Onwards, upwards, marching in a prayer Onwards, upwards, the sons and daughters share Onwards, upwards, the joyful hope prepare You'll get there, you'll get there, you'll get there
Hello, and welcome to Top Hole, the podcast about Eleanor M. Brent Dyer, the Chalet School, and anything vaguely connected.I'm Deborah Lofus, and I'm a fan.The usual provisos apply.
With respect to pronunciation, spoilers, and bonkersness, please see episode zero.
I'm joined today by the writer Caroline Crampton, who may be familiar to you from her podcasts, She Done It, about golden age detective fiction, and A Body Made of Glass, which ties into her book of the same name about the history of hypochondria, or health anxiety as it's called nowadays.
A Body Made of Glass is absolutely fascinating and includes reference to the Chalet School, where of course health is a central theme.
EBD uses health to drive the plot of many chalet school books, with significant concern about the health of several key characters at various points in the series. EBD also sets out many healthy habits.
If you were a listener of the late Dr. Michael Moseley's Just One Thing podcast, you may have been as struck as I was by how many of those Just One Things were reflected as normal practice at the Chalet School.
And EBD also addresses mental health, which makes her in some respects very modern, even if some of the treatments for physical illnesses and even the illnesses themselves are very much of their time.
To prepare for this episode, I made a spreadsheet detailing exactly who is ill with what in each chalet school book, and all the various injury-causing accidents.
I can report that someone is or has been ill in all but half a dozen of the series, and the school's track record for injuries is pretty poor.
The chalet school's insurers must have had an entire team dedicated to processing their claims, so there is definitely a great deal to talk about here.
We're not going to talk about pregnancy and childbirth or other gynaecological matters because it would be easy to talk about nothing else and we won't be covering babies teething.
There is however some discussion of cancer so if you have recently had a cancer diagnosis you might want to come back to this episode later and in the meantime we're sending you love and support.Let's welcome Caroline to the discussion.
Welcome to Top Pole.It's lovely to have you here.
Thank you very much for having me.
Can we start with you telling us about A Body Made of Glass and how you came to write it?
Yes.So the full title is A Body Made of Glass, A History of Hypochondria.And it started, I suppose, all the way back when I was 17 years old and I was diagnosed with cancer.
And some people find that a peculiar origin point for a book about hypochondria to be diagnosed with a very real illness.But what happened was
I had had really no idea that there was anything wrong with me and then suddenly this news lands like a bolt from the blue and it kind of awakened this awareness in me that you can be very seriously ill without being really physically aware of it at all.
and then went through all the treatment, eventually come out the other side with the injunction from doctors to always be vigilant, be careful, come and see us if you ever have any cause for concern.
All very sensible and responsible things, but combined with that initial realisation
in my brain, they became a fixation on the fact that anything could be wrong with me at any minute, which is mostly what we call health anxiety or hypochondria today.
So I think the phrase I used in the book was, having cancer for real was like a rehearsal for having dozens of other illnesses in imagination.
And so that's really the origin point of the book, was that a few years in, once I was a bit aware of what was happening, I wanted to read about it.I wanted to know more about this phenomenon.
I was aware that other people experienced it both now and in history, and I couldn't really find the book that I wanted. that connected all of those dots over many centuries.
There are some really interesting books about hypochondriacs in literature and things like that, but not that put together that historical timeline.And so I mentioned this in passing, I think, to my literary agent at one point.
And she was like, Oh, I'm sure that exists.Let me see if I can find it for you.And then she came back a couple of days later and said, No, it doesn't seem to exist.And I think you should write it.
And so that was in 2018, just to give you some idea of how long it takes me to write a book.And then the book actually came out in spring of 2024.
It must have been a massive amount of research though.
It was a lot of research, especially because I'm not a historian of science or anything like that.So I wasn't coming at it from having previously done a PhD or anything like that.
I was just starting from a point of personal experience and personal interest.
I felt by the end of the book that actually health anxiety was an entirely reasonable thing, to be honest, that we have been mean as a society to hypochondriacs.You know, it carries a certain weight, doesn't it?
Using that term, which is a bit unfair.
That's definitely where I arrived at as well.The general maxim I now exist by is, if you feel it, it is real.I don't really think it's for anyone other than the person experiencing it to say what they're feeling and what they're not.
I had a really good interview with a very empathetic GP about this.
