This essay was written by Susan Peak for a collection on Noel Streatfeild to be edited by Farah Mendlesohn. The collection did not come to publication, and this essay is being hosted here so it won’t just disappear.

In this essay, I first discuss the kind of autobiographies that Streatfeild wrote, and then explore the main issues (such as genteel poverty) that the books contain. This is with reference to both her adult and children’s fiction as they all relate strongly to her autobiographies.

In writing this, I am indebted to Angela Bull’s biography of Noel Streatfeild, published 1984, which has invaluable discussions of her books and a chapter on her autobiographies. Any quotes are referenced.

Autobiographies come in many forms; the most usual one is where there is a forward progression through the writer’s life, starting with childhood and ending at some point in adult life. Some chapters may be grouped around themes, or with more of a focus on particular people, but there is still the general forward movement. Readers expect this; they also usually expect some degree of accuracy. But this doesn’t always happen. An autobiography can be fictionalised, as Streatfeild’s to some extent is, and another example of this is James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Here, James Joyce’s main character – Stephen Daedalus – is fictional; he is understood to be Joyce’s alter ego. The content does otherwise draw extensively on Joyce’s life. However, a key difference between the two books is that Joyce’s is usually classed as fiction; Streatfeild’s is not. Yet in one respect they are identical: the chief protagonist has a different name from the author. On reception, Joyce’s book was praised for its literary skills – reinforcing its perception as fiction – while Streatfeild’s book was praised as an autobiography. This may partly be because, in a short foreword to A Vicarage Family, Streatfeild says that ‘Vicky is myself’. This foreword does make clear that her intention is autobiographical, and her reasoning for the name change – an awareness that her portraits of her family were probably faulty – comes over as straightforward. It is a small shift away from accuracy with the benefit that it allowed Streatfeild to concentrate on what mattered most to her.

In this sense, she is writing her autobiography in a similar way to all her novels, as elements of herself and her life appear in most of them.

If you like Streatfeild’s children’s stories, then the autobiographies are a joy to read. Writers are advised to “write what they know”; Streatfeild exemplified that, putting her life into her fiction and, eventually, fictionalising her life. Streatfeild’s autobiographies cannot be separated from her books, particularly her children’s books: the themes in the autobiographies reflect the themes she explored in her books.

A reader of Streatfeild’s books may end up wondering if any of them don’t in some way draw on her life. At first glance, Luke may not seem to do so as this is the story of a boy who kills his stepfather. There are certainly no obvious analogies with Streatfeild’s life, but the story is told with Luke “off-stage” for the entire book, so her experience of theatre will have influenced the book to that extent. This is possibly not the only exception: another is Saplings, where a happy, middle-class family is adversely affected by the Second World War. This clearly draws on Streatfeild’s own wartime experiences, but is not what actually happened to her.

A Vicarage Family was published in 1963, when Streatfeild was about 68 and had already written most of her best-known books. Of the books which clearly draw most directly on her own life, only When The Siren Wailed (1974) and the two Maitland books (1978 and 1979) were written after her autobiographies. It is the most accessible of the three autobiographies, echoing as it does many of her children’s stories with the bonus of the story being about Streatfeild herself.

The story starts with “Vicky” aged twelve, facing expulsion from school – a dramatic moment that very quickly sets the scene for the rest of the book. We are shown a clever and rebellious child in what are, for her, difficult circumstances. The expulsion is in the first chapter; genteel poverty is also introduced then, via Miss Herbert the governess, and shabby clothing in the second chapter. Also shown then are Vicky’s difficulties with her mother, who seemed unable to understand this unconventional daughter (she didn’t fit in, she got into trouble). “John”, the cousin, is introduced quite early, coming home from boarding school with their brother, Dick, and a close relationship between him and Vicky is quickly shown. One gift of Vicky’s is shown early: once the family moves to Eastbourne, Vicky begins to act in parish shows and becomes increasingly popular. Her cousin John wants to be an actor, potentially going against his father who wants him to join the army, and they make a good pair in the shows. There is also a brief mention of Vicky’s writing ability, first by John who, the reader realises, is deployed to provide an insight into the kind of person Vicky could become, and then at the end of the book, by Vicky’s headmistress, Miss French, who comments on the quality of Vicky’s writing and says she could earn money through it. Both of Streatfeild’s future careers are thus foreshadowed.

