To ask the Abbess to find me a solid lump of comfort and a cream cake

Anyone read The Lost Staircase? I've ordered it. It's not a CS book BUT the heroine and her best mate appear in a couple of CS books, and it's by EBD. It's during the war years and it's about this mad posh family, the Gellibrands.

I've just started 'Ruey Richardson, Chaletien' which was the very first Chalet School book I ever read. Borrowed from Purbrook Library in 1964 when I was aged 8

So glad for the drop box at working my way through the ones with the biggest cuts (I've got them all in Armada) and loving them. Three goes uncut and I now know why I should know who Gillian Linton marries

Not so far, but I’m sure there’ll be a Night Porter popping into the compartments with some Special Train Milk soon ...

Was there a mad doctor insisting on opening all the windows?

Funnily enough, rather than turning straight to EBD, I randomly opened an unread novel on my phone kindle. It’s called The Exiles Return, written by Elizabeth De Waal - and begins with a man in a train pulling out of Zurich Central Station. Lots of talk of the Swiss-Austrian border and Swiss-German language, sleeping compartments and suitcases on the rack above ...

Eustacia was a little shit, but I always felt she was hard done by because of her stupid parents. She runs off and Mlle de Lachenais is all like WHY DID NO-ONE TELL ME SHE WAS UPSET and I'm thinking 'you saw her crying herself to sleep, you idiot.'

Also, not everyone is going to know the difference between sneaking and reporting, i.e. when it is OK to tell a teacher. You can't expect someone to automatically figure it out.

I'm still on Theodora and one thing bothers me: Margot and her devil. Isn't she a bit old for people to keep going on about her devil? I know EBD doesn't want to admit Margot is batshit insane because of how she was raised, because Joey and Jack are meant to be the perfect parents, but anyone would think the girl was possessed and it's really weird how Mary-Lou and others just treat the devil thing as normal. As is the bit where Margot's guardian angel and devil are fighting over her.

Right, scary deadline wrestled to the ground - I need a break from all this bothersome real world stuff.

Shamelessly planning to hunker down with Eustacia for the afternoon.

Have just come across this thread. Loved chalet school as a child and still occasionally read them but never managed to get all the books, think I’ve read less than half.

Please may I get the drop box link??

I think Eustacia is incredibly poorly treated. Her parents have just died in quick succession, and from being an only child and a natural introvert in a quiet, scholarly household, she’s expected to fit into a large, noisy one of complete strangers, where all the rules are different, and then almost immediately sent abroad for school precisely so that she doesn’t disrupt that family, when what she probably needed was an academically-excellent day or boarding school with a strong classics department and a good record of sending girls to Oxbridge.

The CS was a really poor fit for her — health first, classics not a particular strength that we ever hear of, virtually no free time when she can just read alone, and probably, given how new the school is, a very minimal library. I feel total sympathy with her taking the key of the lab so she can read in silence for a bit!

I like Bride and her friends. They sound like a down to earth inclusive bunch.

Also, in the later books, Ros Lilley is really sweet and I like Ruey, Theodora and Samaris as well. Jack Lambert is evil though.

@clover83 I always thought Joey was a bit mad as a teenager and I still think that as an adult.

I still love all the Tyrol/wartime characters though. Daisy, Cornelia, adult Robin, Bride and her mates, Margia, Elsie...and I feel a lot more sympathetic towards Lavender and Eustacia than I would have as a kid.

(Namechanged, btw.)

Yes, I saw that thread but somehow didn’t feel it needed linking to this one!

Wow thanks for that @woodpigeons. Have downloaded them!

Someone was on the baby names section yesterday asking for opinions on Joey! The response was mixed - some loved it and others hated it.
There were lots of references to a character in a popular tv show, I think it was Dawson’s Creek, but I didn’t see any to the Chalet School.

Please can I have the dropbox link? My 10 year old has been reading the ones that survived from my childhood and is desperate for more.

I've had a look back through, having not read them for years - such a different experience as an adult, compared to my perspective as a child/teenager.

Has it been said that there are some CS related/EBD books on Kindle Unlimited ?
I find it very difficult to search but searching Kindle Unlimited Jean of Storms, which is an adult romantic story by EBD originally serialised in a newspaper, brought up a list of books which people who looked at this also looked at.
They were Visitors for the CS, Two CS girls in India, CS revisited and a biography of EBD - Behind the CS. All Kindle Unlimited.
Which for those who don’t know is an Amazon subscription. Around £8 a month. Can borrow up to 10 KU books. Can get a month’s free trial.

Yes, I've always felt there was something going on with the portrayal of Miss Bubb. She's portrayed as a sort of monster when she's at the school (though her prioritising of academic achievement doesn't seem unreasonable) and God, she gets her comeuppance. It's as brutal as the way the plot punishes the Balbini twins for kidnapping Sybil by killing off their mother and then having Jem telling two young children they will have to live for the rest of their lives with the knowledge that their mother died wanting to see them for one last time.

Fail to appreciate the CS and fall in enthusiastically with its ways, and you will end up a starving beggar, basically.

@AthelstaneTheUnready I love Joey as a kid and she's still likeable as a young mum in the war books, but when she gets to Switzerland she's so cringey. In real life, her daughters would find her embarrassing. It's a shame how she and Mary-Lou get more annoying as they get older, though I do like Mary-Lou's moment of badassery in Trials.

I need to read a biography that’s longer than her Wiki entry - but there was a point somewhere over the past few months of bingeing when I wondered if EBD wasn’t writing herself in Miss Bubb.

It seemed so excoriating. This poor woman with her high ideals and impractical practices, failing at running a school, and then over the years randomly turning up lonely, penniless, hungry, desperately ill ...

Either that or EBD was writing about someone she held a grudge against. But there was something so pinpointedly sharp and unforgiving in the portrayal - it’s the way we talk about ourselves when deeply depressed.

I spotted you on a thread about uni students sharing rooms, QuarterMiss, and you said it would be like being at school.
Most of the Chalet School dormitories slept about eight - it gives me the shudders!
One reason to strive to become head girl, I guess, with it’s privilege of a tiny single room

I think that's entirely true and that she must have been aware she was by this point writing for adult fans of the series who had grown up along with Joey and co, too it's just that it reads strangely to have these gorgeous, popular teenagers oohing and aahing over their mother's old school friends in the vac, and saying 'Tell us again about the time when Cornelia started a jazz orchestra/you rescued a princess/were rude to Bill when you fell down a hole at camp, Mamma!' and keep describing their mother to various new girls as a 'poppet' and 'just like a schoolgirl'.

As EBD doesn't appear to have much enjoyed teaching actual girls, perhaps it was wishful thinking, imagining clusters of girls being terribly impressed to be in the company of a famous writer of girls' stories?

To be fair I absolutely love hearing my mother’s stories of her youth, and they become more and more precious as we all age. But I’m not sure I’d have appreciated quite so much time with her old school chums in my teens.

But I’d imagine by that stage of the series it was less about writing to character and more about finding devices to re-hash past stories ...