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Introduction
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: tensions, alliances, secrets far 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.
The MP Visits Saint Clare – Previously posted
The Archivist Gets the Last Word:
When the last ink dried on Mr Fowler’s log: petrol topped, ham sandwiches eaten, punctual return to St Albans at four o’clock, the day and its record appeared, on their surface, neatly concluded. A tidy ledger of routes, meals, and mild discontent is precisely the sort of document one expects from a conscientious chauffeur in the summer of 1955. And yet any record, by its nature, resists such tidiness.
Alongside Fowler’s careful timings sit other papers of a different character: Gladys Williams’s letters and diaries, written quickly and with feeling; Clarissa Charrington’s halting, embarrassed accounts; Inez de Vries’s measured observations, sharpened by attention rather than emotion; Miss Kelley’s restrained professionalism; Matron Rowntree’s clinical precision. There are also statements gathered indirectly — by servants, by overhearing, by necessity rather than design. Some were written in haste, some in confidence, some in the belief they would never be read beyond their intended audience.
They are preserved together not by accident, but by a method that has not yet announced itself.
It is tempting to treat Fowler’s statement as a grounding document, a pragmatic full stop: routes logged, meals refused or eaten, doors opened and shut. He supplies geography and sequence where others provide sensation. But archives rarely conclude where convenience would prefer them to.
Several strands remain untethered. Certain voices — admonitory, supervisory, carefully placed — have so far appeared only at the margins. Others recur with a frequency that suggests forethought rather than coincidence. Some documents survive as originals; others as copies; a few as summaries prepared by hands not yet identified. Even the act of preservation itself — what is kept, what is omitted, what is annotated — points to a guiding intelligence operating quietly behind the scenes.
Who began this collection, and why? The papers do not say. Yet their alignment is too precise to be accidental. A schoolgirl’s diary does not usually share a folder with a chauffeur’s log, nor does a housekeeper’s moral judgement ordinarily sit beside a medical report. Here they do.
In the days that follow, the term limps toward its close. Lessons resume. Reports are drafted. The summer holidays approach.
Ghastly Gladys has finished writing.
Clarissa Charrington dreads the approaching holidays.
Mr Fowler has closed his notebook.
Elsewhere, correspondence continues. Observations are weighed. Connections are noted. Between the iron gates of Saint Clare and the corridors of Westminster, between a diary written at midnight and a log kept at the wheel, a pattern is taking shape — one concerned not merely with discipline, but with influence; not simply with punishment, but with leverage.
The MP Visit is past. The file remains open.
Afterword
At Saint Clare, the summer holidays approach with the usual brisk efficiency. Trunks are aired. Timetables loosen. The girls prepare to scatter, each convinced — wrongly, in most cases — that distance will simplify matters.
Miss Anne Kelley remains at her post.
Her diligence has been noted. Her discretion admired. Her usefulness, until now, assumed to be limited to essays, supervision, and the careful handling of girls and parents who ask too many questions.
This assumption will not hold.
The next documents follow Miss Kelley beyond the classroom, into a web of attentions, invitations, and obligations that arrive wearing the reassuring costume of familiarity. Nothing improper occurs. Everything appears reasonable. That is, perhaps, the point.
Seduction, as it turns out, is not always romantic.
Sometimes it takes the form of trust, carefully placed.
~ Archivist’s Note