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Tag: Saint Clare’s School

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The MP Visits Saint Clare – Prologue – 11 July 1955

Posted on By Mija

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And we’re back in 1955. Sorry about the time traveling. Context is in Foreword below.

The story of Inez de Vries unfolds through a constellation of documents—some official, drawn from the prim and unforgiving files of Saint Clare’s School for Girls; others more intimate, taken from the journals, letters, and scribbled notes of the girls themselves. Some will appear typed and orderly; others 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 ideas and reactions also join the archives, where they may quietly shape what comes next..

Saint Clare November: 14,539 / 50 000 words

Foreword

From the archivist:

The Charrington Papers, of which the present collection forms a small but telling part [see also Heard in the Charrington Household, Melodrama by Post, The Secret Letters, and Gladys in Trouble] offer a glimpse into the anxieties of an English household in the mid–twentieth century. The documents gathered here—letters, annotated responses, and private jottings—capture in miniature a struggle over authority and propriety between Gerald H. Charrington, Member of Parliament and self-appointed patriarch, and his sister-in-law, Miss Gladys Williams, a young woman who had the misfortune to combine a lively disposition with a poor instinct for discretion.

This is Gladys’ diary entry from Monday, 11 July, 1955. It’s a short entry but is the start of rather dramatic week. The accounts that follow will unfold a series of documents, files, diaries, and accounts.

If you’re wondering where these documents are coming from and why they were collected, more will be revealed soon.

In the meantime, a wee hint. Look closely at the 1938 Honour’s Game posts and consider where Ned and Honour’s little “game” may have carried Lady Gwen by 1955.

Note: If you’re struggling with the font, here is a plain text version. 

Gladys’s Diary  –  11 July 1955

Diary on nightstand, pen, lipstick

11 July 1955

It’s after 11 PM but I can’t sleep and my head and heart are so full I can hardly stand it. No, I can’t stand it. I’m writing this in the hope of making sense of it. Though it may be I’m just talking to myself.

This morning was Gerald’s humiliation exercise number one: the Institute. He marched me there, hand on my arm like a ward in chancery, and handed me over to the Head as though I were a new pupil. Rather than leave me alone to discuss this, he then stood by while Mrs Perris discussed timetables and subjects as though I’m ten years old. Timetables! For me! And what an utterly wretched timetable it is.

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The Music of Discipline: Notes Toward a Sonic Saint Clare

Posted on By Mija

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Saint Clare November: 14,539 / 50 000 words

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

Honour’s Game Part I – November 1938

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 is watching. And she remembers.

This story goes back to 1938 and tells the story of Inez’s parents, especially Lady Gwendolyn “Honour” deVries, 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.

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

Introduction

This tale follows Honour’s Lesson, where Lady Gwendolyn Randolph de Vries — Honour — first tested the patience of her new husband, Edmund Alexander de Vries, 9th Earl of Darlington. Like that earlier story, it begins in a more traditional narrative mode, borrowing the cadence of Regency romance. Yet here a new element enters: the reports of a bride still half a schoolgirl, too quick with her laughter, too eager for her husband’s notice, and learning how his sternness might be turned into intimacy. What she believes to be a private game of observation will, in time, shape far more than she imagines.

Though not set at Saint Clare’s, its themes are familiar: discipline, secrecy, defiance — threads that are woven through the school itself.

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.

Part One

If you haven’t read the Prologue yet, you should. 

Note from D. –

11 November 1938

Honour,

You are attending Lady Fenton’s gathering tomorrow. Treat it as exercise.

– Sit where you are seen, not where you are heard.
– One glass of champagne, no more.
– Listen more than you speak. Note what is certain, and what you only suppose.
– Write it after, neatly, as if for school.

Report due upon return, as soon as possible. Marks for observation, not embroidery. Late submissions will not be entertained, .  

 

D.

 

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discipline

Heard in the Charrington Household, OR,The Day Miss Gladys Came Home

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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:

Miss Gladys Williams was enjoying herself in Scotland — scarves, suitors, and no shortage of attention — when a telegram from her brother-in-law yanked her home like a fish on a line. By the time she stepped off the train at King’s Cross, protesting she’d been “dragged back in chains,” the machinery of the household was already rattling back into place. The chauffeur collected her, the housekeeper was torn from her seaside holiday, and even a maid had to be fetched from the village. All this fuss over a single letter — one that should have stayed safely in the school office, but instead slipped out with Aunt Gladys’s obliging help.

What happened once the front door shut was not meant for public ears. But houses have ears of their own. The chauffeur, the housekeeper, and the temporary maid each caught a part of the day’s drama, and their accounts, set side by side, give us the picture.

Here, then, is Heard in the Charrington Household, OR, The Day Miss Gladys Came Home.

Having trouble reading? Try the plain text version. 

Private Notes of J. Fowler, Chauffeur

 7 July 1955, King’s Cross Station

9:55 AM

Mr. Charrington and I arrived on the platform. Dark suit, bowler, gloves, umbrella. Car polished and ready, myself in uniform. His mood was grim.

