I need a Chalet School fix

Clearly no suitable Solid Lumps of Comfort around in the Raj, then. You’d think Robin could have been menaced by a crocodile or an evil Maharajah or something, and Jo could have found a lovely Home Counties doctor.to swoon onto.

@TheOriginalFrench there is a lovely fill in called Two Chalet Girls in India which tackles this. I don't normally like fill ins but I would recommend this one if you can track it down on Abe or Ebay.

Nancy Meets a Nazi sounds fabulously wrong.

As this thread is two and a half years long I can’t remember if the missing story of Jo’s post school trip to India has been mentioned here? (My most successful thread ever was a Chalet School one a few years ago - but I don’t recall what we said about it there either.)

Anyway, that trip would have taken up a bit of time before her precipitate marriage. I do long to read it …

I wouldn't mind reading 'A Royalist Soldier Maid' - I think that's the one Rosamund got as a present.

I can never imagine Joey's books as being anything other than the CS books, so essentially naked autobiography with herself as a barely-disguised Mary-Sue! Especially after Matron takes a hand in pruning out the villainy of the bad character in Cecily Holds the Fort.

Though the title Nancy Meets a Nazi sounds brilliantly bogus.

.....having done precisely zero since leaving school other than a bit of temp teaching, helping out at Die Rosen and running away from the Nazis dressed up as a peasant

In fairness to Jo, she was a published author, her first book was accepted when she was eighteen and she'd written more by the time they left Austria. Which might seem unrealistic, but I believe Georgette Heyer was nineteen when she was first published.

FI'd have loved Joan to end up a fabulously ballbreaking entrepreneuse, but from what I remember, in one of the last books, Con or someone gets a letter from her where she says she's engaged to a 'boy' she met at business college, and one of the triplets pulls a face about early marriage being 'horrid'.

Which would read far less oddly if their own mother hadn't prided herself on being married with triplets by her 21st birthday, having done precisely zero since leaving school other than a bit of temp teaching, helping out at Die Rosen and running away from the Nazis dressed up as a peasant, and then promptly strongarms Len into getting engaged to Ghastly Reg while still at school....

(Incidentally, I have always wondered whether Joey having a few phrases of a gypsy language readily enough to fool a pursuing Nazi suggested she was hanging around the Tzigane bands that played the Kron Prinz Karl in an unladylike manner... )

I do rather like the fact the EBD didn't attempt to reform Joan or turn her into a real Chalet school girl. Joan very sensibly decided to improve her business skills and languages, and I hope those and her tennis meant she was able to get a good job, marry a promising manager, and take over the business.

The younger girl (also the product of an appalling mother) in one of the Lorna books is also obviously never going to 'reform' despite being gifted with a horrible injury and having to spend months in hospital (she also likes boys). It's interesting when the author basically knows there are people she can't understand.

I always picture BJB as the woman on the cover of a pulp fiction novel. The hussy.

To be fair, I’ve never been keen on the black fringes on that dress.

Fantastic idea for a fanfic @FortunataTagnips :)

Joan Baker needs her own spin-off series.

And eating fish and chips on the street with Viic Coles and his ‘unsavoury reputation’. And shop cake. And with a perm.

Plus I’ve always vaguely assumed that she’s called ‘big Joan Baker’ not because she was tall or plump, but because she was bosomy, and wore a red dress ‘far too old for her’, presumably cut to enhance said bosom…

Don’t forget not making our beds properly.

Interested in boys, neglecting our prayers, and disliking cold baths?

Surely not.

I think most of us are Joan Baker deep down. Or even not that deeply.

And this was Joey's experience too, wasn't it? Both parents die and oh dear never mind let's go start a school in Austria!

Glad it isn't just me!

Then in one book there’s a mention of a six year old who’s at the a school because her parents both died in an accident and who’s apparently perfectly happy.

And Joey tells one girl, who was raised by her aunt, that she should be glad her aunt’s died because after having such a terribly hard life where she had to sacrifice everything to be able to afford to look after her niece, she’s finally able to get some rest. How‘s that for setting up a future guilt complex?

Did they put "don't worry if you die unexpectedly, we adopt all the orphans" in the prospectus?

Maybe we never hear about the boysike David and Rix as they are actually assassins.

I do like the the Tirol and War books. But they are rather implausible.

I've just been rereading some of the earlier ones as we went to Tirol at Easter.

I'd forgotten about all the children dumped on Madge from an early age. In one Dick & Mollie are over with their 1-year old Jackie, and decide to leave him too because Mollie is up the duff again. That kid is destined to end up with huge therapy bills!

Also Margot Venables whose poor boys died on the harsh climate of Queensland! She, like Robin's Dad, just casually dies too in between 2 books. EBD was quite happy to kill off some of her characters.

And I've just read Exile - which is the best of the bunch- but that had wondering whether EBD had ever held a baby. As Joey casually scoops up her triplets in her arms, and later has a basket to carry them round in.

Yes, I totally sympathise with Joan Baker's horror at the baths. Actually, I sympathise with Joan Baker on lots of things, like preferring to stick forks in my eyes than to spend Saturday night playing paper games involving picking up peas with knitting needles and thinking up river names with beginning with D or whatever. I have a feeling the CS would have made me quite sweary, too.

Maybe the parents are worried that if they told their daughters about the languages they'd refuse to go. And the freezing cold baths, come to think of it.

There's clearly some kind of 'The first rule of Fight Club is that you never talk about Fight Club' thing going in about trilingualism, which forbids the parents of prospective pupils from disclosing anything at all about substantive about the school.

Or that prevents anyone from pointing out that it's probably not a great idea to take a bunch of delicate girls considered at risk of TB because of contact with immediate family members who have TB, and shut them all up together in a building!

I mean, everyone behaves as though Robin is going to die at any moment, yet Joey gets all riled because Joyce Linton (who has literally just accompanied her TB-stricken mother across Europe to the San) doesn't kiss her goodnight!