In A Vicarage Family, the story is told entirely from Vicky’s point of view, both the good and the difficult. It is the most intense of the three books, covering a period of only about five or six years. The internal chronology is hard to work out, but it starts when Vicky is twelve and her age is stated as fourteen in 1912 (page 260, Lion paperback edition). This places Vicky’s year of birth in 1898 (although Streatfeild herself was born in 1895). This book ends on the dramatic note of her cousin John, who hated the ugliness of fighting in the First World War, dying in battle in 1915. The period covered is therefore about 1910 to 1915. It is a most memorable ending and well written. In the book, this event is portrayed as ending Vicky’s childhood; in Streatfeild’s actual life, the First World War took her outside the home to work in a munitions factory, and, as for so many of her contemporaries, in doing this she departed from the class and gender-based trajectory previously laid out for her.

There are three key themes in this book which were the issues that mattered to Streatfeild from her childhood: the circumstances of unfairness, shabby clothes and genteel poverty; the acting that she did which foreshadows her first career; and the writing that is more hinted at, as her second career.

In Away from the Vicarage (1965), Streatfeild portrays Vicky’s first steps into adult life: Vicky becomes “Victoria”, and the reader sees the start and establishment of her acting career.

The theme which is most explored in this book, after acting, is relationships with men. Claude – apparently an invented character who turns out to be homosexual – appears in a chapter about The Gay Twenties, and is described as someone with whom Victoria was in love; but of course this ends badly when Claude tells Victoria that he cannot marry. This is interwoven with a theatre tour of South Africa, where Victoria gets into a difficult situation with the company director becoming jealous of her relationship with one of the actors, Robert. In the end, Victoria is isolated, and it signals her acting career drawing to a close; the book itself ends with the sudden death of her father. This echoes the sudden death of John at the end of A Vicarage Family. One pleasure for Victoria that did come out of this tour, however, was a love of travelling, which Streatfeild explores more in Beyond the Vicarage; it also emerges in one or two of her books such as The Painted Garden, a follow-on story from Ballet Shoes that is set in America. In this book, the Winter family goes to California for their father’s health, and Jane, the child who didn’t fit in, becomes a film star. She meets Pauline Fossil, and her sister Rachel, a ballet student, is helped by Posy Fossil.

Streatfeild’s writing eye in her autobiographies was quite realistic, despite the shifts she chose to make (by ‘shifts’ I mean where Streatfeild made a change to suit her narrative which still had its roots in reality). She wanted to show her childhood from the inside, but the reader is left in no doubt that Vicky was a difficult child. In Away from the Vicarage, Streatfeild is realistic about having only a slight talent for acting and a fair amount of luck in getting roles, and also about Victoria’s naivety and social ignorance, illustrated by unknowingly taking lodgings in a brothel. The theme of clothes is shown again but from a very different perspective: Victoria becomes a model, and quite a successful one. This work is dismissed in a page or so in Away from the Vicarage, but it’s evident from Bull’s biography that Streatfeild herself modelled and liked the clothes she could obtain from modelling, and this made up to some extent for the shabby, even ugly, clothes she’d had as a child (page 89).

In Beyond the Vicarage, Victoria becomes very much her own person as her writing becomes the most important thing in her life. Published in 1971, when Streatfeild was about seventy-six, the book itself divides broadly into three parts. The first picks up immediately after the end of Away from the Vicarage, with Victoria travelling home via her brother in Bangkok to work out what to do with their mother and youngest sister after their father’s death. While doing this, Victoria starts writing, and the story quickly moves into the book being published and a second book started. This first part concentrates on her writing, describing the early books (of which the first was The Whicharts).  Then a request comes from her publisher to write a children’s book about ballet – Ballet Shoes – which is very successful. Victoria, however, had become very tired, and organised a trip to America for a holiday (this reflects Streatfeild’s own condition at that time). This refreshed her, and she wrote another children’s book on her return: The Circus Is Coming, which won the Carnegie Medal in 1938. In this book, two orphaned children join their unknown Uncle Gus, in a circus; the story is about the adjustments they have to make.

