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

Yes, good points - Mrs Bertie is a brilliantly awful character, with her smug spouting of cliches and always having to have the last word. Rowan sums it up when she can't bear to ask her where Mrs Tranter's sister lives even though the alternative is tramping the fields to find someone else, because she can't bear the carry-on Bertie would make of Mr Tranter's stroke. The Marlows were, of course, stuck with her forever - they'd make enemies of the whole village if they tried to get rid of her!

Also impressive is the speed at which hair grows in the Alpine climate. Jo goes from a straggly bob in her final term to the dreaded earphones in September!

As well as being extremely dated, I would have thought it was uncomfortable and impractical to have a mass of hair and hairpins over one’s ears.
Most teenage girls would have begged their mother to switch to a modern style.

Joey had her plaits in earphones over her ears, not over the top of her head.

But isn’t that just Miss Bertie being her old-fashioned Ancient Retainer self and hankering after the fashions of her youth? I mean, Karen and Ann have plaits at school, but Rowan and Ginty wear their hair cropped, and Rowan isn’t much younger than Karen, and there’s no expectation ever mentioned that she’ll grow hers (or indeed how Karen wears her hair at Oxford. We only know she’s the only straight-haired one of the older Marlow sisters.)

Mind you, the timeline is so mad in the Marlowverse it’s hard to really think about hair fashions when a schoolgirl character can be claustrophobic because of being trapped in the Blitz while her slightly younger sister dresses up as a punk.

I believe so, essentially that there's an element of immune suppression

And to be fair, it was a good dramatic plot device ! Reading the books as a child it seemed so exotic and exciting

Josephine Elder, another girls' fiction writer, also had a set of triplets. They were young children, so not main characters. They appeared in Exile for Annis, published 1938, so possibly EBD wasn't aware of them when she wrote Exile. Josephine Elder was a doctor, so she'd have known about pregnancy and obstetrics.

In the same family as the triplets there was an older set of twins and the boy twin was what I suppose would be called developmentally delayed today. Very unusual for a children's book.

I think it's more just ignorance on EBD's part. I don't think she knew much about pregnancy/obstetrics at all, as a spinster. And triplets are incredibly rare - less so now, with IVF and better fetomaternal medicine meaning they're far more likely to survive - but even now only 150-200 sets are born in the UK each year (I know this because I recently looked it up after having a cluster at work!) so a lay person in the 1930s would likely have no idea about the risks and complications involved. I think she just thought it sounded like a good dramatic plot device!

Oooh, that's interesting! Is that because your body basically goes, "must turn off immune system in order to not accidentally reject tiny intruder"? I've never been pregnant, though I've had chemo, which seems to involve similar risks re infection, and I did notice then that my eczema improved quite a lot.

The risk of complications in triplet pregnancies at all stages, and of the babies being born very prematurely and having problems related to that, is massive, all the more so when the fact that there are three babies hasn't been recognised before the onset of labour. Someone sailing through her pregnancy and unexpectedly popping out three bouncing babies is heading for the realms of magic realism. Not that I'm the slightest bit averse to magic realism, it just set me off wondering if there's a load more of it in the books.

I must be mixing her up with Mary-Lou or maybe Dimsie. Thanks @HonoriaBulstrode.

I forgot about Jen’s accident. Did she hurt her back while saving someone else?

No, it was a motorbike accident. I forget if she was on the back of Joy's bike or someone else's, but Joy's carelessness caused an accident. It's in Abbey Girls Go Back To School.

However, it is still very hard to believe that Dr Chester and Dr Jem wouldn’t have noticed her being larger than average and deduced that it was at the very least a twin pregnancy

Peter Chester had twin sons himself - he should have known what a twin pregnancy looked like!

I forgot about Jen’s accident. Did she hurt her back while saving someone else?

In the Abbey books, identical cousins Joy & Joan adopted different hairstyles but occasionally Joy copied Joan’s to confuse people. And Jen simply had hers bobbed.

Joy later had her hair cut short, while Joan kept hers long.

Wasn't Jen's hair cut as a result of an accident, and she didn't grow it again? Like Mary Lou later.

Medically speaking though, for many auto immune conditions (for instance) pregnancy can hugely reduce the severity of the condition

I have been "delicate" most of my life due to an only recently diagnosed condition but I sailed through my pregnancies

The triplets but is rather extreme obviously but I loved the triplets story as a child

In the Abbey books, identical cousins Joy & Joan adopted different hairstyles but occasionally Joy copied Joan’s to confuse people. And Jen simply had hers bobbed.

Didn’t Madge tell Joey she’d have to grow her hair now she was growing up?

Antonia Forest's Falconer's Lure (1957) has the housekeeper Mrs Herbert telling Nicola, who has just had her hair cut very short, that she will be jealous of her sister Ann's plaits when Ann comes to put them up (Nicola doesn't think this will be the case). Ann and Karen are both described as having plaits in Autumn Term (1948) - Karen would have been nearly 18 at that point as she went to Oxford the following year.

Or her son climbing over a cliff.

Eg falling into a box.

'I know,' said Carandache (jealously).

Although she was still delicate enough to either faint or need to be sedated when anything remotely upsetting happened.

Maybe her diet of gallons of milk and cherry jam and bread twists, not to mention endless roast veal and pastries bursting with whipped cream not only cured her delicacy but also made it possible for a full term pregnancy of triplets to be pretty much overlooked.

Has anyone done an in-depth study on the potential symbolism of the medically implausible phenomena (such as Joey popping out a set of presumably full term, fully healthy, previously unidentified triplets, and also the prevalence of being non-specifically "delicate") in the Chalet School books? I've never seen any, though I'd be surprised if it hadn't been done.