I was working on the book and he said that really the challenge for me when I have a patient initially presenting with symptoms and then we do all the checks and tests and so on to rule things out and no kind of organic disease shows up, is I then have to have this conversation with them where I say,
I'm not trying to invalidate what you feel but I think we need to look for a mental rather than a physical explanation for this.
And he said some people find that intensely relieving because I'm not trying to dismiss them I'm just saying you know we now need to look in a different field and look at different options for you.
But some people really take that very much amiss and they think that I'm trying to say that I think they're, you know, losing it or a fantasist or something like that, which is not at all what I'm trying to say.
And I found that really useful to think about that, that it's not not real.You just maybe are looking for the explanation in the wrong place, I think is how I would think about it now.
Because there's still there's still barriers to properly considering mental health nowadays.
I mean, it's much better than it used to be, but I think, and I think our understanding has improved about the connection between mental and physical health, but, but not everybody, not every patient I suspect accepts that.
Yes, and especially if you are, I think, older than about 15 years old, you've spent most of your life existing in a world in which any suggestion of anything other than perfect mental health has been treated with great scorn.
So it's completely natural that you have imbibed some of that, that you maybe talk to yourself like that, even if no one externally is explicitly saying that.
You might, you know, you might be, you might think it's totally reasonable to take six weeks off work if you break your leg.You would never, ever think of doing the same for, you know, clinical depression or anything like that.
I think people have it internalized just because of the world that they've existed in.Absolutely.I also think that some of our perception that things have moved on about mental health is mostly to do with celebrities talking about it.
The Younger Royals, for instance, have really made mental health a focus of theirs.
But what's very frustrating about that kind of, I think of it as surface awareness, is that they will very earnestly speak about how it's really important to raise awareness about mental health.
And I just think, great, you've raised awareness now, what's next?And there's no structural interrogation of, well, why do we have record numbers of people with mental health conditions?
Could it be that the way that employers treat their employees or the way that schools work?Or could it be some big structural things about how capitalism makes us?
Yes, crushing paid of capitalism, yes.
No, absolutely not.Those kind of people will not engage with those questions at all.And so therefore, you're left thinking, well, what was the point of your podcast or book or whatever it was?
I'm not sure that you've really done anything here, but we must all be full of praise for your bravery.Yes, for being aware. When I was working on the book, I was very conscious of that all the time, that I didn't want to fall into that category.
I did want to try and look backwards and look at structures and look at history and try and say how we got here and where we might go, rather than look at it in a more surface level way.
And you did that very successfully.I mean, I really enjoyed reading the book.I found it absolutely fascinating.So no, that was great.
To relate it to the Shallac School books for a moment, I mean one of the things Eleanor Ann Brent Dyer is very good at is making that relationship between mental and physical health.
I mean she does that regularly throughout her stories and in a way that's quite forward thinking, I think.I don't know if that was generally what people were thinking at the time but certainly she's making that connection.
Yes, she is.And I still think about it all the time when I am overworking myself and I'm a bit run down.I quite often think like, what would matron advise?Would she advise me to lie down in the afternoons and drink hot milk?Probably yes.
And that's probably a good idea.And all of the stuff about, you know, girls who are more delicate and who shouldn't overtire themselves. In one way, you could say it's maybe a bit limiting and a bit tiresome.
But in another way, I think it is an example of what we would now call self-care.Yes.And being aware of your limitations and your feelings and, you know, cutting your cloth accordingly.So, no, I do think about that all the time.
And I think she expressed it really well.
And I was also intrigued when I started listening to Dr. Michael Mosley's podcast, Just One Thing, just how many of those just one things crop up in the chalet school.I mean, yes, they take cold baths, not cold showers. But quite a lot.
I mean, even for the preference for bitter chocolate, dark chocolate over milk chocolate, good characters like dark chocolate in the Chalet school.I'm sure that was one of the things he talked about in his podcast.
So she perhaps was way ahead of her time in some respects.
I think she was.And I think she was also probably part of a more general movement and way of understanding health that we lost a little bit when the sort of medical science field shot far, far ahead.
Because I think when you could only do things like take cold baths and make sure you didn't overtire yourself, then it made sense to really prioritise that.
But once we had, you know, really good antibiotics and all this other stuff, I think there was a temptation to think, well, we don't need to worry about that kind of thing anymore because you can just take the antibiotics, you can just take this pill, you can just have this treatment, blah, blah, blah.
