Is there a current chalet school thread? Anyone fancy it?

Wouldn't it make you feel slightly weird if your Faithful Handmaiden actually turned down an offer of marriage because she didn't think you and your bazillion children and wards could get on without her, though?

Nah, that's just standard.

Another bit of CS wish fulfilment that totally went over my head as a child was Penny Rest! I want to be sent away to Penny Rest. I won't even have to square any pesky principles about patronising/exploiting wonderfully simple continental peasants for that one.

There is a real theme about being able to lay down your burden running through the books. I think for me that's actually a part of what makes them v comforting reading. I'm definitely not into the 'collapse and promptly marry a doctor' manifestation of this theme, but Madge at the Mensches for Christmas nearly makes me weep!

I always felt sorry for Anna, having to deal with a gajillion children and barely having any time off. In CGGU she quits, and I don't blame her. And I want to smack Len in Triplets for the patronising way she speaks to her when Cecil is missing and Anna is upset and frightened. Anna has been raising you since you were a baby, you smug bint. (Marie Pfeiffen is the servant girl with the gajillion relatives who work at the CS in the early days.)

@BinocularVision I know the exact poster and thread you mean, and I agree. People like Peggy are nice in real life, but they are incredibly boring to read about, and Peggy has a giant stick up her arse, ruining the Middles' AND the prefects' weekend because the Middles committed the heinous crime of speaking Regency English. The horror. Madge just laughed it off when Joey and her friends did the same thing with Shakespeare in the Tyrol.

@NellWilsonsWhiteHair

I want an Anna.

Anna as ideal servant is another classic wish-fulfilment bit of the CS, like whatever the Mensches' servant was called in whichever early book (Jo Of?) Joey, Madge spend Christmas in Innsbruck, who works like a demon and is pathetically grateful for five minutes off to go and see her own family over Christmas, and whom Madge specifically compared to English servants.

Basically, the European Lower Orders are different, all picturesque, devout and deferential -- is it Marie Pfeiffen who is thrilled to get a framed photo of the school for a wedding present?

I want an Anna.

As a child, I loved the Chalet School books, but as an adult, I just want to punch Joey Maynard. She is so unutterable patronizing, with her 'my lamb,' and 'my dear.' Perhaps that's the way they all spoke in Brent Dyer's world, but it's infuriating.
Also irritating is the way she appears to do nothing much for the children when she's a mother, apparently leaving all the cooking, shopping and childcare to the indefatigable Anna.
The book I most love is Chalet School Grows Up. ( That might not be the exact title), as it gives a whole new perspective. Mary Lou runs off with Reg and Jack shoots himself as he can't take any more of Joey's constant hobnobbing with the prefects. Great stuff!

CARE BEAR!!

Honestly, though, this thread made me peek at the CBB for the first time in years, and in a thread on Peggy of the CS, where several posters remarked that they found Peggy bland and irritating, like the perfect girl down the road your mother was always comparing you to when you were 14, someone got on her high horse and said they thought Peggy was incredibly nice and it was no wonder that nice, quiet people were always being bullied etc etc.

I think some people on there don't read much apart from CS books, and don't have a sense that a personality that might be quite nice to have as a neighbour or workmate is simply not going to work as the protagonist of a novel -- or that saying you find Peggy a dull little bit of girlish perfection isn't the same as mistreating the new intern!

Frankly, given Robin's hailing by everyone as the uber-fragile 'Engelkind', and Joey's habit of lashing out at anyone she thinks doesn't appreciate her sufficiently, like Joyce Linton or Eustacia or whichever Bad New Matron locks her in a room, it's pretty likely she'd have grown up to be possessed by a demon that would make Margot's devil look like a Car Bear, rather than a Cool Nun who dashes off to rescue potential CS girls from a life of prostitution and then discover they're her long-lost cousin.

The Robin is the most irritating character; the irritation is heightened by the way Joey slops over her. Boak.

Eustacia is an arsehole but NOBODY comes off well in that book, except Gottfried (who is lovely) and Madge, maybe. The girls play really spiteful pranks on each other and Matey somehow thinks a whole form were just being careless and there's nothing odd about a group of girls with cat hair on their blazers or bits and bobs missing off their clothes. Miss Stewart goes batshit because she assumes some girls are laughing at her and bullies Margia into telling her why they were laughing. Miss Wilson tells Eustacia that if she was at a boys' school, she'd get beaten up and expects her to know the difference between sneaking and reporting, despite the fact she's never been to school before, and then blames Joey when Eustacia runs away because apparently Eustacia wanted to be her BFF. Mlle Lepattre sees Eustacia crying herself to sleep and then asks the other girls if Eustacia was upset about something. Joey is extremely vicious and blames her for Robin getting ill. Mary Burnett is useless and calls a meeting just to bitch about her. The girl's lost both her parents who weren't that great to begin with, and nobody seems to take that into account. Compare with Nina Rutherford, who has a lot more allowances made for her, although she's admittedly nicer than Eustacia (even if she is a monumental bitch to poor old Hilda).

EBD did like killing people's families off, didn't she? George RR Martin's got nothing on her. Also, Daisy is one of my faves and RAARGH. She's an award-winning paediatrician but sure, let's ask her husband about dealing with Charles' appendicitis.

Actually, on the subject of new girls, Emerence Hope is constantly made out to be one of the worst pupils ever but in hindsight, she's not that bad apart from the scarecrow incident, being a bit sweary, the stairs incident (where she gets owned by Miss Dene) and gobbing off at the prefects. Jack Lambert is much worse, IMO. Emerence at least becomes nicer when she's older, and she wasn't a bully like Thekla or a traitor like Betty, and never did anything as horrible as smashing up a Head Girl's study. (Bride is one of my favourites, so I'm biased.)

