randolph

P.S. Inez also mentioned interrupting a lesson on the Marshall Plan, which she appears to have found illuminating. If nothing else, thank Miss Clark for me.

 

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