I positioned trolley where the first-class carriage was expected. Train in on time.

Miss Gladys Williams stepped down, breaking off with two young men who pressed their cards on her as though it was their right. Two porters trailed after with the luggage. She carried a small valise and a bright little handbag, face done up, headscarf tied like a cinema actress — not the thing for King’s Cross morning, but she’s always been a pretty girl and knows it. Too much indulged, if you ask me.

Exchange heard:

Miss Williams (too loud): Well, here I am, dragged back in chains!

Mr. Charrington (curt): Good morning, Gladys.

I said nothing but took the valise and set it on the trolley atop her other luggage. She clung to her little handbag as though I had offered to take it too. Her smile faltered then, as if she finally realized this was no game.

We walked off in silence. She tried chatter:

Miss Williams: It was only a bit of fun, Gerald — all blown up into a five-reel melodrama.

Mr. Charrington: We will not discuss it here.

While I saw to the cases, stowed them in the boot. Mr. Charrington opened the rear door himself, put her in, and then got in the other side.

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fiction

The Secret Letters – Part 1

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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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fiction

The Lady and the Headmaster

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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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discipline sketch of a folder and pen on top of a skirt and blazer

The Elwood Files – Inez of the Upper IV

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.

Forward to the Elwood Files

It is one of the consolations of life in a girls’ boarding school that, although hairbrushes vanish before prayers only to reappear at bedtime, knee socks sag at inspections, and knicker elastic betrays its wearers at the worst possible moments, one may always rely upon the ingenuity of the pupils. The present dossier — christened in pencil The Elwood File — began with a folded scrap of green ink and a doodled key, and swelled, in due course, to the proportions of a minor parliamentary scandal. Or so it felt to Ronnie Elwood at any rate.

decorativeThe dramatis personae require only the briefest introduction. Veronica (Ronnie) Elwood (Upper V) is amiable and obliging, with a handwriting that proclaims every secret long before she intends it. Inez de Vries (Upper IV) is armed with both daring and design, seldom without a plan calculated to vex her elders. Keeping them under ceaseless watch is Georgina Fairfax, Senior Prefect, whose close supervision might well recommend her to the quietly vigilant MI5. Among the staff, Matron persists with her infallible spoonfuls of of cod-liver oil, Miss Kelley keeps a close eye on her house with rather sharper judgement than some expect, and the Headmaster, from his lofty perch, maintains that martyrs are not to be manufactured at any cost.

The scheme itself — to smuggle a page of prose through the mighty bulwark of school protocol, hidden inside another girl’s letter home — did not succeed. Prefects pounced, staff rummaged, and the mail-bag emerged none the wiser. And yet — here is the rub — Lady de Vries, many miles away, somehow contrived to receive the very intelligence intended for her, and with remarkable promptness.

How Lady de Vries came by her intelligence is not disclosed in these pages. That she had it — and was corresponding about her daughter with the Headmaster before the week was out – is beyond dispute. The archivist can only remark that Saint Clare’s leadership is already discovering how very little control remains within its grasp.

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

Notes Found

[Folded small; tiny key inked at the top.]

 


Strictly Between Us — Dispose Wisely
Do you have space in your letter home for a stowaway?
Thought you might add something for me next time you send yours — nothing shocking, just something better not left in the St. Clare’s pigeonholes. I’d owe you a favour (real currency, not just toffee).
Your mum wouldn’t mind a stowaway page, would she?
P.S. Your hair looks like it’s plotting mutiny today. In the best way.


Margin (G. Fairfax): 11/6 — confiscated, folded tw

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Clarissa’s Letters Home or The Jelly Baby Files

Posted on By Mija

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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, as this post indicates, your responses and ideas can be included in the archives, shifting and changing the focus.

 

Forward to: “Clarissa’s Letters Home”

Archivist Note: These letters, begun and co-authored by reader JustAnotherBoomer, were the private correspondence between a widowed father and his fourteen-year-old daughter.

Clarissa Elizabeth Charrington and her father, the Rt. Hon. Gerald T. Charrington, weren’t writing for teachers, headmasters, politicians, or biographers sifting through archives in search of origin stories. Clarissa, newly arrived at Saint Clare’s School for Girls in the Lower Fourth during the summer term of 1955, could never have imagined these early letters home would be treasured decades later—by a daughter who may have walked the same school corridors, or found by a granddaughter after a lifetime of stories. The letters themselves spoke to no one but sat quietly for years in a forgotten tuckbox, hidden behind a yellowed copy of Jane Eyre, a single petrified Jelly Baby, and a torn wrapper from an ancient toffee.

This first exchange between Clarissa and her father captures her earliest days at Saint Clare—tentative, observant, and already sharpening into something unmistakably her own. Clarissa’s letters home are notable not only for her frank admiration of one Inez de Vries—already firmly on the staff’s watch list—but also for the affection and respect she shows her father and his public life, and for introducing a private code between them: their “Jelly Baby Ledger.”

