The Chalet School 2 - Still talking about it a century later!

I thought "Bouncing Bet" equated to "growing like a weed" - something I have often said about my own children.

Yes, but a tiny pink wildflower isn’t really much of an explanation for why Joey uses the phrase repeatedly to describe the healthy, tall, broad, post-Canada Margot — she says it in a letter to Hilda in Wrong and then says it again to Frieda in Joey Goes to the Oberland when Frieda is worried about her Gretchen. There she glosses ‘Bouncing Bet’ as ‘plump and rosy and boisterous’.

The thing I find weird about EBD giving Joey this expression is that Bouncing Betty was the nickname given to a type of WW2 bomb, a type of land mine that propelled itself into the air before exploding for maximum damage, I think invented by Germany but widely copied. I mean, it makes more sense as an origin for the way EBD uses the idiom, but it’s not that long after the war, and comparing your newly healthy daughter to a landmine reads a bit strangely to me!

Bouncing Bet is a flower. It's a common name for soapwort.

I reckon “bouncing Bet” is another example of EBD hearing slang and not understanding the nuances - so weird to use it about a 10 year old.

Yes, that's right. I think someone else is described as a Bouncing Bet later on as well. And Anna is described as "buxom" in Exile.

Isn't that how Margot is described when Joey first goes to meet her in Canada? When she would only be about 10, I think?

I assumed that a "Bouncing Bet" would be a busty young lady.

I'd say eBay.

That’s what ‘big Joan Baker’ means.

Oops. I was saying that Jo & Madge were married women & that if any Chalet girl had noticeable norkage it would have been Joan Baker.

Yes, but that’s once they’re married women.

If any Chalet girl had big breasts it would have been Joan Baker.

Jo and Madge do breast feed, though - there are quite a lot of slightly coded references to it, like when Miss Bubb won't let Jo go to feed Stephen in Gay from China. And in Go to It there is a reference to Jo having to "cast" the triplets, which I have never encountered elsewhere but presumably means wean.

Indeed. Perhaps a doctor has to cast on eye on them and decide ‘what he wants’ for them to grow secondary sexual characteristics.😃

Though I’ve also always wondered about Lawrie Marlow, aged 14 and a half, but who is able to fit into an 11 year old boy’s money costume well enough to be indistinguishable from him as long as the head is on — even if we assume the twins’ early delicacy kept them comparatively small and thin!

And no Chalet School girl has periods. Or probably even grows breasts, come to think of it.

Fortunately this doesn't matter since, despite imbibing vast quantities of food and drink, the girls never need to relieve themselves

When I was a child reading Eustacia I always used to wonder what they did when staying in the mountain hut. These days I realise that there would have been a very basic convenience round the back. But when they get stuck on the coach overnight in the middle of a flood in The New Chalet School what on earth would they have done? I'm sure there wouldn't have been a loo on the coach in those days.

Exactly!

What makes the splash in the splasheries then? 😜

Particularly as there are no toilets at the CS.

Yes, I'm currently reading Does it Again where they all have "48 hour flu" and there's definitely good awareness of isolation etc.

It has made me wonder whether this is what we now call a sickness bug, or the Americans call "stomach flu", and I've been musing on the risks and potential horrors of an outbreak of D&V at the school. A bit like on a cruise ship, there would be no escape!

There are several examples of the CS facing viral epidemic illness (whooping cough etc) and EBD does seem to understand that - the staff ask who has had it already, divide the girls based on symptoms and likelihood of exposure, protect the vulnerable ones etc.

TB is more complicated, of course. By the time of the CS it was known that it was caused by Koch's bacillus and typically spread in overcrowded, insanitary conditions, but it still had a lot of cultural baggage around it, and EBD frequently refers to it as the "white man's plague" though it obviously was not race-specific in any ways.

Thomas Dormandy's The White Death and John Green's Everything Is Tuberculosis are really interesting on both the medical and cultural history of TB.

Where is the best place to sell them?

I think I've only read one of the La Rochelle books, and clearly not that one!

I'm imagining Jack getting TB from his work at the San, and Joey having to cope, nurse and support him -- only of course EBD would simply never have contemplated that plotline, because doctors are invincible in the CS universe. And if she did contemplate it it, it would be just that Jack had a shadow on his lung that turned out to be nothing, but it would give adult Joey a 'crisis' plot like when Robin had periods of being 'extra-delicate', when she got to be melodramatic and strained, and everyone cosseted her.

Maybe she could sing 'The Red Sarafan' under his San balcony.

Heather Leaves School.

Alured something (?Saxon). Leaves all his money to Heather Raphael. I enjoy that book, but looked with clear non EBD-dazzled eyes it's an odd tale of romanticised mega rich. Janie visits for Christmas and is given a very expensive dressing-case full of yellow-enameled stuff.

@Shellityhorn in one of the La Rochelle books - or maybe it just has some of those characters - there’s a young landed gentleman who comes home from Switzerland to die nobly surrounded by his people.

I remember at least one book that mentions they're switching to cancer research. Can't remember which one though.