Yes, Dr Benson is — from what I remember — blamed for her own death, because she follows her own course of treatment, rather than listen to a kindly, authoritative, male doctor, as all ‘nice’ women should! (She’s constructed as a nutty obsessive like Professor Richardson or Richenda Fry’s ceramicist dad, not given the breathless deference the series generally gives doctors.) And blamed for Eustacia’s oddities in her first term at the CS, whereas things Sybil’s vanity, Margot’s propensity to violence, and Con’s maladaptive daydreaming are never blamed on their parents...

I don’t think EBD accorded woman doctors remotely comparable status to men, anyway. One minute Daisy Venables is an award-winning paediatric specialist, the next it’s her husband who is pontificating (and being listened to) about the health of some child, though I can’t remember whether it’s theirs or one of the Maynards, as EBD appears to have completely forgotten she’d made Daisy an eminent children’s specialist.

(Or she did remember but thought it was a bit unwifely for Daisy to know more than her husband...)

She’s treated spectacularly badly by everyone in that book, anyway. Robin, if she’s so fragile that a night’s worry will send her into a fatal decline, shouldn’t have been allowed to go on that trip and been left at the hotel with another girl, and that the climbers got stuck in a hut overnight was in no way Eustacia’s fault. I mean, E is hard work, but no more so than lots of other new girls.

Yes! There's a lot of rather un-chaletian callousness and uselessness in Eustacia IMO. Everyone blames her for getting stuck at the Stubai glacier but actually none of it is her fault (and by the by why does Jo get to go on the trip but poor Anne(?) has to stay behind and look after the Robin?) There's a complete lack of useful leadership from both Mademoiselle and Mary Burnett, and Nell Wilson tells Eustacia that if she was a boy she'd get thumped.

Ironically she strikes me as a rare case who actually would have benefited from a kindly interfering adult Jo nearby, but of course child Jo doesn't butt in at all, despite later insistence to the contrary.

EBD absolutely loved doing a bit of parental killing off to swell the population of Freudesheim, didn’t she?

Although the parental death that still shocks me on rereading is the completely heartless way EBD presents poor Eustacia as completely unfazed by the sudden deaths of both parents, because apparently prigs who like their classics simply don’t mourn the death of their entire family, but devote their attention to a confused attraction to Joey.

She’s treated spectacularly badly by everyone in that book, anyway. Robin, if she’s so fragile that a night’s worry will send her into a fatal decline, shouldn’t have been allowed to go on that trip and been left at the hotel with another girl, and that the climbers got stuck in a hut overnight was in no way Eustacia’s fault. I mean, E is hard work, but no more so than lots of other new girls.

@margotsdevil I'm sorry I missed your sad news & very sorry for your loss.

I have ME/CFS & am autistic, CS books are my thing when my brain is in meltdown & I need something I can read without thinking too much. I collect the fillins as well & am gradually replacing all my abridged Armada copies with GGB copies. For anyone who wants to read the books in Ebook form, there is a thread somewhere on here where you can get the login details to onedrive with the majority of the books.

Thanks for the they're much appreciated.

And the username is definitely Chalet School inspired!

I like Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. I recently read The Shadow Rising and it made me cry. They're also incredibly sexist (he had some very odd ideas about gender and an obvious spanking/humiliation/femdom fetish). You can like stuff and still get irritated when you have Joey happily throwing the n-word around and characters being snobby towards girls who aren't like them. I wish the CBB would realise this.

Joan is an arsehole towards Ros, she's very nasty and manipulative, but she does get better afterwards and even has a cool moment in Richenda where she helps get smaller girls over a flooded river. But EBD never lets the other girls really accept her.

EBD also has a weird obsession with weight. Characters are always commenting on how fat other people are. And no, nobody called Sophie Hamel Fatty at school, Madge would have stopped that. And that's before we get into girls obsessing over how pretty their peers are or the staff congratulating themselves on being good-looking. No wonder so many fans write slash.

^so sorry that was supposed to be.

I'm so orry for your loss, margots. I like them for easy but engrossing reading too. Read quite a few during the first lockdown for that reason.

@NellWilsonsWhiteHair

Oh, I've had such a yen for a CS thread over the past few months! I fell off them a few years back (EBD would meaningfully say I was "very busy") but I loved them. I spent some time on the CBB too and there was a mix of really good and insightful conversation and a lot of people for whom... the safety of the chalet school was sacrosanct. I mean I obviously have a strong attachment to the books and characters too and they are my go-to comfort reads and I will defend so many ridiculous aspects of them, but also the reason I want to discuss them (much more so than eg the Kingscote books, which are undoubtedly better) is because of the imperfections and oddities and problematic bits and the slash fic possibilities. So the more playful MN threads were better for me.

I bought my children a shop cake called Frieda (the caterpillar) this afternoon! I daresay they'll be bilious later and I've ruined my chances of nabbing a solid lump of doctor.

I absolutely agree that it’s entirely possible to combine deep affection for the CS world with acknowledging that it can also be batshit, error-riddled, snobbish, racist, unintentionally comic, maddening, hilariously inconsistent and plain weird.

Yes Ann would have fitted right in and Karen and Rowan too at a push, but Ginty and Lawrie would have needed near-death experiences and tears in Miss Annersley's office before becoming real Chalet Girls

I have quite a fondness for the truly perverse even in the later books (drugs! motorboats! beatniks!). In fact by that point the madness is becoming the highlight...

And then there are the perplexing things where you think 'has so much really changed in 60 years? How did EBD expect this to land?', eg. when Jo hilariously writes to Madge that she's so fat the ceiling broke and Madge cancels her holiday and goes on a slimming retreat instead