Clarissa left the ledger on her father’s desk the morning she departed for school—a small, deliberate gift in her careful handwriting. Its pages are marked with doodled sweets in the margins and a hand-drawn scale that ranges from “catastrophic” to “triumphant.” In her letters home, each Jelly Baby count is shorthand for how she is faring—socially, strategically, and in terms of her all-important tuck supply.

The paradox is part of the charm: Clarissa is still young enough to count her sweets in Jelly Babies, yet already capable of nuanced political metaphor and a subtle, sidelong interest in the de Vries family. Something is awakening here—not a rebellion exactly, but an alertness. She is watching Inez. She is watching the adults. And, increasingly, she is watching herself.

You may already be familiar with other records from this term—the official school reports praising Clarissa’s eloquence, the stern notes cautioning against questionable friendships, and the famously provocative essays. Yet these letters offer something different—personal, candid glimpses of Clarissa quietly shaping her conscience beneath covers and torchlight, with Inez’s daring casting long, flickering shadows across the page. In these early exchanges, we glimpse not only the schoolgirls they are—but hints of the women they will become.

The archive cannot answer every question. But the Jelly Baby count will shift, and the careful observer might notice that while Clarissa watches Inez, others have begun watching Clarissa.

Read on, gently, knowing these letters are not merely relics, but snapshots of a life becoming—quietly powerful, subtly courageous, and, well, interesting.

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

 

This sort of stationery/letters attache case was a frequent and much coveted gift to boarding school girls. Many Old Girls used them their entire lives.

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Inez’s Diary, 19 June 1955

Posted on By Mija

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 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 them on Twitter and Bluesky, I love getting them here and promise to respond.

Forward to Inez’s Diary Entry 1

(Pinned inside the front cover, possibly written years later. Possibly not.)

The pages that follow were not meant to be shared. Not with teachers. Not with school authorities. Certainly not with Mummy (not that she would ever read another’s diary!). These are the extremely private thoughts of one Inez de Vries, age fourteen, penned under the covers at Saint Clare’s School for Girls, Summer Term 1955, using a torch that needed new batteries and her trusty, if leaky, fountain pen.

sketch of manuel typewriterThey were tucked away in a locked tuckbox, behind an embroidered handkerchief, a Latin vocab book, and three boiled sweets (two of them fuzzed). She cursed the book so no one could read them. Naturally, you may read them anyway –but on your own head be it.

You may already have seen other documents from this term — the official reports, the memos, the staff meeting minutes (oops! that’s tomorrow!), the infamous reflective essay. This document is not like those –i’s her diary, what she didn’t say, not even to her closest friend. Or perhaps especially not to her closest friend.

It’s tempting to say the diary reveals “the real Inez,” but that’s too easy. All of these posts are “real,” as Inez was “real” in all her forms: the strategist, the spark, the girl with too much cleverness and just enough conscience. Her diary doesn’t contradict the rest —-it deepens it. Complicates it. And, perhaps makes you feel ashamed for having read it.

Grown-up Inez, now an old woman of 84 –though she doesn’t look a day over 70– will likely laugh and claim it was all fiction, all drama, all performance, and perhaps it was. Still, if feminism taught me nothing else, it’s the truth that just because something’s constructed doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

— Archivist’s Note, redacted version. Not for circulation outside Form IV without permission.

Image of diary on bed with flashlight on top.

Private!!!!
This diary is for me only so you Get Out! 

To Whomever Disturbs This Book:

Death shall come on swift wings to him who touches the secrets of the daughter of de Vries.1Adapted from the tomb of King Tut. Look it up — they found the curse scratched in charcoal behind a statue. No, really.

 

Sunday, 19 June 1955 
(Under the covers. Torch getting dim. Note to self: Ask Mummy for batteries in next letter. Also: do Not leave this in pillowcase again, you idiot.)

Dear Diary,

I wasn’t going to go up there, truly. I’d survived the caning — medium cane, four sets of three, all very proper — and I wrote the “reflective” essay they asked for. It said what happened. It said more than what happened: it named names, explained motives, laid everything out. No one but me wanted that, but TOO BAD.

Miss Kelley said it didn’t take responsibility. But it did — it took as much as I should, as much as is mine. I’m not going to take ALL of it. I may have been the spark, but the fire came from Mr. Mean’s hot air and rage going TOO FAR. They all know it, tooo, whatever they say.
(Must stop calling him Mr. Mean. Even in here or will do it where he could hear about it. That’s the sort of thing some swot fink might tell him.)

It was amazing – Green was incandescent. Not only red, but that awful blotchy purple one sees on exploding thermometers. I rather thought he might burst. (No such luck.)

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    Adapted from the tomb of King Tut. Look it up — they found the curse scratched in charcoal behind a statue. No, really.
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