The Seduction of Anne Kelley: Part 0, An Introduction

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Introduction

This sequence draws from the Kelley–de Vries correspondence and the less officious corners of Saint Clare’s, chiefly the Blue Prefect Study papers, where respectable documents go to become something else. You will find letters meant to be burned, copies kept “for reference,” drafts that should by rights have been torn up and were instead saved, retied, and filed under headings of optimistic vagueness. Some pages are neatly typed, as though the truth might be made more palatable by proper margins. Others arrive in the swift, unsteady cursive of someone writing under pressure, or in a place she very much ought not to be.

Readers are invited to take up the archivist’s task, and the investigator’s pleasure, of weighing what people say they intended against what they were, in fact, doing. Much will be implied. Little will be stated outright. Those accustomed to the School’s “special friendships” may notice familiar patterns resurfacing in adult form, with the same old hierarchy, the same old tenderness, and rather higher stakes than dormitory gossip ever required.

The file runs on to later years. Do not panic. For present purposes, we begin where the story begins, with Inez’s arrival in 1947 and one old girl’s decision to write, not to a school, but into a memory.

The archive remembers. And so, of course, does Inez.

Comments are warmly welcomed. While I enjoy seeing them on Bluesky and Twitter, those left here become part of the archive proper, where they may quietly shape what follows. I cannot promise the archive is obedient, but it is, as ever, attentive.

Foreword

This document, a letter from Anne Kelley, English teacher and housemistress for Inez and Clarissa, is written on Saint Clare’s letterhead and dated 12 July 1955. The reader will recall that 12 July 1955 was the day of MP Gerald Charrington’s visit, the sort of day the timetable insists is perfectly ordinary right up to the moment it becomes legendary, and poor Clarissa learned that a man may promise to “conclude matters at home” while concluding them perfectly well in the Headmaster’s study. Despite the letterhead, this document is not a school report; in fact, it is not an official communication; it is, strictly speaking, the sort of thing the writer hopes will be burned, mislaid, or eaten by the dog before anyone has the bright idea of filing it.

Fortunately for this archivist and you, dear reader, it was saved and filed.

The reader may recall that earlier, in Miss Kelley’s own journal, there is a line about “enough of this ink-spilling” and the need to “take up a clean sheet” in order to write to “Gwennie” about the day’s events.[1] This is that clean sheet, or at least a draft of one of them. (Saint Clare’s, as we are learning, produces duplicates with the same ease it produces contradictory rules.)

Recently found among Lady Gwendolyn’s papers in the Blue Prefect Study archives, it was part of a bundle of letters tied with green ribbon and optimistically labelled “Williams, G., Misc. 1955.” It is marked, in spirit, for your eyes only, which, in any archive, even Saint Clare’s Blue Prefect Study, is less a boundary than an invitation.

[1] One further note, offered as an observation rather than judgement: the salutation of “Gwennie” is not the sort a young school mistress generally addresses to either a countess or mother of a pupil. And yet Anne Kelley is generally so very professional and proper. Curious, that.

Saint Clare’s School for Girls

12 July 1955

My dear Gwennie,

   You asked to be told when anything material touches Clarissa; what follows is for your eyes only. I was correcting essays at the outer desk by the Head’s study when Mr. Charrington arrived with Miss Gladys Williams. I will not pretend I did not linger. One can hear perfectly well from that chair if one is so inclined.

   Gladys owned, in her truculent, defiant fashion, that she had slipped part of Clarissa’s letter into her own post so that it should reach you. Mr. Charrington pressed her to state the facts plainly (“from Inez to Lady de Vries”), which she did, though sulkily. The Head, much relieved to have the “mystery” solved, affected dignity and then fled into small talk and sandwiches while a girl was sent to fetch Clarissa.

   There followed an awkward quarter-hour of weather, gardens, and the fête. I could hear the Head making host noises, and Mr. Charrington answering with that steady, clubman composure that does not trouble itself to rise for small inconveniences. Gladys said little, or nothing. Silence can be as expressive as speech when one is trapped in a room with adults.

   When Clarissa was brought in and the door shut, Mr. Charrington took her through the same catechism he had exacted from Miss Williams: what she had done, what she ought to have done instead. Clarissa stumbled, then steadied; notably, she would not name Inez. When she could be led no farther, he supplied the rest himself and then, speaking first with real affection, then with authority, administered a paternal correction there and then. It was not savage, but it was inexorable; the sounds leave no doubt on that point. He told her the school was to hear no more of this, and that the matter would be concluded at home. When they emerged, she was tearful but contained; I sent her to Matron with a note and followed shortly to explain.

   Before all this I took the trouble to read through Gladys’s file. It is one of the fattest in the cabinet (telegrams, letters, memoranda, marginalia in every hand), and yet not a single slip for lines, not a single record of detention or corporal punishment. Always tragedy, always indulgence, never consequence. She is, still, exactly as the early entries describe: lovely, spoilt, and unsteady, grown into her beauty but not into ballast. Mr. Charrington, meanwhile, was already the Member he is soon to be: correct, certain, and entirely blind to the patterns under his nose.

   Inez will learn from this; she has the grit for it. Clarissa has learned something sooner than most, per disciplinam et lacrimas, ad astra, and will, I think, be the better for it. As for Gladys, I doubt she has learned anything at all.

  Burn this, or lock it away with the others.

Yours Sincerely,

Anne Kelley

Afterword

“Burn this, or lock it away with the others.” Readers may take their time over that final phrase. It is one thing to lock away a single indiscretion. It is quite another to have a place prepared for it.

The letter is frank, even brisk, right up to the point where Miss Kelley instructs it to be destroyed. Saint Clare’s produces many fine traditions, but none so durable as the habit of saying one will destroy a thing, and then saving it carefully for later. That instruction does not, as it happens, appear to have been followed.

What matters, for our purposes, is not simply that Miss Kelley wrote to Lady Gwendolyn, but that she wrote to her as “Gwennie,” and did so without hesitation. One does not usually arrive at such ease in a single afternoon.

The papers that follow were kept together, tied, retied, and ultimately filed under “Private.” They are dated, to the reader’s possible astonishment, 1947–1968. Do not panic, we are not reading all of it today.