I think now the pendulum is kind of swinging back a bit and we're saying, yes, it's great that we have all that stuff.
but either we can prevent ourselves from ever needing it if we do these more kind of would use words like holistic or lifestyle things or if you have for instance gone through a really serious sequence of medical procedures perhaps those are the kind of traditional convalescence things are still worth paying attention to.
So I went through various stages of cancer treatment over about three years and
every time I would just be sort of discharged from hospital with this enormous bag of pills and regime on which I had to take them, no one ever said it'd be a really good idea if you tried to get outside every day, even if it's just for a few minutes, or start going for really gentle walks and just try and go a little bit further each time, or any of those things.
Nobody ever said that. or talk to me about what I might want to eat or how I should eat.
For instance, my weight fluctuated wildly in those years because I would lose a lot of weight while I was on chemotherapy and everything made me feel like I was going to throw up.
Then I would eat voraciously as soon as I was better because I was suddenly really hungry again and I would eat whatever.
I'm sure that was probably not the best, ultimately, but no one was really connecting those things together in the way that I feel like the Chalet School view would have been much more complete.
Yes, looking at the whole person.Yes.I mean, Eleanor's own experience of illness, it was quite impactful, I think, on the way she viewed it as well.Her brother died when he was 17.Quite suddenly, he had cerebral spinal meningitis.
So he was whipped off to a fever hospital and died five days later.And during the time he was in the isolation hospital, they couldn't visit him or talk to him at all.And that had a huge impact on her perception of illness.
And also her best friend died of tuberculosis at the age of 16.And you can see that thread running right through the series pretty well with all the TB patients and the connection with the SAM.
And then her granny died when Eleanor was five or five, quite little, and she'd lived with them.So she was an important person and presumably they witnessed her gradual decline and death.
And she died from pneumonia with pleurisy, which again, pleuroneumonia is a phrase that only Eleanor seems to use, but she uses it quite frequently for serious illness, doesn't she?
I'm not sure I really know what it is other than shallow school.
I don't think pleural pneumonia actually exists as a thing, but I think she probably meant pneumonia with pleurisy, which is two different bits of your lungs getting ill simultaneously, isn't it? presumably quite a harsh way to go as well, I think.
I'm sure.Yeah.I think in my research about health anxiety, it came up a lot as a possible trigger is people having somebody close to them experience a really serious illness.
And I heard some really interesting stories from people about one person, for instance, told me about how her twin sister was very ill when they were children. and they were in and out of hospitals a lot on her behalf.
And she then recovered and grew up completely healthy.But it was the sister who could never shake the anxiety about it because she'd been the one to sort of observe and experience it all at second hand.And that came up a lot that either
watching someone you love go through something serious or having someone suddenly die in a way that no one was expecting, definitely very well-known triggers of health anxiety.
So, I mean, I wouldn't want to kind of diagnose Eleanor with anything, but I think it would be very plausible if she did.
Yes, yes, yes.And it's reflected in her work and the frequent illnesses that we see throughout the series.And in fact, you made the very good point that the Chalet school was founded on the fact that Joey had ill health.
And, and so they needed a financial solution that also matched Joey's health needs.And that's why they went to Austria, which had never struck me before, but you're absolutely right.The whole series is pinned on health needs.
Yes, I was so struck by it when I remember reading the books over and over again when I was a child that that description at the very beginning of the school at the chalet of how Joey looks, you know, she's got these sort of deep circles under her eyes, she's very pale and she's waiting for her brother.
She's waiting for her brother and sister to come back and tell her what her fate is, essentially.What are they going to do?Yeah, so almost the first thing we learn about her and about this family is that this illness is at the centre of their lives.
But it's also never really explained what is wrong with her. other than just she's, you know, very subject to colds and very subject to sort of over strain and this kind of stuff.
Of course, she then grows up strong as a horse, it seems like, has all those children and lives a long time and so on.But yes, as a child, she just seems to have this undefined air of delicacy about her.
And that baton passes on.So when she gets older and stronger, we've got the Robin in the background to be a fragile child that needs constant looking after.
And that probably progresses throughout the series, I think, because the Robin in the end, well, she doesn't grow up to be entirely healthful because she ends up having to become a nun so that
she can preserve her health that way, that she reaches adulthood and is generally fine and much stronger than she was.Who would be the next weak, not weak, fragile or delicate?Trying to think.
Good question.I don't know if there's such an obvious one, but you see it through several books, don't you, that then there's the kind of Mary Lou arc where she has her accident.Yes.
