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

Do link, @KevinTheGoat. Are the Old Guard screaming about ‘relentless negativity’ and nastiness and fundamentally failing to understand that the Chalet School is wonderful and discussable partly because the stuff EBD thinks is unassailably brilliant and needs reiterating all the time — whether it’s the creamy milk, the dainty new uniform dresses in Switzerland or adult Joey’s competitive fertility (and the fact that her ‘perfect’ triplets include a psychopath and a harried juvenile middle-manager having a semi-forced marriage) — is sometimes kind of gruesome.

Also, ho-lee shit the Mary-Lou fan in the CBB thread for Coming of Age is defensive. We can't even have a jokey discussion about OOAO fighting vampires or something. You can't slag Joey off all the time but get super defensive whenever anyone criticises your fave.

"Don't come to the Chalet School! Your daughters will get TB and die!"

I'm reading Coming of Age and apparently Joey is utterly unbearable in it, to the point where even OOAO thinks she needs to cool it. A Shakespeare sale sounds fun though -imagine the scenes if they'd had a Titus Andronicus stall-

Also, major EBD-isms about the age of the school: is it 21 or 25? The latest CBB thread on the book has a list of EBD-isms in the book and some of them are pretty glaring.

There is a brilliant book by Amy Witting called “Isobel on the way to the corner shop” set in a Australian sanatorium which sheds rather a different light on postwar TB treatment.

I remember when I read the books first thinking that EBD still seemed to have a rather glamorous 19thc view of TB — pale, beautiful young women wasting delicately away — compared to the one that adults held when I was growing up, which was that it was rather shameful, associated with poverty and overcrowding. And TB sans were feared and stigmatised, not regarded as heroic and prestigious. People would often get off the bus at a different stop when visiting someone.

Plus it never seems to have occurred to EBD that many parents would not have wanted their daughters, whether frail or robust, to be in a school with a lot of girls who were considered TB risks or close contacts of cases.

Miss Browne was missing a marketing trick!

Forgot to add, do other GO series have an obsession with health/disease? I've finished a St Clare's book where one girl has flu, another has a mental breakdown due to her dickhead parents pushing her too hard - she's like the St Clare's equivalent of Nina Rutherford, if Nina had had awful pushy parents instead of being very self-motivated - and another girl has a glandular problem (thyroid, probably) which makes her fat and permanently hungry. But it's not at EBD levels.

I always headcanon that the San branched out into more of a general hospital - OK, so it's up a mountain that isn't easy to get to, but it would explain why they take on pregnant women, accident victims etc.

(There's also something here maybe about the typical scientific education of women of EBD's generation, isn't there? The earlier CS girls get an unusually extensive and professionalised science curriculum, but I assume EBD's involved a mild smattering of botany at best, which doesn't provide much of a framework for understanding diseases or bothering to follow developments in medical thinking, even for someone with an imaginative interest in illness.)

I do wonder how accurate layperson knowledge would have been of any of these issues, though. Much easier in the era of Google to check your facts! I know that obviously if you were writing (or editing) "serious" books you'd still have researched stuff like this to get it right, but I imagine that the standard for this sort of series was not particularly exacting.

I think also that TB advances in the 1950s would have been very inconvenient to a CS world which relied on a steady flow of British traffic to an alpine sanitorium!

As well as her brother, I think there's a bit of a Victoriana interest in illness as a plot device: illness to indicate a charming ethereal vulnerability (eg Robin), illness/injury as a means to improve moral character (Eustacia, maybe also Ted?)...

Her little brother died as a child of meningitis, so I would guess that’s connected with the obsession with illness and doctors. But agree she was very poorly informed about how diseases work. Imagine being worried about a child being vulnerable to TB so you bring them up surrounded by infectious TB cases …

EBD is kind of obsessed with disease to the point whether I wonder if she had a medical fetish. I mean, disease was still fairly rife in the '20s (in one of the non-CS books, there's a diphtheria epidemic and some of the kids in it die) but medicine was making advances by the '50s. And yet you've got tons of TB patients, the obsession with the Robin's health, poor Mary-Lou's mum AND stepdad dying of disease, Janice Chester getting cowpox of all things, loads of epidemics...nowadays she'd be having a field day with COVID. They'd all be looking very trig and dainty in their gentian blue masks. Actually, there's a fanfic idea...(and i didn't know that about polio, but you're right, how the shit would Phil have caught it? Or did EBD just want to make one of Joey's kids ill?)