The second part of Beyond the Vicarage starts with the Second World War. Victoria continues to write; she is a member of the WRVS, involved in work in Deptford where Streatfeild had undertaken social work earlier on in her life, and in setting up the mobile canteen service. In this, she used the kind of contacts that only a Bishop’s daughter turned actress would have. This experience was to contribute to the book When the Sirens Wailed (1974) which is unusual for Streatfeild in exploring the lives of working-class children. In this book, Streatfeild demonstrated her new understanding that real poverty of the kind her father had tried to teach her about was very different from the genteel impoverishment in which she had grown up.

Although Streatfeild wrote a lot of books during wartime, the second part of Beyond the Vicarage focuses mainly on Victoria’s wartime work and on family issues, settling her mother, and her brother Dick who was interned in Bangkok. However, a few books are mentioned such as I Ordered a Table for Six, where a restaurant is bombed and some diners survive while others do not, teaching each of the survivors a lesson about the value of life. Interestingly, there is no mention of the romance novels which Streatfeild wrote as Susan Scarlett, which are pleasant and very conventional but still warm and witty: unusually for romance novels, each of them situates the heroine firmly within her family, showing the interest family dynamics that links all of Streatfeild’s work. There is a continual reference to novels being destroyed in the bombing of the Collins’ repositories, but these novels are now available on Kindle so some copies clearly survived.

The third and shortest part deals with Victoria’s post-war life. This section could be described as “perfunctory”, taking only four chapters to cover about twenty-five years. In this part, it is noticeable that, for the first time, one of Streatfeild’s friendships with women is mentioned: Margot, presented in the book as Margaret. It isn’t shown in any great depth, but the mention may indicate a degree of self-acceptance and perhaps less censorious times. The other significant event is Victoria’s decision, in 1961, to stop writing novels for adults and to concentrate on children’s books instead. She doesn’t mention that her final book for adults, Silent Speaker, didn’t do well, but she does portray Victoria as accepting that her books no longer suited the times. The book ends with another death – that of Margaret – and with Victoria facing old age alone.

By the time Streatfeild came to write her autobiographies she had written sixteen novels for adults and twenty books for children. Of these, the children’s books were thriving while her adult novels were becoming dated and less popular. Streatfeild was recognised – and was now recognising herself – more as a children’s writer.  She drew on both her children’s stories and her novels as a means of informing how to write the autobiographies.

What is interesting to see is what she chose to emphasise in her autobiographies – particularly the first two – and what she chose to downplay or leave out. Both these types of elements appear again and again in her children’s stories and were issues that she considered all her life. The main elements are genteel poverty; clothes; a child who is a rebel/special; a family of an unusual kind; shifts (including a degree of exaggeration); and omissions. The ‘rebel’ type is that of a child who doesn’t fit in, who is questioning and occasionally defiant, and who may do things differently from her siblings.

Genteel poverty was a major feature of Streatfeild’s Vicarage books, many of her children’s books, and a few of her novels. It reflected her experience as a child and was something that made her very unhappy. Streatfeild discusses some of her family background – which was in minor gentry – in chapter 7 of The Vicarage Family. Genteel poverty is quite a specific thing, and of a specific time. It is a condition which occurs to people who are of ‘good’ family, but who do not have enough money to maintain what they consider is their position. They are usually not in absolute poverty – that is the lot of poor people, and poor people are invariably of a very much lower class. But they struggle, and two factors make it difficult to alleviate their struggle.

One of the characteristics of the genteel poor is that they tend to be hanging on to middle class status in “approved” and often hereditary professions. Streatfeild’s father was a vicar, of a family of vicars. He secured his first living as a curate to his father as his father had before him. Alternatively, they might be ex-soldiers living on a pension, or clerks. If the latter, they would only just be hanging on to gentility.

Women in genteel families were rarely in paid employment. If they were, it indicated a drop in status, and even then the roles were restricted. They might be governesses or companions; they would not be maids or cooks. So Streatfeild records her shock, in A Vicarage Family, around 1911, when her mother, most unexpectedly, tells her daughters that she expects they will have to earn their own livings. In that respect, Streatfeild’s mother was both foresighted and sensible for, after the war, many women of the gentry classes found themselves competing with better-qualified grammar school girls for jobs. A problem, of course, was that very few avenues were open to women then, despite the impetus of the First World War. Of the three older Streatfeild girls, the eldest, Ruth, became an illustrator and art teacher, and the younger, Louise, married young. Theodora, younger than Streatfeild by thirteen years, also married but was in effect of a different generation and the recipient of the good boarding school education for which Streatfeild had longed. Her choice was perhaps more genuinely a choice than would have been possible in the past.