Griselle has an accident at one point, Eustacia, you know, there are sort of, I think it's not quite as pronounced, but there's always somebody
Yes, who needs special care.Yes, yes, yes, yes, you're right.There is always somebody there.And toothache as well features quite frequently, understandably, given the dental practices at the time, which I don't actually want to research too hard.
So she uses health as a plot device quite often as well, a health episode to drive things on. or bring an issue to a resolution.And they'll quite often be a crisis of some sort that involves health or an accident that resolves the story.
So it's just inescapable throughout the books, really.
And it's interesting thinking about the connection between what you might call ongoing or chronic health things versus accidents, because she does treat them somewhat distinctly because you have things like, you know, train accident or fire in a hotel or that sort of thing.
But then you also have you know, the lingering suspicion that the Robin might have inherited tuberculosis, that kind of thing.But she then also does interrelate them just in terms of what the girls are able to do and capable to do.
And then you get things like Eustacia's mountaineering accident, where she has become an invalid as a result of the injuries that she sustains.
Another thing that I find really interesting that she does is the sort of relationship between virtue and health.
So Stacey is a really good example, I think, where, you know, she's very unpleasant before her accident and she's very sort of arrogant and difficult to get on with and she doesn't gel with the community.
and then she runs away, has her accident, and then she becomes a better person through her suffering, as it were.She becomes a nice person because of everything that she has to endure.And it reminds me very much actually of Katie and what Katie did.
very similar pattern that she sort of acquires virtue as a result of harm.
And EBD does that in another book, Stepsisters for Lorna as well, which is a non-Chalet book.The girl in that, Marigold, is just awful, has a cycling accident, injures her back.
And then within 24 hours, I mean, it's not, I mean, I think Katie is reasonably convincing And it's a portrayal of that transformation.Yes.But in Stepsisters for Lorna, it's almost overnight.They bring Marigold home, give her a stern talking to.
She has a bit of a cry.She says, right, well, I better be a nicer person then.It's very unconvincing.It's a plot stolen from somebody else.And EBU doesn't do it very well in that case.
But I think with Eustacia, it is better, not brilliant, because it's still quite overnight, really.
Yes, I suppose it seems better because she isn't a prominent character during the time it is happening.
We sort of see her when Jo and the others go and visit Madge for half term and they notice the marked improvement in her since they last saw her, which was maybe eight, ten weeks ago sort of thing, rather than it being
She's at the school all the time.And so you're conscious of the time.But yes, yes.So it does feel a bit more gradual.
I was very keen on that storyline on the Stacey storyline, I think, because I was so fascinated by this idea that you could undergo a personality change because of an illness.
Yes, it's quite an interesting idea.It's also interesting with Stacey that many, many books later, when she's an adult and comes back to the school to teach, she still has a bit of a back problem.
But in a way, I think is good because I think that's quite realistic.
I think if you did have a very serious sort of accident where they feared you may never walk again, that kind of thing, I think you would be very lucky to completely recover and never experience any effects of it again.
So I do quite like the adult version of her.I think it is nuanced, but it is.I do remember, you know, going into my own period of serious illness quite young,
with all of these ideas swirling in my mind from being a very intense Chalet fan, I think I was quite surprised to find that I was just still me. but just more tired and grumpy because of chemotherapy.
I think I kept waiting for the sort of magical moment of transformation at which I would be better and my family would all suddenly be very nice to each other and all this kind of stuff.It's like any hard period in your life.You're just yourself, but
Things are hard.Yes, yes, absolutely.
My shallow experience when I have my cancer diagnosis was because the shallow school is a safe place.And for me, it always been my safe place place to come to.
So diagnosis of cancer is a huge shock, obviously, you know, mentally, quite a lot of anything else, you're preparing yourself for treatment, right shallow school books.
and I started picked up probably the first one that I'll read the whole lot one start to finish and I just suddenly became aware of all the missing people in those books particularly missing women and I thought oh yeah no imagine Dick's mum probably died from breast cancer and that just became the way I perceived them at that moment and it was quite a while before I could actually come back to them with some enjoyment because there are a lot of missing mums
There are a lot of missing mums or mums that have to go away for, like Molly Bettany, you know, have to go away for treatments or who can't travel or and all this kind of stuff.So, yes, you're right there.
There are a lot of women clearly dealing with things that are not, not the main propulsion of the plot, not specified, described, but they are there.Yeah.And I forget, why doesn't Lavender Lee have parents?
I don't think we're ever told because she lives with her auntie, doesn't she?Yeah, she lives with her auntie and it's never really explained.No, it's not.But there are girls like that who just kind of don't show up without parents.