Do we hear much about Phil's polio? Is there an outbreak on the Platz?

I always thought it was a slightly odd decision from EBD to give her polio I'm from somewhere that had several big outbreaks of polio in the 1950s (and which were major public health emergencies, involving school closure, curfews on children, the closure of swimming pools and cinemas, postponements of sport events etc.) and it's a highly infectious disease that thrives on crowded conditions and poor hygiene one of the most common modes of infection was via faeces between children who didn't wash their hands after going to the loo.

So, despite the fact that it was so much in the news worldwide in the 1950s because of the development of the vaccines and the big vaccine trials, it seemed like an unlikely disease for one very protected child in a big family, almost certainly brought up with very strict hygiene rules and with excellent sanitation, living in an isolated Swiss mountain community and not, by the sound of things, mingling with many other children at all...?

I think it's one of those things that happened offscreen. In Two Sams she's recovering from polio and it's why Joey wants Samaris to come over and play the flute to Phil, because Phil is off her food. Two Sams is pretty weak but Joey showing a more vulnerable side is one of the better things about it, as well as Miss Annersley actually putting her foot down and saying "Samaris can only come over in her free time, she's here to get an education and we can't just let her out of class when you want to see her." And Samaris and Samantha are lovely, though I want to smack Jack and friends for having a go at Samantha because she got to see Nina in hospital and they didn't. Joey asked her, how could she say no?

Actually, that's a point. Bitchiness/jealousy is a recurring theme in the Swiss books.

I thought she had mastoid and then polio?

Yes, like all the Bettany children being sent to Die Rosen from India one by one. And while I know it was entirely normal to send your children ‘home’ in the Raj, there’s something so strange and unnatural in warm-hearted young parents like Dick and Mollie pumping out babies in quick succession to leave at Die Rosen for years. Is it in Jo Returns when they give Joey the typewriter and say they’re leaving Bride and Jacky (who’s under 12 months) to join Peggy and Rix at the Sonnalpe, and Mollie is already pregnant again with Maeve and Maurice?

www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612020000200242

This essay suggests that sending your children ‘home’ was an important class distinction among the British inhabitants of India, because keeping them with you was a sign of poverty, of being an employee’ of lower standing in the government service, or in trade, and you would have to send them to local schools that took mixed race and ‘poor white’ children. It actually mentions the ‘hill schools’ in this context, which might make sense in terms of the Carricks’ standing.

@Frogcorset wasn't there this belief that white kids could not hack it in hot climates? Like poor Margot's sons, who all died out in Australia (and Aussie readers were a bit bemused at EBD making Queensland sound like some kind of heat-ravaged hellhole). EBD also wrote this adventure book called Top Secret and the hero has this conversation with some woman about how Oz is bad for white people or something.

i find all the colonial stuff so fascinating. Mum knew people at school in the '60s who were boarders cos they had family in Kenya and other colonies, and my maternal grandparents lived in Sierra Leone for a bit when Grandad's firm sent him out there - one of my aunties was born there - but Gran hated it and was desperate to go home, partly because of my auntie getting ill and partly because the white people there were so racist. It was like a W Somerset Maugham book, whites were expected to keep to themselves and not mingle with the natives.

Gillian Linton and Peter Young had the best relationship. They went on a few dates first and he wasn't a masterful doctor, and it didn't have the creepy aspect that Jack and Joey did (bearing in mind Joey was in school when he met her). Armada cut it out of the paperback, I think, which is a shame because it's a nice little plot.

Some of those midnight feasts sound rank. I mean, gingerbread and fish paste? Minging. No wonder they were ill!