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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..
Foreword
From the Archivist
We open with Miss Gladys Williams at the end of a day that began far too early and went downhill with impressive speed. The St Albans Institute had little patience for her, and she had even less for it. This evening entry preserves the results: indignation, exhaustion, and a level of offence that could be measured with school rulers if one were inclined.
Her morning at the Institute on 11 July 1955 offers our first glimpse—at least in this sequence—of a girl, well, a young woman, whose capacity for trouble is exceeded only by her capacity for surprise. Nothing dramatic occurs, but the atmosphere is unmistakably primed.
Readers joining us midstream may wish to revisit the earlier Saint Clare entries that converge upon this moment:
The Elwood Files — the failed attempt to slip Inez’s letter past the school authorities.
The Lady and the Headmaster — in which Lady de Vries learns just enough to become dangerously perceptive.
The Secret Letters, Part I — where Gladys first involves herself in a correspondence she might have been wiser to avoid.
Melodrama by Post — ending in Clarissa’s own very revealing postscript.
Heard in the Charrington Household — Miss Gladys, hauled home from Scotland, is made to “answer for herself.”
Gladys in Trouble — Gerald’s formal terms, Gladys’s formal compliance, and the informal tears that followed.
The Charrington Papers, of which the present collection forms a small but telling part 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.
These episodes form the quiet prelude to the tensions now gathering just out of sight. What follows in this entry—indignant, tired, and brimming with offence—is merely the overture.
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
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.
Starting next week, for two months I am to present myself at 7:30 in the morning. Daily!! Students are expected to cook breakfast—not only for ourselves, but for the staff as well. We must all sit down at 8:30 and eat what we have produced. Imagine it! Gladys Williams up at dawn, frying bacon for a pack of “teachers” in hairnets.
And the clothes—oh, the clothes. Not a pretty or smart uniform at all. I’m required to wear plain cotton overalls, a stiff apron, my hair tied back and under a net. Servant’s garb, though no one called it that. I shall look like the scullery maid in a touring play, only without the curtain call at the end.
Most of the girls are 16 or 17 at the most, just out of the local school, local shop-girls’ daughters and factory apprentices, blinking at me as if I’d blundered into the wrong doorway. If they knew I was five-and-twenty I think they’d simply die of laughing.
Worst of all was what the Head herself said. She took pains to tell me most of the girls at the Institute are under eighteen. That they were taking me only as a “special exception.” That I was to be careful not to “corrupt” them with “fast ways” that will only get them in to trouble. No make-up. No cigarettes. No “inappropriate topics.” She looked straight at me when she said it, as if I were some cabaret singer smuggled in through the back door rather than a young lady from a “good” family. Clearly, that’s Gerald’s point.
I smiled and nodded while the Head explained, but inside I burned. Gerald, of course, called it “wholesome discipline” and a “needed adjustment.” He spoke as if he were sending me to the seaside.
And then, as if that weren’t enough, came humiliation number two: tomorrow we go to Saint Clare. Gerald informed me over lunch when we returned from the Institute, scarcely lifting his eyes from his paper. We are going together. I commented that there were less than two weeks left before the Summer holidays, that Clarissa would come home then, that there was no reason for us to go.
He said nothing. I wasn’t even sure he heard me. I then said there is no reason why I need to go. “We are leaving at nine, sharp, and will be spending the night at Bryn Derwen.”
Great. So this trip is also to be a stop at his constituency. How lucky for me that I get to come.
That was all he said. I excused myself and left the table. Before dinner I said I didn’t feel well and would be in my room. Nothing was sent up for me, making it clear that Mrs. Fielding isn’t happy with me, or at least too busy to care that I haven’t eaten today. Fine. I don’t have an appetite anyway.
Poor Clarissa! She knows nothing about what’s coming. Gerald has forbidden me to write before the end of the term and didn’t tell me we were going until it was too late anyway, so I cannot even warn her. Tomorrow she will see Gerald and me walk in and know why we’re there.
I want to scream, to stamp, to tear this page, this book in two. Instead, I write my anger, because there is nowhere else for it to go.
Apparently 25 is still old enough to be spanked by circumstance and scolded like a schoolgirl as far as my dear brother-in-law is concerned.
Afterword
From the Archivist
With this entry, the day finally ends. The next dawn will bring Birchwood, a timetable, household expectations, and increasingly strained patience on all sides. Those seeking calm are unlikely to find it.
Continue to:
The MP Visits Saint Clare: Part I – The Weekend at Birchwood (8–12 July 1955)
Perhaps it is merely the cloudy lens of my advanced years that warps my view. But it seems to me that Gladys, at 25, is “old enough” (and hardly too old) for a spanking of a far less metaphorical variety than one delivered by “circumstance.”
Indeed, her attitude, her serial misbehavior, persistent cheek and (especially) her fundamentally poor aptitude, suggest to me that she’s likely MORE deserving of such literal treatment than her niece (who is plenty deserving enough).
[That those who know me even a little would churlishly point out that I think EVERY young woman, of every age — including a certain abuela with whom a share my days– is “‘old enough’ (and hardly too old” lessens my conviction not at all.]
She’s a lovely girl, but, I confess, a tiny bit spoilt. It does get annoying. Especially after hours in a confined space. Like a car.
AAARGH.
ATTIUDE, no aptitude.