Joan Baker -
a problem solved? 

This article first appeared in FOCS 23, published in February 1994.

I'm sure we all had a Joan Baker at our school. While the rest of us would walk demurely in "croc", averting our eyes from the building site adjacent to the hockey field, the Joan Baker would have already made a date with the youngest and best looking of the workmen! While we were still at the dressing-up-box stage, the Joan Baker would already be dyeing her hair and wearing rather more than just a light dusting of powder (properly applied). Socially precocious, but intellectually not-especially-bothered, the Joan Baker would cross the authorities with heels and hemlines too high, and a figure far too well developed for a schoolgirl. (Like their fictitious counterpart, the real Joan Bakers were always "big"!) The Joan Baker in my class had her first bra at the age of eight, and her first boyfriend at eleven. She was expelled after running away from home during O level year to live with a hairy twenty-five-year-old called Dave. When last heard of, she had given birth to a daughter by a married man in America . But I digress.

Elinor's Joan Baker was never quite this bad, but that was arguably because the Chalet School got to her before a hairy Dave did! Elinor was never overly fond of worldly heroines, and Joan was no exception, being cursed with unpleasant appellations from Miss Brent-Dyer's pen like 'cheap', 'coarse' and 'vulgar'. Mary Lou sums her up quite well, '"She has cheap ideas and cheap tastes"', and, '"Well - she talks - about - boys". Mary Lou was very red as she got this out."

We first meet Joan Baker as the unhealthy influence in the life of her 'decently poor' classmate, Rosamund Lilley, in A Problem For The Chalet School. Elinor has few genuinely working class heroines, preferring to describe those paper daughters who are impoverished gentility (Jeanne le Cadoulec), or have fallen on hard times. Witness Tom Gay in Bride who says she is not going to Switzerland, '"No cash ... we can't afford it."' Tom, for all her peculiarities and poverty, is not a slum child from the tenements. Elinor, when she does condescend to mention the working classes, prefers decent working stock like the Lilleys (father a market gardener, mother a former lady's maid), or poor girls with a story, like Biddy O'Ryan, or the pitiful Adrienne Desmoines. But Joan Baker, the anti-heroine, bucks the trend. She is worldly and confident beyond her fourteen years. One could hardly expect Mary-Lou, or the shining example Len Maynard, at fourteen, however much they were perceived as mature leaders of their generation, to utter Joan's lines: '"I was going to tell you all about the larks Vic Coles and I got up to ... We went to the pictures and then we bought some fish and chips and went for a walk and - but you won't want to hear. We didn't half enjoy ourselves. Laugh! I could have died!"' To illuminate further, Elinor adds, 'she might condescend to hint at certain things she and Vic Coles had said and done during their walk. That 'ud make the kid open her eyes. Vic certainly was a hot one!' Not exactly 'our one and only Mary-Lou', is it?

The Lilleys disapprove of Joan as a friend for 'their' Rosamund, who outwardly annoys Joan by winning a scholarship (ironically given by Tom Gay's parents, formerly poor, to thank the school now that Canon Gay had a decent living in the Church), to a 'posh' school - the Chalet School. Inwardly, Joan is very jealous of Rosamund. She resolves that whatever Rosamund has through dint of a scholarship and hard work, Joan must also have through the newly acquired wealth of her grandfather, who has won the pools. (There is a humorous echo of Edna O'Brien's worldly character, 'Baba', who leads her friend 'Cait' into all sorts of scrapes including a shocking expulsion from a convent school in the trilogy, Girls With Green Eyes. Cait wins a scholarship to the convent; Baba doesn't, but like Joan, persuades her family to send her to the school as a fee-paying pupil, because, sharing Joan's views, she says, "it's better if you pay"!) Clearly the Bakers have 'ideas above their station' following the pools win. We are told in a letter from Rosamund's mother to her daughter newly settled at the Chalet School that '"Edna Baker [sister of Joan?] has left her job and has sent Reg Harrison his ring back"', and worse still, Joan has upset Kath Stevens, a schoolfriend of Joan and Rosamund. '"Kath says that Joan has written to say that she hopes she will understand but now she is going to a grand school she can't go on being friends with girls who only go to the Parish"'! The Lilleys, being decent folk, do not think like that at all, and Mrs. Lilley urges Rosamund to write to the sad Kath.

