To not be feeling the love for the Chalet School

[doingthesplitz]

Inspired by a few threads on here, I rooted out a couple of old Chalet books the last time I was at my mum's and brought them home, looking forward to a nice few hours wallowing in the past. However, I tried both of them and couldn't get past the first couple of chapters.

They just didn't have the same magic anymore; the girls were either ridiculously prim, or chortling, jolly hockey sticks types. When they weren't all chuckling merrily their eyes were darkening as they remembered Joey/MaryLou whoever's recent brush with death. The teachers were far too wrapped up in the school and needed to get out and go to the pictures occasionally and maybe find themselves a boyfriend. And the 'old girls' needed to "move away from the schoolgates. Nothing to see here anymore".

AIBU to think they are not as good as I remember and to feel a bit sad .

St Clares is much better. I wanted to be Claudine.

I've just re-read Exile from Girls Gone By and there is a huge amount that was taken out in the Armarda books, I'll now need to replace all my old copies as GGB publish them (at least the ones that were cut). I've just downloaded School at the Chalet but I'm going to read that one with my dd if she's interested.

Bummer. Apart from Mary Lou I think all mine are the Armada paperbacks.

I've been busy re-reading some of the earlier ones, and they are fantastic! I love how Mddle often has the girls 'hard at it' in her classrooms, and how ludicrously wealthy all the girls are. and all related to each other too! Still find Mary-Lou and The Robin irritating, and Jo is clearly losing the plot after having so many kids.

there were a few e-copies doing the rounds on here a month or so back, and I'd be happy to email them to anyone who is interested.

I love them, just bought the last one and have been reading through the whole set!
Some things are unintentionally funny though.
There is a near-accident with a motor boat in Althea Joins (the one I'm reading) so a teensy bit of up-to-dateness.

I'm sure at one point in the later ones they spot some hippies on a station platform.

The war ones are genuinely quite good, as I remember (especially Exile and Highland Twins) but after that they become v. derivative and samey.

Robin has lots of potential but is massively undeveloped as a character... an odd omission, I've always thought, given the number of deeply tedious characters whose life stories we follow in gruesome detail.

In 'Peggy' Peggy Bettany tells Polly and Lalla that she has two years left at school but will then have to come home to keep her mother company because her father works abroad and also to look after the chickens and sheep. Sounded like a dull future for a young girl!

I think it's beatniks (precursor to hippies) that get spotted on a station platform - and I seem to remember that they were described as 'people in need of a capable Nanny and a good tubbing'. I worry about how much of this stuff I can remember...

The start of Peggy is deeply weird. I remember not understanding it at all as a child, when it was one of the first I read. Persevere, once they get to school it gets much better!

I never minded Robin, but I don't think I ever thought of her as a real child. One thing I'm noticing on the re-read is that the school secretaries (old girls, of course) are addressed by their first names, but they have to address the Heads as 'Miss Wilson' and 'Miss Annersley'. The staff, however, get to address the Heads as Nell and Hilda. Never noticed it before, but now I keep seeing it!

The start of Peggy is deeply weird. I remember not understanding it at all as a child, when it was one of the first I read. Persevere, once they get to school it gets much better![quote]

I know. A load of stuff about Peggy calling on Lalla and Polly; them all getting on the wrong train etc. I kept wondering when we were actually going to get to the school. And even then a long boring chat between Miss Annersley and Peggy about how difficult it was to be chosen as head girl and have to follow in the footsteps of all the 'greats' like Robin and Joey.

The bit at at start of Peggy is Poppy and Lalla playing that "Lady Something-Lamp" game isn't it? I used to play that sort of thing with my sister.
It was one fo the first books I read, and wished I could play it with them.

Lady Acetylene Lamp, I think. It was years before I realised that an acetylene lamp was an actual type of lamp at the time!

Fellow chaletians!!

Some of the books like joey goes to the oberland and chalet school reunion are not set in the school at all but are about Joey home life which I think was quite a brave thing for EBD to attempt.

I agree with posters who say Elinor was quite even handed in the war and distinguished between Germans and Nazis which was probably enlightened, (my grandad always said the only good German was a dead one.) but that's what 2 WWs do to you.

The thing that mostly gets on my wick is the idolisation of men and doctors in particular. I remember seething as a kid when Jo refers to Laurie Rosomon as being so capable of looking after her son after appendicitis when his own wife Daisy was actually the ex paediatrician!!!

EDB couldn't update them I don't think, it would be like Tracey Beaker going to prep school or Jaqueline Wilson having story lines about playing the game and mid night feasts. Wouldn't work.

Yes, that's the one. They were mortified when Peggy arrived and they were in the middle of such a childish game.

Actually, I think one of the things that irritates me now about the books (and that I loved as a child) was the sense that there was a kind of inner, more important circle of girls ie the ones who were related to or informally adopted by the Russells or the Maynards. You always knew, if someone talked about Auntie Jo or Joey or Auntie Madge as opposed to Mrs Maynard or Lady Russell, they were part of the 'in' crowd that everyone else aspired to be like. (And were always going to be the ones chosen as Head Girls).

Yes, and it always annoyed me that after the school left the Tyrol there were never any non-British head girls, even when the school moved to Switzerland. The first few books are charmingly European but from the war years onwards they feel v parochial and Anglo-centric with few links to the wider community.

it always annoyed me that after the school left the Tyrol there were never any non-British head girls

Ah, but Mooncup you are forgetting that as the series matures you either have to be Mary-Lou or you have to have Bettany DNA to be head girl. At least, I think that's how it works.

Yes agree with that mooncup, and of course if any one screamed during an air raid or lightning she was either a maid or foreign or usually both.

I also wished that someone would have told both the wonderful doctors Jem and Jack to use a bloody condom once in a while.

No C sections despite multiple births, no PND, no painful mastitis. Still EDB lived talking about illness but hadn't a clue really. Usually comas or breakdowns were averted by Joeys singing 'the red sarafan' 😄😄

Don't read the chalet girls grow up by Merryn Williams, shocking plot lines.

I read somewhere that after the first twelve books, where Joey returned to the Chalet School to teach for a while, the publishers wanted to pull the plug on the series. In fairness, I suppose the original premise of a young English woman setting up her own school in Austria and drawing in pupils from a wide international mix had run its course and reached the natural conclusion of Madge getting married and Jo leaving the school and becoming an adult. So EBD had to change tack a bit. I think they lost some of their uniqueness after that and began to drift into typical girls' school story territory.

Fudging heck, The Chalet Girls Grow Up is hugely disturbing...

Yes, the Merryn Williams book thoroughly depressed me, though I think it's very interesting. I also find most of the later Swiss ones a bit tedious, particularly the last two or three.

Soo agree, the chalet girls grow up is like spitting in a kittens eyes.

Everything I ever thought true was ruined!

Jo mad and worse A BAD MOTHER, MaryLou and Sybil slappers, Reg a bastard and poor Len.😂

Try chalet school librarian by Pat Wilmott or Peace comes to the chalet school by Katherine Bruce. They are luffly.

By no stretch of the imagination could I see Mary Lou as a slapper.

I can't remember how she ended up in the EBD series but I'm sure she became a bossy WI type responsible member of society.

Sybil, maybe, but not Mary Lou Trelawney.

Doing in this book she steals Len from Reg!!!!

Sybil is also a marriage wrecker!!

Don't read it. Gave me nightmares.

EDB has MaryLou finally doing archeology after dear Doris ( her mother) dies.

Reg was always a bit of a bastard, though.

I bet they put archaeology on the Chalet School syllabus so she could come back as a teacher and never, ever have to leave the safety of school and Joey's loving care again.