Before the Second World War, genteel people had servants who lived in. This was partly a condition of their class, but also – and very much so – a consequence of the fact that housework was a great deal of work and some of it, such as cooking, was a skilled job. Housework comprised three major areas of work: cleaning, cooking and laundry, and all three were very labour-intensive. Not only was a woman in a genteel family expected not to work outside the house, but she was also expected not to do housework other than light tasks inside the house. She did, however, have to be able to supervise her servants in their work. Streatfeild records social changes here, as the availability of servants becomes less between the wars, and her mother even tries to learn to cook. There was little in the way of convenience then – manual carpet sweepers, for example, were invented in the late 19^th century, and motorised sweepers appeared early in the twentieth century, but they were expensive. For meals, shops provided both necessities and luxuries, but only necessities could be afforded, and shopping had to be done daily (no weekly supermarket shop). Cold storage, such as cellars and ice houses, had existed for centuries, but refrigerators were invented only in the early twentieth century; and were expensive. Laundry, however assisted by scrubbing boards, tubs and mangles, was equally labour-intensive, and early washing-machines (available from the mid-nineteenth century onwards) were – again – expensive.

Another aspect of genteel poverty was a resistance to accepting external charity. Only family charity was acceptable, such as passing clothes down and helping with school fees. (It was taken for granted that children would be privately educated.) One noticeable feature of the Vicarage books is “Vicky”’s concern with having to wear ugly clothes that were handed down or which were gifts from richer cousins. This also reinforces her sense of being the odd one out, not helped by the fact that Streatfeild was rather plain as a child while her two immediate sisters were pretty. A great deal of detail is provided in A Vicarage Family about how awful some of the clothes were; being dressed poorly as a child was one of the things which caused Streatfeild inner anguish, and she reflected that most in A Vicarage Family. This is drawn on very clearly in Ballet Shoes, with the Fossil children often commenting on their clothes and how shabby or unsuitable they were – old velvet dresses with worn patches, for example, and clothes that were really outgrown and therefore skimpy and tight.

Streatfeild herself liked nice clothes and dressed fashionably, particularly when she was young.  In the 1920s, Streatfeild was a model as well as an actress (an experience she used in the Susan Scarlett romance, Clothes-Pegs, 1939), and took the opportunity to buy the clothes she modelled. She bought a lot, and her youngest sister was most impressed with the clothes she wore when she visited (page 89, Bull).

In most of Streatfeild’s children’s stories there is one particular type: a child who is a rebel, and who is also in some way special. From childhood, Streatfeild was rebellious, and also convinced that she was in some way especially talented. She depicts both these characteristics very clearly in the first two Vicarage stories in “Vicky”. The rebelliousness shows up early, mostly as awkwardness such as in her refusal to work properly at school, and her tendency to say exactly what she thinks. For example, on arriving at the vicarage in Eastbourne, Vicky wishes they did not have to live in vicarages, upsetting her mother who had spent time preparing the house. Her schooling is a major area of her awkwardness and bad behaviour – she is frequently rude to the teachers and the headmistress. Then eventually, in her early teens, she is instead able to channel her rebelliousness into trying to do well at school and accepting the difficulties around this with surprising patience. It starts with her discovering a love of reading but, typically for her, she initially does far worse at school – deliberately doing badly in exams at age fourteen and very much upsetting her father as a result. Much of this rebelliousness arises from a strong sense of justice: she is very aware of when adults are unfair to her and outspoken in challenging it rather than accepting it. This challenging rebelliousness can be seen in many of her subsequent story characters, especially in her children’s books, such as Nicky in Tennis Shoes. It is certainly a major feature of her first autobiography.

The most striking act of rebellion was when Vicky, the daughter of a most proper vicar, decides to become an actress. As a vicar’s daughter, and of her class, this is almost unthinkable but, in Away from the Vicarage, which starts after World War I, when she tells her mother that she wants to be an actress, she tells Vicky to ask her father, and he agrees that she can go and train despite how much he dislikes the idea. Only after about ten years in the theatre does Vicky discover the way in which she is truly special: writing fiction, first for adults and later for children. Her talent for theatre is shown early on in the autobiographies, in shows which the children would put on: she and her cousin “John” are recognised as the best “turns” in any of the shows. But, although she is well trained and can act, she isn’t outstandingly good. It is her writing that is truly outstanding.

