I need a Chalet School fix

The whole thing is completely
mad! But this didn’t occur to me when I was a child.

Like the languages! No girl is ever prepared for the three days, even though it must be in the prospectus, and the exam students especially must be at a major disadvantage compared to girls who do everything in one language.

I suppose they’d also have to get textbooks to match the language of whatever day the lesson was.

Like a PP, I absolutely adored the books when I was a child, but as an adult I find them unreadable. So longwinded and badly written, and that’s before you start questioning the entire set-up!

And then she forgets some of them (Marie-Claire?), or they get shipped off somewhere, anyway (especially the boys, in whom EBD has zero interest).

Even poor Mike, too young to get sent to England to board, gets packed off down to the Emburys, and only comes up to the Gornetz Platz periodically in good weather, so Joey can get on with her new novel and popping in to the school through the hedge every five minutes, or donating jam.

And all the 'holiday' books involve the boys either staying elsewhere with friends, or sloping off offstage, so we can focus on the triplets reforming yet another recalcitrant/reluctant/ungroomed new girl (Melanie Lucas, Ruey Richardson etc).

I think one of the bits that cracks me up as an adult is when Len criticises Ruey (who is keeping house for her caveman brothers and absent father in a remote chalet) for not keeping things 'daintier' and having nice tablecloths and ornaments.

Then the war ends and the Russell go to Canada taking a strange assortment of the children with them.

No wonder joey keeps having more. Probably scared the rest are going to be sent to darkest Peru

Well, the situation in the Russell nursery was a bit fucked up — no wonder poor Sybil turned out to be a bit of a brat, continually saying ‘You’re only cousins, David and me belong!’ and that getting turned into Sybil’s beauty being the root problem, rather than just the ill effects of being packed en masse in with a random collection of cousins and desperate for attention. I mean, I get ideas of adequate parenting differed from ours, but I sometimes wonder whether EBD ever actually met a child. The bit where someone (a mistress?) remarks approvingly on David, who must be well under one at this point, already being ‘well disciplined’ by Madge, struck me as mad even as a child reader!

the bettany kids were toddlers. And didn't see their parents again until they were teenagers or near about?

That was because of the War. They missed two furloughs, by my reckoning.

(Dick seems to have been home every three years, before the War.)

I dd get a bit tired of the repetitive descriptions of cubicles in the Swiss books, but each one could have been the first CS book for somebody, for whom it was all new.

@Corbally what a wonderful description of the detail I loved. I’m remembering the cubicle curtains! I loved both Jo and Mary Lou. I remember wondering what a silvery voice sounded like (Verity).

I can understand a bit at school age... but the bettany kids were toddlers.

And didn't see their parents again until they were teenagers or near about?

I'm reminded of Sara Crewe, sent to that miserable boarding school in London.

The furlough thing stopped in the early 60s once it was possible and affordable to fly back to the UK in a day or so, and people working 'out east' got regular annual leave like everyone else.

I met someone, born in India, who had been left with her grandmother in England when she was very young, and she was fairly insistent (and resentful, more than 70 years later) that it was because her mother enjoyed the parties and dances and didn't want the burden and bother of a small child round the place. She had lived in Kashmir, and I got the impression that she ached for the country more than for her flighty mother.

My understanding is that what usually happened people (men) got six months furlough every six or seven years, came home to England then with their families, and left whatever small children they had at that stage with any extended family members who could be persuaded to take them in.

Perfect recipe for building a class of emotionally damaged adults.

her only idea for her life after leaving school is the quickly-abandoned idea of going to be Elisaveta’s lady in waiting or ‘continue singing lessons and help with the babies’.

I wondered if EBD introduced the lady in waiting idea as a possible way of 'rounding off' the series and then abandoned it when she wanted to continue it. It doesn't seem a profession that would ever have been compatible with Joey's temperament.

Brits living in India did certainly routinely send their children ‘home’ as the physical and ‘moral’ climate were considered unhealthy for European children, but generally nowhere near as early as EBD depicts Dick and Mollie regularly doing, where they seem to be regularly depositing babies and toddlers in the Die Rosen nursery. Generally they were sent back to boarding school at seven or so.

I assume EBD wanted to populate the Die Rosen nursery to make it look as though Madge and Joey hadn’t just chucked in a fully and busy life at the CS to twiddle their thumbs at the Sonnalpe? It’s always seemed mildly puzzling to me that, although Joey was never university material, that her only idea for her life after leaving school is the quickly-abandoned idea of going to be Elisaveta’s lady in waiting or ‘continue singing lessons and help with the babies’.

I agree that’s likely to be EBD, rather than a corrupted text file — I agree with a pp that this is part of the series deeply silly charm for me! The endless descriptions of dainty dormitories, exotic bread twists and milky coffee, the error-filled snatches of French and German from supposedly native speakers, the endless iterations of the trilingual system and charming foreign niceties like curtsies (which is quite funny when you read the first couple of books where all the Austrian girls are desperate to have the school be as English as possible), the cult of Saint Joey, the spirit of the school, and her earphones and fertility, followed by the cult of the insufferable Saint Mary Lou, and cello-voiced Hilda, whose ‘eyes had never yet needed glasses”…😀

In many ways, they are colossally dreadful books, especially after the move to Switzerland, where the setting is leaden, the storylines get madder, and EBD’s views on The Youth of Today start to really interfere with her depicting of teenage girls, but they’re still compulsively readable.

Many of the parents were terrible.
Juliets abandoned her
Robins dad basically did the same.
Eustacias weren't deliberately bad, but emotionally neglected her
Dick and Mollie... the leaving your babies on a different continent thing seems incomprehensible these days... was that really a thing?

The dreaded Mary Lou drags things down once she turns up. In my opinion.

Mary Lou was OK in the English/Welsh books, where she was bumptious but was regularly squashed for her own good. It was after they moved to Switzerland she could do no wrong, and became insufferable.

My new take on that one on my most recent re-read what just what a stinker Grizel's father was. Her stepmother was abusive, but his marrying her without mentioning a daughter was appalling. Grizel is an interesting character imo - she is let be a bit awkward right through till middle age, and there's always a feeling that her childhood experience had harmed her. I wonder did EBD know someone in that situation.

Fair enough @ArblemarzipanTFruitcake

@DeanElderberry it's the very first book. It makes me smile how they keep bumping into new families who just need a boarding school to take their girls off their hands!

irrelevant details and little conversations or descriptions that don't seem to add anything

In a way that's part of the charm for me. An odd comparison, I know, but it's a bit like Cathy Glass's memoirs, where she gives a detailed step by step description of going up to the loft to get an old cot out and that sort of thing.

Is it a late book? After the first few, the ones set in Switzerland get progressively more leaden. I think she was at her best in the early Tirol books, then got second wind with the rise of the Nazis and the need to address what was happening in Europe in the context of her characters and settings. The dreaded Mary Lou drags things down once she turns up. In my opinion.

It doesn't feel like a proof reading issue - I'm not seeing typos or grammatical errors. More that the whole sentence structure feels heavy and the chapters are so long winded - irrelevant details and little conversations or descriptions that don't seem to add anything.

Maybe I need to get my old set next time I'm at my mum's!

Yes those are often pretty poorly proof read. Not a proper release by a publishing house.

It wasn't a kindle book exactly - it was a pdf or something from a website someone mentioned on here.

The kindle books are not approved by the EBD estate - her publishers have said they have complained to Amazon about them. I’ve not seen any of them but they could easily be poor transcriptions from somewhere.