Some Fretwork and the Interminable Christmas Play at the Chalet School

Ah, but I have a copy of Soul Music signed by the man himself! I've just started DD (9) on the Tiffany Aching books, she's enjoying them so far but I'm not sure what she's making of the Nac Mac Feegle

Hello everyone. I'm at the station at the bottom of the mountain, could you send a delightfully handsome (and inexplicably single when there's a whole school full of pretty women nearby) doctor to drive me up to school once he's had a quick look at the tubercular woman who's coughing her lungs up on the platform?

I was a mistress at the school many years ago but left to marry my sweetheart who I saw all of once a year, mentioned smugly daily and sulked when the mail didn't arrive bang on time.
Astonishingly things didn't go that well when we wed. He didn't like the cold baths, the morning walks or talking French on Tuesday and Saturday and German on Wednesdays and Fridays. He also felt my strudel rolling technique was clumsy. Then he had a mistress and a gambling problem business losses and caught pleurisy. I nursed him devotedly but he died as did our twins, my mother and the neighbour three doors down. I had a complete breakdown which required a stay at Penny Rest but now it's three weeks later I can't wait to get back to school and find work to fill my empty life (and find a new husband )

Shall I take prayers for the c of e girls who'd like to hear about my miserable marriage?

By the way, how (and why??) does a character called Arminel!!! turn into the prosaic Gillian?

Chudleigh isn't on the shared drive ☹️️. But I'm delighted it exists, and it gives me renewed hope that the manuscripts of Why Gay Left China, Jesanne and the Hidden Staircase, and Joey and the Robin in India will eventually turn up.

Rue that is indeed my usual habitat, but I rather think music-with-rocks-in would be frowned on at the Chalet Yurt School (well spotted, most people are oblivious, bit of a minor character I suppose )

Nothing to apologise for Nell, I'm an app-illiterate idiot!

Imp every time I see your name I have a double take. I'm sure you should be frolicking about a small, disc-shaped world, playing music-with-rocks-in

Cheddar, we must be sisters by marriage or something: I dropped my phone down the toilet the other day because I was too busy trying to tell DS off at the same time. Mine has survived, apparently unscathed. I hope yours will too.

I am reading Seven Scamps at last. I'd vaguely anticipated not enjoying it very much, possibly because I have a recollection of EJO being a bit nonplussed by the dedication. I am liking it a lot so far, though. I think 5yo Tim is pretty well-drawn (even if he does suffer from the inevitable toddler-talk). The arrival of the new stepmother is very well done, I think. Interesting to contrast her with Grizel's stepmother, who is far less sympathetically portrayed, and whose perspective we never get to see.

Whatever you write, link us to it on here! You too, Mornington.

My reading of Regiment of Women has been interrupted by DS, aged 2, who peed on my phone. Phone is now on radiator drying out.

Drat you, Nell, I've just purchased Regiment of Women on Kindle!

If it's any consolation, I'm a bad influence on myself too - I promptly ordered Legend by the same author after reading (parts of) the thesis. Yes, hurry up and read it so we can discuss. You should also totally write that PhD mornington. I keep coming back to wanting to write a paper on something related (the exact thing I want to write varies slightly each time I come back to it, I think, but essentially it's about lesbian readings of the CS). Probably I should stop pretentiously regarding it as a bona fide academic project, re-brand it as a blog post (or a small collection of blog posts) and actually get on with writing it at last.

Laura and Imp, I've PM'd you both. (Apologies btw Imp - I thought I'd already sent you the details!)

Hello everyone, i'm not entirely a new girl, but I have been having ripping adventures trying to find the school after the last thread school I was on relocated. I've basically been wandering around the world unaccompanied but it's okay because I'm a Guide and therefore equipped for anything.

Could someone PM me the details of the shared drive?

Aww, I love their little school with the stove that stands on a sheet of asbestos! I think EBD definitely saw it as a book of two halves - first Heather's unhappiness at leaving Ripley/redemption by Janie, and then Heather herself using what she'd learned at Ripley (ie the schoolgirl code, not being priggish, bravery etc) to redeem Cressida. The good and bad of a big public school, in fact! And I like that Heather doesn't teach Cressie - she just fights with her and gives her unvarnished opinion until Cressie gradually learns not to be a prig.

I have never before grasped the comedy of a doctor called Fill Graves. It wouldn't inspire confidence...

Yikes, that's never occurred to me before. Has everyone except me been smirking along all the time?

Thank you for the link to the PhD thesis, Nell. Some of the chapter titles look very intriguing, though whether I've quite got the stamina to plough through a thesis I'm not sure. Should we start a Regiment of Women thread when Cheddar's finished reading it? I love that book and there's loads to discuss.

Ooh Nell would you be a dear and pm me the one drive details too please?

There are a few titles that I haven't read - The Little Marie-Jose or The Little Missus, which sounds like a rip-off of A Little Princess to me, but none of them exactly sound like they might contain Gay's story.

I have now also purchased the first 3 Trebizon books and Autumn Term by Antonia Forest. Happy days!

