Schoolhouse in the Wind by Anne Treneer ~ 1944. This edition: The Travellers’ Library, 1950. Hardcover. 221 pages.

My rating: 8/10.

A slight memoir which leapt into my hand as I was quickly browsing the back room bookshelves housing the “collectibles” during a recent visit to Hope’s lovely used book store, Pages. I’d never heard of Anne Treneer before, but I am so pleased to have made her unexpected acquaintance.

Intrigued initially by the title, and wondering rather why this volume had been shelved among the back room “treasures”, I had no idea what to expect, but a brief dipping-into let me know that this was one of those personal memoirs of childhood which can be such appealing reading, capturing as they do the very essence of an individual’s earliest memories, and frequently memorable glimpses of long-passed time and much-changed place.

*****

~On Catching the Breath

Anne Treneer was born in 1891, in the small village of Gorran in England’s Cornwall (hotbed of so many writers and creative types), the very much unplanned-for sixth child of the family, born after the family of four boys and a longed-for daughter, Anne’s older sister Susan, was thought complete. The baby carriage had long been given away, so Anne was trundled about by her older brothers in whatever other conveyance was handy:

My brothers say they brought me up in a wheelbarrow, and that this accounts for certain bumps in my forehead and generally scrappy appearance. When I was small they used to tell me that old Mrs. Tucker brought me one winter night in a potato sack and left me on the front step; and that I squalled so loud that my father said to my mother, ‘For God’s sake bring the little Devil in and see if she’ll stop that noise’. So in I came and stayed…

Anne’s father was the local schoolmaster, and Schoolhouse in the Wind is an affectionate, humorous and occasionally poignant evocation of a small corner of Cornwall at the juncture of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Gorran School, with a house for ‘master’ glued to it, stood strong and symmetrical, without beauty but not mean, triumphantly facing the wrong way. It might have looked south over the distant Gruda and the sea; but this advantage was forgone in favour of presenting a good face to the road. Master’s room in school, the big room as we called it, caught the north wind while the closets at the back caught the sun. I have heard that Mr. Silvanus Trevail, the architect, who designed many Cornish schools, committed suicide in the end; but whether out of remorse for his cold frontages I do not know.

That last comment at the end of the book’s first paragraph filled me with quiet glee – obviously this was not to be a completely sweetly sentimental memoir, but something with a bit more bite! – and I read on with high expectations. Those expectations were well met and frequently exceeded.

A young Anne Treneer.

I could go on and quote many excerpts of Anne Treneer’s rather delicious writing, but I won’t. This book was recently (well, in the late 1990s, “recent” in the used book world, I feel) reissued along with its two companion memoirs, Cornish Years and A Stranger in the Midlands, as a one-volume trilogy. It should be fairly readily available in libraries – at least in British ones – and there are a number of copies available through ABE.

A young Anne Treneer (seated) with her father & sister Susan

I recommend it on the strength of this first volume of the trilogy, and I will be buying the combined memoirs for my personal library. The first chapter of Schoolhouse in the Wind sets the stage, as it were, introducing the physical setting of the chapters of reminiscence to follow, and though it will perhaps be of greatest interest to those familiar with the area, even to me, a reader who has never visited England, the picture it draws is vivid and memorable. Also vivid are the character portraits the author paints of her family; with a few well chosen words they come alive on the page.

An internet search brought up a very few references to Treneer. Though she is described as a “prolific” writer, there appear to be few of her titles now available, aside from Schoolhouse in the Wind and the other two memoirs. Schoolhouse is also full of brief snippets of poetry; one assumes these are samples of the author’s work. Some are quite lovely; others seemingly aimed at perhaps a juvenile audience, which is understandable as Anne Treneer spent many years as a schoolteacher.

Anne Treneer

Anne Treneer never married, and seems to have led a happy and rather individualistic single life, pursuing her many interests with passion and good humour. She died in 1966.

I will leave the subject of Anne Treneer, at least for now, with this excerpt of a short biography from Maurice Smelt’s 2006 book, 101 Cornish lives.

 Anne Treneer pulled off a difficult trick; she wrote an autobiography that succeeds in enthralling despite its almost relentless happiness. Most writers would not even try, reminding themselves that ‘happiness writes white’. It came out as three books over a period of eight years – Schoolhouse in the Wind, Cornish Years, and A Stranger in the Midlands – and it runs from her earliest memories to a day in her late 50s when she went to America to visit her brother.

From her father’s village school she went to St Austell County School, then to a teacher training college in Truro and then taught in various schools in Cornwall. Ambitious to read deeper and wider she took an external course at London University during the First World War, later spent a year at Liverpool University, later still took a postgraduate degree at Oxford as a mature student. Her longest spell at any one school was a seventeen-year stint at King Edward’s in Birmingham, ending in 1946 with a year’s sabbatical leave. She had by then already written Schoolhouse in the Wind two years earlier, and her future was to be a writer, exiled but coming to her beloved Cornwall when she could. In those twenty post-war years she lived mostly in Devon. She was never married and died in 1966.

One reason why her life seems so tranquil is that she was so eccentric, and at the same time so commonsensical that she records what she did as if doing it were the most obvious thing. For example, she loved air with a passion. It is a word of power in her books, her poems especially; there it is, in slight disguise, in the title of Schoolhouse in the Wind. Hence her whizzing about the country in her young days on a Velocette motorbike, the air streaming past her nose like high-speed champagne. As a teacher in Birmingham she spent a summer term commuting (by Velocette) from a tent in Shropshire on Clent Hill. Tents also feature in later summer holidays in Gorran with her sister Susan – three tents, one for each of them and one for the saucepans… Her outdoorsness gave her the keenest eye for the particularity of place, and she could see several worlds in a single Cornish parish.