Mary Lou doesn't really have parents either, does she?
No, she does, because her mum's really ill and weak and ends up dying.
And marries Verity Ann's dad and they become sisters by marriage.
They become sisters.That's right.Yes.But there are, yeah, there are girls who turn up at the school.Yeah.
Verity Ann's mum you never hear anything about, though, thinking about it.
No, because she just has a grandfather or something, doesn't she?
No, her father's one of the explorers and he comes back OK, but she doesn't have a mother.So, yes, that's another one.There were just loads.When I became kind of attuned to it, I just noticed how many absent women characters there were.
And it just I just thought, well, they probably all have breast cancer because it wouldn't have been talked about at that time if they had.
No, so I suppose probably, yes, they either had, yeah, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, something like that, or they died having babies again.Not talked about either, you know.So, yeah, you're right, there are just those holes.
But eventually I was able to make it my safe place again, so that was all right, good, because it is a nice place to go and you get some top tips on how to look after yourself.
And, you know, when it's super hot, as it is right now at the time of recording, really we should be having a lie down in a darkened room. you know, with the cool breeze passing through, just to keep ourselves out of the main heat of the day.
Absolutely, yes.So, no, I do think there is a lot to be gained from it.I think there are influencers on Instagram peddling much more harmful ideas about how to take care of yourselves than you would find in the chalet school.
And the more reputable ones are, you know, like the cold plunges and so on, just different version of the same thing.One element of it that I
have sort of mixed feelings about, but I'm very curious about, are the doses, the tonics that Matron hands out and the salts and all that kind of stuff, which again, I don't think it's very different from, you know, people taking supplements they buy in Holland and Barrett.
feels like it comes from a similar impulse to me.It's where, you know, if Matron had more scientifically based remedies available to her, I'm sure she'd be using them, but she doesn't.
And so the best thing she can do is kind of give people, I don't know, preventative.What is it she's always doing?Senna, soaking Senna polish and handing that out to people.
Yeah, noxious mixtures.Castor oil.
Do they have cod liver oil?No, it's castor oil.I'm thinking after the midnight feast, isn't it?Yes.I don't ever want to think about that, but you can't get castor oil nowadays.Can you not?No, that's probably no bad thing to be honest.
And also sleeping tablets.They do use quite a lot of those doses as well.There are quite a few incidents of people often without their knowledge, which is,
Yes, that's quite a common thing that one of the doctors from the SAN will do when called in after an accident or an incident, isn't it?Oh, you know, so-and-so fell through the ice.Well, we'll just put them to sleep for a while.Yes.
And there's at least one occasion where one of the members of staff gives a random member of the public a sleeping tablet, saying your daughter might need one of these later or something like that.So that's, that's quite dodgy.
Really, I don't think we can give EBD a full pass on everything.
No, I definitely would not advise anyone to take up that as a practice.It may well just be accurate to what she observed around her.That is how people did behave in a much more sort of lax and unregulated way towards medicines.
I'm perpetually astonished by this with the work I do for my podcast She Done It about detective fiction, especially in the 20s and 30s.It seems like everybody's home was just absolutely rife with substances that could kill you in a second.
And when I try and look into the regulations surrounding these substances and all this, there just weren't any or very few.
And people were just perpetually buying things from the chemists to, I don't know, clean some brass, which if you accidentally put it in your tea would kill you dead in a few seconds.
So I do think maybe there was just a sense that people were much more carefree, shall we say, the substances that we are now much stricter about.
Yes, I suppose that's why they used to have hideous public information films and stuff as well to try and stop people being quite so carefree, perhaps with potentially harmful substances.Yes.
Well, and as we want to work through the spreadsheet line by line of all the books and all the things that are in it, which I think is quite a big undertaking and perhaps not, I think we covered everything I wanted to cover. OK, thank you.
That's been really great.
Thank you very much.It was lovely to talk to you.
Thank you. Thank you, Caroline.You can find Caroline's book, A Body Made of Glass, online and in all good bookshops, and I really do recommend it.
And you can, of course, find her podcasts, She Done It and A Body Made of Glass, wherever you get your episodes of Top Hole.Caroline also publishes a transcript of every episode.
You have been listening to Top Hole, written and presented by Deborah Lofus, music and production by Kit Lofus.You can find us on Facebook or email topholepodcast at gmail.com.Top Hole is a Lofus Towers production.
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