Drat you, Nell, I've just purchased Regiment of Women on Kindle!

at Fill Graves - I've never noticed that before!

Chudleigh Hold is great - it features a German spy pretending to be Gillian/Arminel's cousin, plus the magnificent mad great-aunt, who does things like, shock horror, travel on a lorry with her furniture when moving house, with the workmen! Also secret tunnels, people falling into pits and a marvellous spooky booming cavern. It is one of the few non-CS/LR titles that I really enjoyed. I've got a GGBP copy - happy to lend it out so long as it makes it way back eventually.

I always assumed there was a book featuring Gay too - it needn't be a war one, because didn't the events in it all take place pre-war? I thought Gay and Mike left China to come home for boarding school, and then the war broke out and prevented them from going back. Or did they have to leave China because of the war? Iirc, there was a dog called Scallywag, and bandits who kidnap Ruth. It was so detailed, in much the same way as Gillian's story and The Lost Staircase featuring Jesanne Gellibrand (who may have the best name in the entire series) and Lois. Oh, and Monica Marillier/Vicky McNab's backgrounds as fully described in Monica Turns Up Trumps. It's a very interesting period, that - I think all the tie-in titles are referenced within Lavender Laughs and Gay From China. I'm not aware of any others, but EBD must have written the three published spin-offs and possibly the Gay one that doesn't seem to have made it to publication in very quick succession.

Do you mean Gillian Culver, Princess? I know that her backstory is in fact covered in Chudleigh Hold, in which she has a different name (Arminel Chudleigh?). I haven't read it before though - I should, because at the moment Gillian seems likeable but vague, but presumably from reading that she'd become a bit clearer, like the various LR families did from reading LR in addition to CS.

(Can EBD really not have realised the name she gave Phil Graves, btw? Is it a deliberate joke? She usually seems extremely attuned to the names of her own characters.)

😆 I have never before grasped the comedy of a doctor called Fill Graves. It wouldn't inspire confidence...
I always assumed there was a book somewhere which told the back stories of Gay From China, and Gillian who had adventures with a brother called Hawk and a doughty great aunt. It's rather disappointing that there isn't - though there is always the chance of an undiscovered manuscript out there I suppose.

Ah, well - I suppose we can't all be "steaming ahead with real families", Iona. (Did she also dispense any advice on interior decor for newly-acquired chateaux?)

I think the most inexplicably bitchy competitive comment Joey makes might be the one in Reunion, quite possibly on the very morning that Hilary Burn's latest baby is born: the proud father (Phil Graves ) tells everyone how big the baby is, and Jo immediately points out that one of hers was bigger. Who does that?!

I'm saving the La Rochelle ones for maternity leave next week. Joey has already told me that I'm slacking as it is only one (not twins or triplets or even quads) and there is a 5 year age gap between DD and this one. She has also dispensed lots of "advice" on childcare.

Ooh, Irene my local bookshop does actually have a Lady Chatterley's Lover reading group. There will be talks from academics and stuff.

I always wonder that. It's clear that she at least knew it very well in her head (and writes almost as if everyone ought to know it), but at what point between being in her head and being published it vanished is hard to guess... planned but not written? Written but not finished? Finished but not liked by the publisher? Earmarked for publication (either as a book or in an annual) and then lost somehow? I wonder whether maybe she had it planned / half-written but never completed, while she was v busy as a headmistress and writing quite prolifically - and then when she had more time, she no longer wanted to write about the war... The war does disappear quite suddenly, I think (which is v understandable given the author and her contemporary readers were probably sick of living through it) - Goes To It and Highland Twins are both rich in specific wartime drama, Lavender leaves it more as a background issue but it's still definitely there, and then suddenly it's gone. There's no VE/VJ Day as far as I can remember, it just fades away.

I'm currently skimming through someone's PhD thesis on Clemence Dane, which might be of interest to mornington (it was you, yes, with the spirited defence of Regiment of Women? I still can't quite decide what I feel about it, on balance - only that the feelings are strong, not quite coherent, and certainly too demanding) and possibly others on this thread, since there are many obvious interfaces with CS stuff - interwar feminism/women stuff; girls' education in the early decades of the C20th; middlebrow fiction and the writers of it...

Welcome to the School, Irene. Luckily for you it's Nativity Play term, so after a few misadventures when you try to bump off the Virgin Mary so that you can have her part, you'll soon shake down and become a Real Chalet School girl who sobs her way through the baby angel chorus of Adeste Fidelis.

Ah, Joey is the spirit of the school, my lamb. She may be over 90, but she's just a girl at heart. Surely you've read her books - she's the well-known authoress Josephine M. Bettany and if you put your copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover between the gaily-jacketed cover of Nancy Meets a Nazi none of the staff will enquire further.

Do we think EBD ever wrote Gay's backstory? I remember thinking it must be there someone in one of her non-Chalets that I hadn't read - but I've never seen it mentioned anywhere. Is it lurking in a lost manuscript somewhere? Or did she mean to write it but never get around to it?