Joan arrives at the Chalet School thinking she is a superior being to Rosamund, and is convinced that once the well-to-do Chalet girls realise Rosamund's humble origins they will no longer wish to be friends with her. I believe Joan is motivated by jealousy. She is jealous of Rosamund's scholarship, and jealous of the good start, both academically and socially, that Rosamund has made at the school. Not wishing to be outdone, Joan rocks boats with vim! But however irreverent, unpleasant and vulgar the character of Joan Baker was, she was rather a refreshing shock to me in her challenging of Elinor's well held views. Never before had a Chalet girl been so iconoclastic; at my own school, naughtiness was characterised by shuffling in one's chair, so I was stunned by the daring comments of Joan Baker regarding established Chalet rituals. She felt that the school prayers were 'idiotically pi', and was amazed at the daily bathing ritual enforced at the school, summing it up with the humorous remark, '"Well, they say cleanliness is next to godliness At this rate I look like being forced to be both clean and godly! What a lot of silly fuss!"'

Joan resents many things about her new school: not being able to wear make-up and elaborate clothing, not having boys with whom to dance; having to speak French and German; saying private prayers in one's cubicle; taking regular baths . the list is endless. She also resents Rosamund's success. Hitherto, she could always assert herself above Rosamund and influence her. Now Rosamund is in the leading pack, a personal friend of no less a person than Len Maynard. Not only this, but she is also learning to speak 'la-di-da' like Elinor Pennell! (We are told that in reality, all that was happening was that Rosamund was losing her Hampshire accent.) It takes the combined talents of Jo (of course), Mary-Lou (who else?), Miss Annersley, and, unusually, Jack Maynard, to point out to Joan how wrong it is to be 'agin the government' all the time. Indeed, Miss Annersley says that it was very good of Mary-Lou to want to help Joan to become a typical Chalet School girl. But that was not before the said Mary-Lou had sought the help of Jack Maynard, (Jo being 'busy'), and Jack had uttered an incredibly patronising explanation of why Joan was not like other Chalet girls: '" . I rather think Joan belongs to people who finish school at fifteen or thereabouts and either train for a job or go straight into one. That means that they are much more grown up about that sort of thing [i.e. 'knowing about boys'\ than most of you girls who expect to stay at school for at least another two years ." (and this from the husband of someone who has no use for snobs!).

So we leave Problem, where Joan and Rosamund have shared centre stage, and in New Mistress we expect to see that Joan has knuckled down to being the stereotypical 'real Chalet girl'. Indeed, when the 'big' girl is appointed tidiness prefect by Kathie Ferrars, she 'looked flushed and pleased when she heard her name called out'. Nevertheless, Miss Ferrars wonders what sort of a mother Joan had 'to waste money on having a schoolgirl's hair so elaborately permed'. By Excitements we learn that following her bad beginning, Joan was 'working tooth and nail to make up huge gaps in her education'. In Coming of Age she is discussed as a possible for the school's tennis Six, and is the victor in the long-jump.

Chalet girl or not, as to whether the problem of Joan Baker was ever really solved, we can turn to a conversation that Joey has with Rosalie Dene at the beginning of Theodora. The thrice-expelled Theodora Grantley would be coming to the Chalet School, and the two old friends were reminiscing how the school had managed to reform many a firebrand in the past. Rosalie adds, '" . the only one I'm afraid we haven't made a big change in is Joan Baker."' Jo replied, '"There you've got to deal with heredity as well as environment . And even so, Joan has improved all right. She's not one of our most brilliant successes, I grant you, but she's much better than she was when she first came."' Rosalie went on to say that she would sooner have mischief and naughtiness than '"the sort of nonsense that is Joan's besetting sin."' Joey was pleased that Joan had reformed her language and her appearance, and was cultivating good taste. Also now, at seventeen, she was working hard at her French and German, taking additional Spanish, and joining the school's new secretarial classes with an eye to gaining a secretarial post when she left school. Still, however, 'big' Joan is described as being unpopular with several of the girls because of her cheap sophistication. One of the last things we hear of Joan Baker is from her long time friend, Rosamund Lilley, after Joan has left school. Rosamund tells Len that she has had a letter from the secretarial student, Joan, who confessed that she had become more than a little friendly with a young man at her commercial college!

In conclusion, I don't think the problem of Joan was solved completely because Joan never became a real Chalet School girl. But she did improve considerably. By the end of her schooldays she was settling down to the routine of the school without complaint. I think it was Joan's inherent 'cheapness' of manner, not her working class background, which prevented this total assimilation. After all, Rosamund Lilley, from the same working class background and the same council school, went on to be Head Girl of the Chalet School, and close friend of Len Maynard, which proves that, in the best tradition of the school story, a scholarship girl, (Rosamund), can win through, and a misfit, (Joan), can certainly try to make good!

Polly Goerres