She claimed to hate crossings-out and third thoughts, but one would never know it as her books are easy reading, usually a sign of art concealing graft…

“Art concealing graft”… what an intriguing comment that one is, as well!

So, if you stumble upon anything by Anne Treneer in your travels, pick it up and peruse it. She has a lot – happily wry and generally unsentimental – to say.

This one gets a “hidden gem” tag.

As you can see from the photo of the author, taken from the jacket of the book published eighteen years after her marriage, the initial attraction on looks alone is understandable!

Luis shows Elizabeth the attractions of Monterrey, including things definitely off the tourist track, such as his family ranchito, and, significance unknown to Elizabeth at the time, the private parlour of his beloved mother, Mamacita. He also takes her dancing, in company with a respectable engaged couple, a situation that made all of Monterrey society take note…

I was left at my hotel. But a sort of die had been cast. Luis had cast it and with his eyes open. He had taken a strange woman to dance. Just any strange woman, and the incident might have been passed over as a wild oat on the part of the fifth Trevino. But he had taken the strange woman in company with a pareja of his best friends, an engaged couple! Two plus two equals four. Dancing with one girl all evening, with an engaged pareja to make up the party, means something serious! Phones rang in Monterrey; the news went round. Only I was in the dark.

Formally on the afternoon of the next day, I was taken to call on Mamacita. While we sat in the sala, Luis disappeared, to return with a tray on which sat Mamacita’s best small silver liqueur glasses. In each was a thimbleful of sweet vermouth. On a plate there were some little yellow cakes that melted into a puff of flavour when bitten. These were Mamacita’s famous polvorones de maizena (cornstarch puff cookies), the engagement cake… They were a kind of symbol. All unknowing I ate the engagement cakes and tasted the engagement vermouth.

Later Luis brought me a small yellow-striped kitten and dropped it into my lap.

“Oh, the darling! I wish I could have him,” I cried. “But I am leaving tomorrow for Mexico City and I have lots of work to do. I won’t be home in California for weeks.”

Mamacita said calmly, “Galatea has kittens like these every four months. You will have a kitten.”

Paling visibly, Luis scooped up the kitten and left. I wondered what had happened, but it seemed he had only recognized his mother’s acceptance of me. Mamacita had decided that I was to come to Monterrey, marry Luis, and receive a kitten from the fecund Galatea. He had been working toward this, but it was serious, and it sobered him to realize he was practically a married man.

Elizabeth eventually catches on, and with the blessing of both sets of parents, the couple is married and sets up housekeeping in Monterrey, on a shoestring budget. Culture shock hits strong and hard, as Elizabeth is suddenly immersed in traditional Mexican society, and finds herself floundering more than a little in her new role as the wife of an established, upper class Mexican husband. Luckily Mamacita and Papacito, Elizabeth’s new parents-in-law, are firmly behind her, and guide Elizabeth through the maze of “proper” behaviour, and cover up her most blatant mistakes. Of which there are many, reported in full by the author.

I am afraid I am not at all familiar with Mexican society of the time period of the memoir – the 1930s – or even of the present day – but after reading My Heart Lies South I have a clear and mostly positive impression of a world in which family comes before all else, and in which women, though subject to the strictest of behavioural expectations from their menfolk, have an enormous influence and hidden power, which they can wield for either good or ill. Elizabeth’s family, visiting some years after her marriage, shake their heads in wonder and tell Elizabeth that she has wandered into a world frozen in the 1800s. Elizabeth, having carved out her domestic niche after significant struggle, agrees, but states that she is deeply happy, and that she now fully enjoys the more positive aspects of this steeped-in-tradition world.

This full acceptance of uber-traditional female roles may have modern-day feminists grinding their teeth in despair, and it also does appear, from the glowing reviews which this book receives on the “Godly womanhood” websites I’ve stumbled across while researching the author, that the more conservative “right-wing” types have embraced this memoir as an estimable example of true femininity.

I find that I fall somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Elizabeth and Luis seemed, from all reports I’ve read, to have a most successful and happy marriage, which is an accomplishment worth celebrating, no matter in which society it is achieved. Elizabeth continued with her successful writing career after her marriage, managed to find time to keep up with her music, created a beloved home, and adapted very well to the expectations of her in-laws, while still staying in close contact with her American friends and relations. It seems to me that her life was most reasonably “fulfilled”; she certainly does not come across as downtrodden in any way, and she speaks of her integration into Mexican society with affection and sharp-eyed realism.

All of this to say that I enjoyed this book greatly.

There also exists an expurgated “Young People’s Edition” of My Heart Lies South, got up, I am sure, to piggyback on the perennial success of I, Juan de Pareja. Apparently all the more risqué bits are left out – and there are a few – so I can’t really see the point of that, as when Elizabeth shares some of her more “adult” anecdotes she’s really at her best. So look for the original version, which has been reprinted numerous times, instead. (And to add insult to injury, the cover of the junior version is not at all dignified, and hints at a jolly comedy, which, for all of its humour, this memoir is definitely not.)

My Heart Lies South has two companion memoirs, Where the Heart Is, and The Hearthstone of My Heart. I’m a bit taken aback by the Heart-y-ness of the titles – definitely working the theme to the utmost! –  but I’ll be keeping an eye out for these, as I’m sure they will be worth investigating.