Books
Girls will be girls
Brigid Brophy
The Schoolgirl Ethic: The Life and Work of Angela Brazil Gilllan Freeman (Allen Lane £4.50) 'Did girls really ask one another, "Twiggez vous ?",' Gillian Freeman wonders, 'or acquiesce with "Right you are, 0 Queen! It's a blossomy idea!" ?' Plainly she doubts the benefits of the remarkable expeditions she reports, when Angela Brazil would take the morning train from Coventry, where she lived, to Leamington, expressly to eavesdrop the conversation of the girls of Leamington High School. Well, I can vouch for at least 'Twiggez vous'. What 1 can't tell, of course, is whether Angela Brazil learned it from listening to schoolgirls or schoolgirls learned it from reading Angela Brazil. Literary influence on spoken language is a neglected theme, but there have been instances furtherfetched than 'Twiggez-vous': the creation, for example, of the name Cedric from Scott's misreading of Cerdic, or the fact that if you get a minor hurt you say 'ouch', a word that is alleged to have come into spoken being because unsophisticated readers of boys' school stories gave a literal, phonetic pronunciation to what was meant to be a merely formal rendering, on the lines of 'Phew' and the French 'hein', of a yelp.
Gillian Freeman is right, of course, about the artificiality of the slang Angela Brazil put into her schoolgirls' mouths. It was her most inventive invention and. I suspect, the centre of her historical importance. Gillian Freeman doesn't say (it's one of her book's rare gaps) whether it was Angela Brazil herself who devised the girls' school story—or, as I suppose it must historically be, created it from a spare rib of the boys' school story. I think in fact the genre had already, though only recently, been established by others when Angela Brazil moved in on it in 1911, with A Fourth Form Friendship (not her first book, but her first school story book), after which she reigned over it till her death in 1947.
Angela Brazil remarked that she wrote from the schoolgirl's, not an adult's, point of view. Gillian Freeman adds that the chief elements of school life in her books (organised games, school plays, extra-mural excursions, prefects) did not reach the boarding school (in Manchester) where Angela Brazil herself was educated until after she had left. In literary fantasy she was, therefore, projecting herself not backwards but forwards in time. That, plus the fact that she was the youngest of four children and contrived to remain for ever the precocious baby of the family by choosing, as an adult, to live with her immediately elder sister and brother, is the source of the Peter Pan-ism that Gillian Freeman diagnoses as the essence of her imaginative gift.
Education for girls (at least, for middleclass girls) was enlarged partly by the importing of institutions from the boys' public schools, like the prefect system, which Angela Brazil applauded because it made the school into 'a state in miniature', and compulsory games, in which schoolgirls of my and my daughter's generation saw only the unjustifiable compulsoriness but which to Angela Brazil were a liberation from the compulsory decorum that forbade adolescent females to take any strenuous physical actions at all. Educationalists opened the social possibilities, but it was the imagination of Angela Brazil that gave girls in Britain (and, I learn from Gillian Freeman, India) an idiom in which to experience them.
She herself wrote what I can only call good vigorous cliches. In the extracts Gillian Freeman gives to beautiful point, I recognise the determined brightness of tone (whose sole literary virtue is that at least it isn't pompous) which has informed the prose style of generations not so much of English schoolgirls as of English school mistresses. One classic passage has the sprightliness of fake champagne as Angela Brazil bubbles out each item of dialogue with a different synonym for 'she said'. Six girls contribute seven speeches, and the stage-direction lines read: 'exploded Kitty', 'grunted Alice', 'yawned Monica', 'chirruped Marie', 'retorted Kitty', 'interposed the injured voice of Hilda' and 'groaned Elizabeth'.
Angela Brazil was not only, I think, keeping her passages of dialogue afizz but teaching her readers how to recognise and respond to each other's characters in a social group. The male sex had centuries of experience, from school, club and army life, of social bonding, with unconscious homosexuality as the tie. Angela Brazil brought the female sex up to parity almost overnight. She imported the boys' school ethic of honour and loyalty (to the state at large as well as to the 'state in miniature') and added to the ethic something that was definitely not an import from boys' schooling, namely an aesthetic. Gillian Freeman credits her with being staunchly, if unintellectually, on the side of the arts.
Her historic achievement was, I think, to make a society composed of girls interesting to girls. So long as they preserve the safety that lies in numbers, a group (or a secre society) of her schoolgirls can be as adventurous as the hero of a boys' story of the same date. She emphasised the adventurousness of her plots in writing to the most unexpected of her acquaintances, Marie Stopes. (In the correspondence Gillian Freeman quotes, some readers may recognise, in 'dear little Buffkins', the present chairman of the British Humanist Association.) It must, as Gillian Freeman says, constitute 'the most bizarre literary request of the twentieth century' that Marie Stopes sought permission to adapt an Angela Brazil book for the stage. Angela Brazil said No for the self-knowing reason that, though her plots were confined to the society, they were not confined to the setting of school but depended on the 'large action' of outdoor adventure.
The unconscious or, more exactly, unphysical love affairs of school life Angela Brazil reported in her books truthfully. She gave the emotion her girls felt towards each other or their teachers its proper name, being in love, as unequivocally as Tolstoy (or at least his translator) described Kitty as being in love with Anna Karenina. Gillian Freeman is surely right in thinking Angela Brazil innocent and probably ignorant of the possibility that her heroines might have expressed their emotion in bed. Indeed. only in ignorance could the adult Angela Brazil have written (at least without adding 'as the actress said to the deaconess') that she and a girl she loved in her own real-life childhood 'dovetailed into each other's grooves'.
Twice, I think, Gillian Freeman may do her subject an injustice. She suspects Angela Brazil's taste for music of being an affectation. The evidence is only that friends said her own singing was out of tune. Yet it is possible to possess an ear but not the ability to make one's own voice obey it. And how reliable were the friends' ears? Out-oft uneness is a matter of judgment. There is an operatic superstar who is almost always out of tune to my ear, but presumably she isn't to the majority of ears or she wouldn't be a superstar. The other injustice I feel more certain of. Recording that Angela Brazil went riding in Wales and declared herself 'a thorough Diana Vernon', Gillian Freeman comments: 'she meant Dorothy, of course. I think she meant what she said, namely Diana Vernon, the heroine of Rob Roy.
Gillian Freeman's fascinating book has the great virtue of not sending up Angela Brazil. Free from facetiousness about the jolly awfulness of hockey sticks, it is a wellresearched account of the life (which eventually grew into an unofficial Queen Motherhood of Coventry), a patiently-read account of the oeuvre, and a shrewd analysis of how bits of the one (including, even, the begetting of a bastard by one of the Brazil brothers) were transformed by fantasy into items in the other. It is full of a novelist s expert respect for Angela Brazil's craftsman' ship and professionalism. I trust it will make people re-read the novels not of Angela Brazil but of Gillian Freeman.
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