This narrative theme recurs time and again in her writing, and she explored it thoroughly before writing the Vicarage stories. In her first book, The Whicharts, Mamie is the rebel, and often as outspoken as Vicky, and more clearly still in Ballet Shoes, Tennis Shoes and White Boots. In Ballet Shoes, the closest to a rebel character is Petrova, who dislikes ballet and finds happiness and satisfaction in mechanical hobbies. Petrova in fact conforms outwardly, accepting the need to do ballet and theatre to earn money, although she grumbles, but her talents clearly lie elsewhere; both she and the reader are pleased when she finally gets a chance to do what she wants. Posy is the particularly gifted child as a dancer, in Ballet Shoes. She is also much more of a rebel: she refuses to take any notice of anyone else especially in matters relating to her dancing, and she is very determined in pursuit of her dream, going on her own for an interview with a famous ballet teacher in order to get lessons from him.

In Tennis Shoes, the older sister, Susan, is the apparently more talented child, but it is her sister Nicky, less cooperative, who proves to be the champion, having the drive and determination that her older sister lacks. She shows those characteristics while also being in some ways an awkward child, very direct, like Streatfeild.

The theme of “rebel” is strongest in the first autobiography, and it is noticeable that “Vicky”’s life is much calmer in the second two books as she is then doing what she wants to do. Streatfeild’s novels for adults do contain characters who go against convention, such as Flossie in It Pays to be Good, who is a cynical and ruthless gold-digger, but it is with Streatfeild’s children’s books that being a rebel is most strongly associated.

In several of her books, the protagonist’s family is a “found” family. Probably the best known of these is the Fossil family in Ballet Shoes, where the three children are found by Great-Uncle Matthew and brought up together, naming themselves “Fossil” after his hobby of fossil-hunting. This parallels an earlier book, The Whicharts, where the three children are in fact half-sisters rather than rescues, but in a similar way they are handed to a connection of the father, in fact his first ex-mistress, and brought up together. Amusingly, both these books have exactly the same opening paragraph, about living in the Cromwell Road; however, one book is for adults and the other for children.

In The Circus is Coming, two children join their Uncle Gus in the circus. This brother and sister – Peter and Santa – have led a sheltered life and face a big adjustment to circus life. Both the children are used to having their own way, for example, and Peter is both arrogant and lazy. They are not used to mixing with other people, and have to learn a lot to settle down and become part of the circus family.

In these books, what Streatfeild was reflecting was her sense of being very much an odd one out in her family—that the family did not really fit together. How poorly she felt they fitted together comes over most strongly in A Vicarage Family, with her difficulties with her immediately younger sister in particular. This is “Louise”, who is portrayed as a rather smug child who is also a tell-tale. Streatfeild also felt her family to be “odd”, being the children of a very devout vicar and subject to awkward restrictions such as only eating bread-and-butter while out during Lent, which was embarrassing at parties. So strong is this theme that Angela Bull devotes an entire chapter to it in her biography (pages 29 to 40).

Streatfeild very much edited her life for her autobiographies. Angela Bull has commented on this:

“There is no mention of Streatfeild’s childhood delight in books and games of pretence, no hint that she ever encountered a ghost, or enjoyed snowdrop gardens and walnut plantations. Such details would have thrown the book out of key, by lightening the sombre impression she wished to create. So she opens her story at the moment when her expulsion from the Hastings and St Leonard’s Ladies’ College is only averted by the move to Eastbourne, her father’s second living. It is to be clear from the first page that Vicky is a problem child.” (page 220)

Streatfeild exaggerated the extent to which she was unhappy and badly treated in order to highlight those aspects: her parents not understanding her, the trials of being a vicar’s daughter, the difficulties at school, her problems with ugly clothing. She seemed very much to be exploring the extent to which her childhood and early life shaped and informed her writing, almost to the point where they mirrored each other.

