Some Fretwork and the Interminable Christmas Play at the Chalet School

I bet the Swiss cubeys would be 1960s lurid patterns. The original Chalet ones would be more like these ...

I always assumed the Red Sarafan was a person! Like a Red Indian crossed with Robin Hood...

Now I have an 8yo and younger children, all the books mentioning child-rearing are even more amusing (EBD clearly never bothered checking a copy of Dr Spock!). Dd in particular is very resistant to any idea of Instant Obedience and would be full of My Devil if we'd ever inflicted any Catholicism on her. Even if she does call me Mamma...

I can't find any lyrics beyond these, and the context that a red sarafan was the traditional wedding dress.

Ooh, I totally had cretonnes wrong as well. I think I had sort of substituted hospital curtains, given this is my only experience of bed-separating material, and hadnt thought too deeply beyond that. I definitely imagined them lighter (because they throw them up over the rail every morning!), and probably with a slightly translucent quality. I am not sure how I feel about this.

I'm also not sure what I thought a (red) sarafan was, before knowing it was a dress. Possibly a flag, or a bird...

Also, am delighted by Cheddar's Wertheimers!

I think I must have muddled sarafan and samovar because I realise that's the picture I've always had in my head. Not quite sure why I thought a teapot would be red now I come to think of it.

The pictures that google images gives me for cretonne aren't a bit like I imagine the dormy curtains, either. And now that I come to think of it, my internal pictures of them reflect the kinds of flowery clothes (orange, pink, and yes, lime green) that little girls used to have to wear in the late 60s/early 70s. Scarred for life, we were! Google what Lulu wore in the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest and you'll get the idea.

I seem to have entered a timewarp and ended up back in the classroom

Oooh, I hope you're teaching your pupils to reason from cause to effect, with the aid of synthetic maps. As a special treat you can give a stand-up class because they sound like a species of torture so much fun.

Ahh, googling red sarafan brings up photos of a traditional Russian dress.
It is a folk song and is on YouTube.

I didn't know what I thought a Sarafan was either.
I googled cretonne the other day to get an idea of what the gaily patterned dormy curtains would be like. Not much the wiser now!

New picture of Robin singing "Lady in Reddddd"...

So the red sarafan is a red dress? I don't quite know what I thought it was, mind you. Something like a samovar.

Look what I have just discovered! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Wertheimer The Wertheimer family still own the House of Chanel and rose to prominence from their association with Coco Chanel in the 1920s! I bet that's where EBD got the name from!

Tis half term so may have to return to the Chalet School. I did notice one of my girls reading a Trebizon book. I muttered that she would make a good Chalet School girl. She looked a bit nonplussed but my aim is to get someone reading a Chalet School book though not sure how as no copies in the library and I'm not lending mine!

I think it's interesting that you rarely see much Joey/Grizel/Madge interaction after Jo gets married. This despite the fact that Grizel lives in the School - does Grizel come back immediately to teach when the School re-opens in Guernsey, does anyone recall? She appears briefly being bad tempered Cocky in Gay From China, but apart from that I seem to think that she sings very small during the war years.

Witchend, yes, I must have only been 7 or 8 when I first read Jo of, but in my head I was ages with Joey and Robin was a baby!

As an adult, I think you could make an interesting and plausible narrative around their lives diverging very naturally as they reach adulthood: one goes in for further training, a job, the difficulties and the financial independence (ish) that that brings, the other marries young and has loads of kids and her life is inevitably hugely different, they're absorbed into different groups of peers. I can also totally see why none of this would appear in a CS book! But for me, that's what happens, and Jo the Bountiful in Carola and Reunion makes sense in that context for me: sisterly teenage years, then a big gulf due to being on such different life trajectories, but still an underlying familial relationship which resurfaces on a couple of occasions, and I'm willing to believe that Jo is sufficiently matured by life (eternal schoolgirl status notwithstanding) for it to happen as it does.

I think though that EBD gets into difficulties with Grizel after Head Girl. She doesn't want her to be wholly reformed (because she's a foil to Joey?) so it all drifts a bit. Not entirely dissimilar to Margot, years later! Difference there is that Grizel is a fantastic character in spite of Elinor's intentions. Margot is one of the better characters for her era, but that's not saying much.

I also love Jo of. The first time I re-read it as an adult, I think I actually wept a bit over the Christmas bit, where Frau Mensch puts Madge to bed.

Thermogene, goose grease and turpentine!

Ye-es. In Head Girl they get really quite close and then all Grizel's maturing/deepening vanishes again until Reunion!

Jo of is one of my favourites. I was about the age of Robin when I read it, but thought of her as way younger though

It's so lovely with the arrival of the Robin and the way they all adore her as the baby, the Christmas scene, Madge still in school, Joey's at my favourite character wise, still young and fun, and they're still small and family like in school.

I don't think EBD really knew what to do with Grizel and Joey though. She gets a fairly realistic sister relationship here with them scrapping like siblings but still getting on well. But then you get in subsequent books I think it's Juliet who says "Oh they've never got on well" and similar remarks. Then at other times EBD seems to suddenly put them as really close.

Jo and Grizel's relationship is so utterly sisterly in this, fighting, snapping at each other and all the rest of it. I forgot that Grizel lived with Joey from the age of about 14 to her early 20s and was essentially her sister, and yet it's Robin who is her adopted sister and her chief bridesmaid, not Grizel. Anyway, I set out to say that this portrayal is realistic. Jo the Bountiful in Reunion and Carola, not so much.

Now reading Jo Of and young Joey is just so much better and more rounded, likeable, interesting, realistic!

Also the Robin is described as having lived amongst older people and therefore the other girls shouldn't find her too much of a baby - not sure what happened there!

Can you imagine those Sale raffles, though? You'd buy your tickets out of politeness / obligation to the San's worthy cause, and then stand there the whole time crossing your fingers that you weren't about to win Joey's infamous lime green twinset, school jam which Matey has been siphoning off over the last term, some sort of dolls house monstrosity built by fourteen year olds...

Any sentiment along the lines of "no one except Joey" is always brilliantly misplaced. It's always the most mundane, unexceptional non-idea of the chapter, but "it takes Joey to come up with a thing like that" nonetheless.

And then we have the "no one except Joey would ever think of sending the school such an amazing treat as greengage jam"... which Anna had made and no doubt carted over to the school, and then probably had to make more to use it in the way she'd planned.

But also, I think it's in Peggy or something where Matey has donated jam for the fair and Peggy says something like "we've been rationed to one tablespoon a fortnight-we knew then she was planning on donating jam" which always makes me think of the dreadful Matron in Noel Streatfield's "Thursday's Child" who starved the children in order to take stuff to her family.

Poor Anna is punished by her own competence. I bet she wished she'd never baked Joey those lemon biscuits in the first place...