Some Fretwork and the Interminable Christmas Play at the Chalet School

I'm always surprised at what I assume is the disconnect between the quality of items produced for the CS sale, and the quality of items I know would be produced by any random school I've ever known. Mind you, this is less intriguing for me in the case of Tom's dolls' houses - I'm willing to believe she was a carpentry genius - as compared to the scrap books and so on that I just can't imagine why anyone would want.

I came here to say that I have just found clock golf and a police force (rather than a school) run "on English lines" in Gladys Mitchell!

If anyone is still hanging on for onedrive access, let me know.

I don't think Tom's would have fallen apart....she was a master carpenter surely?

I loved the idea as a child of her dolls houses and was most envious. However as an adult I suspect it would be the sort of thing you groan inside when your dc wins because it's big and scrappy and you know it will fall apart and upset them.

She did make an Inn once and they had to guess the name. There were no miniatures in it as I recall. However if there were then there is the comp.....how many units of alcohol are in the pub??!!!

And Tom is making a real model pub, complete with miniatures for the raffle. Or actually hasn't she done that before?

Ive just tried to log onto the shared drive for the first time in a year or so and the password I have doesnt work any more, if anyone has the new one i would be very grateful!

Maybe....or just as bottles? I thought for competitions we could have spin the bottle, how many things can you make with a cork, guess the wine by the taste, blindfold wine pouring,

With each form dressing as a different grape?

Now see I was thinking of a wine based sale....or would that just be a step too far? i am not even sure where the school is any more..

I know that I'm just a new girl but can we do a sale based on the novels of Josephine M Bettany or, and I'd really like this one, legends of the Chalet School. I'd like to work with the Special Sixth on refreshments - we could sell the special milk.

Mornington I was horribly unsporty and never in any teams. Nor choir. Closest I got to saving the day might be when two girls in a play got drunk in most un-Chaletian fashion and I had to slap them, shove them on stage at the right moments, and try to sing while holding them upright. Thankfully they were playing giggly schoolgirls so we got away with it.
Though now you mention it, we had various cliffs in the grounds and a friend still insists I pushed her over one. She just slipped and I couldn't catch her!

There was a grafitti campaign to get rid of the "black-haired dinner lady" which we assumed succeeded as prefects were grilled about it and she did leave.

I'd have been one of those background studious EBD characters. Or Jan Scott from Kingscote. Definitely an Untrustworthy Type, not allowed to be a prefect, etc. Fine by me - prefects had to supervise behaviour in Chapel, whereas I'd managed to skive off practically every time (thrice weekly for 10-minute assembly, about an hour on Sundays) since the fourth year. Of course if Miss Annersley had taken the services, I might have been won over by the simple faith...

Also the Sale is the big entertainment in the area at the time, so I suppose the decorations and theme and games stop it being just another jumble sale?

In one of the books it said they could just have a plain sale, but for the younger girls half the fun was dressing up..

I once broke my finger during a netball match and then still went on to score the winning goal! I didn't get carried off to the San, though.

I never quite understood why they put so much effort into the theme for the Sale. If the objective is to raise money, why are you spending weeks organising clothes?!

Hello o both new girls...(I think there was someone else further up too?) Sadly my technical knowledge is lacking so despite being told more than once about the one drive I can not help. In the meantime are we having a sale this term? What is the theme???(or have we returned to pre Swiss days and had it last term and I missed it?)

Is there room for a new girl? I would have been here at the beginning of term but my mother couldn't remember the name of the school and I wasn't sure of the location. I've therefore wandered the globe looking for a group of girls in brown and flame.

Cheeky request from a new girl who should, I know, be content in the background for a while but if anyone could share the location of the shared drive I would be grateful.

Fair especially if you're the scholarship new girl looked down on by the nasty girl because she's a snob while the rest of the upper fourth take you to their bosom...

Mornington I got knocked unconscious saving the crucial goal in a boarding-school lacrosse match. I got carried to San and everything. Do I win a prize?

NotCitrus did you ever score the winning goal in the dying seconds of a hockey match? Or shove someone over a precipice so that you could take their part in the Nativity play? Or go round speaking loudly to bring about the dismissal of a member of staff you didn't like? Do tell.

Ohh, Citrus, I'd have loved to have gone to any boarding school in truth. In theory anyway. The older, wiser me acknowledges I'd have probably hated it!

Papergirl I unexpectedly did end up at a boarding school overlooking the sea, with four towering boarding houses... the swimming pool was a plain rectangle in a purpose-built building, which was fine by me as it was heated!

Got bored rigid of sea views though, by the time I left. Give me trees any day!

I did manage though to talk myself out of a scholarship by telling the Head of Languages (who happened to be the Spanish teacher) that of course I'd choose German over Spanish in third year, because German is so useful for business across Europe. I blame EBD...

Hello! I'm just reading "Althea joins the CS" and had to share this with you. It's right near the beginning, where the Major is trying to decide what to do with Althea and her brother:
"Tony will be all right. Strangeways runs a home-from-home for boys whose parents are out of the country and he can spend his holidays there."
So, especially given that EBD was (I think) a Northerner, was she having a laugh there?

It was the sea filled pool that did it for me, Citrus. I wanted to go to MT!

I re-read both MT and St Clare's recently. I'd never noticed before how St Clare's is clearly set pre-war and with a wealthier clientele, and Malory Towers is post-war, clothes and food rationing clearly in the minds of the author if not explicit, and laughing at the snobbery of schools like Redroofs and I'm sure there's an envious mention of St Clare's tennis facilities somewhere.

But of course MT is so much more sensible and has the sea-filled swimming pool. Alicia is always there with a quick retort, I'm guessing because she's learned that kind of banter from her older brothers and been trying to keep up with them. One gets the impression that teasing was to be expected and weaknesses hidden in the Johns/Hill homes, and even if girls' schools weren't as boisterous with creating a pecking order as boys' schools, no-one's ever told Alicia she's wrong. She's supposed to magically figure it out from never being chosen as head girl of her class, which is a bit much for a 13-15 year old.

Margot wasn't much more delicate until the really nasty go of bronchitis just before Highland Twins, and then there was the 'nasty go of throat' when Plas Gwyn had its 'drains' problem. Then she's shipped off to Canada where the miraculous dry cold makes her more robust than the others by the time she sees them again, so we never actually see Joey worried about her health or any of her actually being delicate.

Nor the spoiling - I do wonder how much of Len martyring herself for her sisters was innate and how much was encouraged by her parents. I get the impression she was a motherly helpful type age 3 or so and got praised for it and it got into a feedback loop.

The bit with the bookend in Triplets is Margot's final wakeup call really, isn't it, along with her realisation she has a vocation. She only becomes a prefect the year after Len and possibly Con, IIRC. Probably because the rest of the Sixth at the time are colourless types and all named characters we've ever heard of are prefects...