There are other minor shifts. Streatfeild depicts her relationship with her mother as worse than it seems to have been in reality, certainly in later life (page 221, Bull). But this, as an issue, shows up very little in her books, and was probably only slightly exaggerated from her actual childhood. So the shifts described above are the major ones.

One major aspect of adult lives that was almost absent from Streatfeild’s autobiographies – and to some extent from her novels – is that of relationships with men. Perhaps the biggest single change was to switch Derek Baumer to “John”, portraying a brotherly type of relationship as a more intense cousinly one, with herself being “John”’s confidant. There is not really any parallel to this relationship in any of Streatfeild’s books.

Only two relationships are mentioned: the really quite adolescent relationship with “John” which may have reflected what Streatfeild wanted to have happened and not any reality – Derek didn’t actually live at the Vicarage; his home was in London and he never stayed for more than a week, whereas “John” was shown as living with them. The type of character that “John” was – sensitive, imaginative – does appear in others of Streatfeild’s books, such as Tony in Saplings, so may have been an ideal.

The second autobiography goes further into pure invention as neither Robert nor Claude appear to have existed in any form (page 227, Bull). Instead, Streatfeild seemed to form the strongest emotional attachments to other women such as Daphne, whom she met in 1928. Streatfeild kept a diary, and the entries at that time show a strong attraction to Daphne (pages 103, 105, Bull). Daphne remained a close friend for over ten years until Daphne formed a close relationship with another woman (page 197, Bull). Streatfeild then formed a close friendship with Margot, whom she met around 1948. It’s possible that Streatfeild was simply not attracted to men. It’s not clear, however, that she ever had a physical relationship with a woman. So one thing that the autobiographies did allow her to do was to circumvent discussion of her sexuality without actually telling any lies.

Her attitude to relationships with men seem to be reflected in the nine romance stories she wrote in and around the Second World War under the name Susan Scarlett. There are nine of these, many published in wartime, and they are very much in line with the restrained romances of that time. There is little emotional depth and no sex, not even kisses. It’s not surprising that they dated quite quickly after the war.

Streatfeild’s life informed her books; she drew extensively on her experiences and interests in writing them, and the books, in turn, informed her autobiographies. They should ideally not be read in isolation, but in conjunction with her fiction writing, particularly that of her writing for children.

Works Cited – Noel Streatfeild:

(Streatfeild’s books listed in alphabetical order as a range of editions was used.)

Apple Bough. Virago, 2018. Kindle ed.

Aunt Clara. Bello, 2018. Kindle ed.

Ballet Shoes. Puffin, 2006, Kindle ed.

The Bell Family. Vintage Children’s Classic, 2014. Kindle ed.

Caroline England. Bello, 2018. Kindle ed.

Clothes-Pegs [published as Susan Scarlett]. Dean Street Press, 1939 and 2022 (Kindle ed.)

Far to Go. HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2020. Kindle ed.

Grass in Piccadilly. Bello, 2018. Kindle ed.

The Growing Summer. Virago Modern Classics, 2020. Kindle ed.

I Ordered a Table for Six. Bello, 2018. Kindle ed.

It Pays to be Good. Bello, 2018. Kindle ed.

The Maitlands, All Change at Cuckly Place. W. H. Allen, 1979.

The Painted Garden. Puffin, 1986.

Parson’s Nine. Bello, 2018. Kindle ed.

Party Shoes. Oxford Children’s Classics, 2013. Kindle ed.

Saplings. Persephone Books, 2011. Kindle ed.

Shepherdess of Sheep. Bello, 2018. Kindle ed.

The Silent Speaker. Bello, 2018. Kindle ed.

Thursday’s Child. HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2020. Kindle ed.

When the Siren Wailed. Orion Children’s Books, 2021. Kindle ed.

The Whicharts. Bello, 2018. Kindle ed.

The Winter is Past. Bello, 2018. Kindle ed.

The Vicarage books:

A Vicarage Family. Lions, July, 1990.

Away from the Vicarage. Collins, 1965.

Beyond the Vicarage. Collins, 1971.

Other works read:

Bull, Angela. Noel Streatfeild: A Biography. William Collins, Sons & Co. Ltd, 1984.

Bailey, Joanna. Can Any Mother Help Me? Faber & Faber 2010, Kindle ed.

Nicholson, Virginia. Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived without Men After the First World War. Penguin 2008, Kindle ed.