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

It can’t be Maria as she doesn’t appear in the choices in the quiz Carrot posted.
I don’t remember Juliet being head girl either.

Isn't it Maria Marani in Exile? It's her and Cornelia trying to save the pilot, and it's all too much for her because of her father (one of the better written plot lines).

I thought it was Cornelia in Exile as I remembered her trying to save the pilot in the burning plane.

See, I always think Mary Burnett was a way better HG than Joey. I’d completely forgotten Elizabeth Arnett was HG, and I had to think very hard who was HG in Exile.

I barely remembered Mary Burnett!

10/10! But I think I largely worked it out off the one or two I was sure of...

10/10 hahahahahahahaha. mind you, wasn't it Louise Redmond rather than Redfield?

8/10 ....

@parker231 please can I have a link to the drop box

10/10 - I think that I may have spent too much timer-reading in the last few weeks.

Thanks, Carrot.
I only got 6/10!

It was one of the books I hadn’t read before so it was news to me, I have just spent far too long googling to work out which book it was and found this.
“Another device that Brent-Dyer uses to illustrate her opinions about modern teaching methods is the invention of another Chalet School, run on very different lines. It makes its first appearance in The Wrong Chalet School (1952), when a pupil tells a new girl:

last year they had a new Head and she has the maddest ideas. She believes in you learning what you like and when you like. It sounds very nice, but I think it must be an awfully untidy way of doing things. I'd a lot rather do as we do and have time-tables. (Brent-Dyer, 1952a, p11)

In a later book, Bride Leads the Chalet School (1953), the two schools merge and the results of these teaching methods are demonstrated for the readers.

it was found that, with very few exceptions, the girls from the Tanswick school were a good year behind their contemporaries on the Island. Free discipline does not make for hard work unless the pupils are born students and the general tone of the Tanswick school had not made for that. (Brent-Dyer, 1953a, p82)

Given her attacks on both old-fashioned and modern teaching methods, it is likely that Brent-Dyer agreed with headmistress Miss Annersley when Miss Wilson claimed that "There's quite a lot to be said for some of the old-fashioned methods of teaching, you know." Miss Annersley replies: "I believe in mingling the old and the new - making the best of both, in fact." (Brent-Dyer, 1949, p386).“

Does the CS merge with the other Chalet School with the bright orange tunic? I think that must be in a book I never read.

All I remember about the other CS is that the girls in the orange tunics get into their train in a far less 'orderly' manner than the CS girls when Katharine Gordon meets them at Paddington, and that Hilda feels the other CS's secretary is too 'assured' when she phones to see whether Katharine has been entered there. Clearly they are wrong'uns.

@Parker231 please can I have the Dropbox link? Shall I pm you my email address?

Hi - I’m not aware of any Dropbox issues - anyone else having problems?

@Parker231 - you kindly sent me the drop box link a few weeks ago and I read Exile and Highland twins. Have tried repeatedly to open all of the others in the last ten days but nothing opens. Is it me or is there something wrong with Dropbox? If you can suggest anything I’d be eternally grateful. If no solution I’ll have to dose Myself with special milk.

GaudyNight don't they merge with the other Chalet School later? And get some very unsuitable girls 😂

There were a number of British children evacuated overseas to the USA / Canada at the beginning of World War 2.

Plus if I’ve got my timeline right, the Chalet School moved from the Tyrol before Britain and Germany were at war.

So Mr Flowers would have had time to arrange for Cornelia to go back to the USA.

But yes, there would be a point at which he’d left it too late to get Cornelia safely out of Britain.

How would Cornelia get to the States? What with passenger ships getting torpedoed in the Atlantic. (And wasn't this discovered in the later ones to be the fate of a chalet girl?)

Why Mr Flower seemed to be wandering around Europe with Cornelia never made a lot of sense to me, let alone why he stays on and keeps her at the CS in wartime. And doesn’t he buy the old CS buildings when the school moves to the Sonnalpe? Because there’s nothing an American millionaire needs like an abandoned school on a remote Austrian lake, in a country that’s just been absorbed by the Reich...

This may be a controversial opinion, but I think that - for most American parents - an average boarding school in the USA would win out over an exceptionally lovely boarding school in the UK given the war context.

I mean, maybe Cornelia wouldn’t get taught in 3 languages and all that. But she’d be less likely to get killed in an air raid.

Because that would suggest there were schools as good as or better than the CS, @NewSchoolNewName? Like that bit in Exile before the CS starts up again in Guernsey, where Joey and Madge (I think) go through a list of all former CS staff and have to kind of come up with very good reasons why a few might not be prepared to quit their new jobs and return to the CS, because obviously that what most former staff would do?

I’ve always been very tickled by the bit in The Wrong CS where it emerges that not only is there another Chalet School, it’s also based in the same part of Wales and has a similar brown and flame coloured uniform. (Well, apart from the bright orange tunics...)

Not surprising we never hear of them again. Probably Madge sued for brand infringement.

And Anna - I can’t quite wrap my head around her staying with the Maynards out of her love for the job, when she could have had a husband and household of her own. Surely working for Jo couldn’t have been that fantastic?

I reckon either her boyfriend turned out to be some unsuitable scumbag, or the Maynard’s had some hold over her.