To wonder whether you'd prefer to go to Malory Towers or the Chalet School

[Vintagejazz]

I just heard to girls about 11 years of age having an earnest discussion about this on the bus. I didn't think kids even read Chalet School books any more.
I think I'd opt for Malory Towers. They seemed to have more fun. I'd probably be expelled from the Chalet School for cursing, wearing lipstick and forgetting to speak German every Wednesday or whatever it was.

Oh my God - imagine the MN reaction to that!

Presumably Simone resisted the temptation to make a snide comment about her and Joey's respective pelvic floors.

Joey is a beeatch who probably had to carry her undercarriage in a wheelbarrow.

I don't remember that comment from Joey. What a cow! Mind you I'm still amazed that Simone stuck by her because she was a real beatch to her most of the time iirc.

I'd forgotten Joey's 'tactful' comment about Simone's one child vs 'real families' (which appears to mean four and upward as soon as possible after marriage). Imagine what she would say to someone like me, who has one child by choice and considers him quite real enough on his own, thank you very much.

EBD had some very odd ideas about having children, including the assumption that everyone wants as many as possible. (I mean, Jack and Joey are devout Catholics, but lots of the other massive families aren't.) She also has this odd idea that fertility is an aspect of personality, ie Joey has triplets because she's a 'wholesale' personality. And there isn't a single other character in the entire series who is anything other than fascinated and impressed by Joey's eleven -no one is ever aghast, pitying, suggests separate rooms or a vasectomy, or tactfully passes leaflets about pelvic floor exercises and sneezing.

Just once, I do want a new girl, on getting the inevitable invite to Joey's house, to say 'No thanks, I'm busy, and I hate dogs/small babies/people who wear their hair in earphones and think they are zany. Plus those triplets are creepy - there's the dutiful one, the dozy one, and the one who throws bookends.'

Burren, I'm with you there. I'm a mum of one by choice too and I think any comments like that from Joey would leave me having to be restrained from slapping her.

Most of the onlies in CS seemed to have "issues" didn't they? Eustacia, Grizel... Mary-Lou and Verity were only rehabilitated by their parents marrying.

Oh yes, and Theodora who is a mistake born 15 years after her older siblings and also has a sad lonely childhood.

Didn't EBD have a brother who died youngish of (I think) TB? Maybe she romanticised sibling relationships as a result (and indeed, maybe that accounts for the TB/San obsession in the books...).

Poor old Theodora, she was made change her name to TED! Not even Thea, but Ted.

Yep all 'only children'are either spoilt excepted the sainted MaryLou as she had a tough gran.

I actually wonder if EBD really understood basic biology and thought that by 'wanting twins' to start your family, like Biddy, was enough to work the magic.

Mind you Anna does most of the work there including cleaning all the windows, cooking, cleaning, washing etc for everyone. I mean how could she physically do that.

She even bakes wedding cakes for other people and gets up at 4am to pull lettuces incase Joey wants to go on an expedition. I want an Anna!

Oh and there was Richenda, she was an only child too and a bad tempered madam as a result obviously. Her porcelain collector father sent her to the Chalet School when she smashed one of his vases. Trying to remember what she was made change her name to. Probably Rick.

Or 'Biff'.

Yes without Joey even asking her she was Ted!!!

What would have been wrong with Dora?

Also jet were teenage girls in the 1950s putting up their hair at 18? What's with that? Wasn't that Victorian? Would Joey even have been doing that in the 30s? The earphones sounded vile.

It was Ricki! She was nearly blinded by a boy who had never been smacked and was of course spoilt by his mother.

Haven't RTFT sorry, but has anyone mentioned St Clare's? I love love loved it!

Dora was seen as drippy, I think. That passage always annoyed me too, I used to wish she'd had the gumption to say, 'Actually I like being called Theodora.'

I can't remember anything about Richenda apart from her getting acid thrown in her face by a brattish child... a particularly implausible scene.

Yep preferred the twins at St Clairs to that bad tempered bitch Darryl Rivers any day.

X-post - ah, that explains it, the body...

The later books (after New Mistress, which I really like) are pretty rubbish, aren't they. The peak of implausibility is reached, as I recall, by a book featuring a girl (Adrienne??) who looks like Robin and turns out to be her cousin, and another one about a girl called Flavia from a rich family and who an evil villain tries to abduct. Except he accidentally abducts another girl by mistake. Or something

Richenda was interested in ceramics and was a friend of Lens.

Margot was a bitch to Theodora and tried to blackmail her by threatening to tell everyone she had been expelled by 3 schools. She had eavesdropped on Joey shock horror.

Sainted bloody MaryLou sorted it all out as Joey had just had more fuckibg twins and couldn't be upset.

I think I misspent my youth right there.

I'd forgotten about the blinding, might have to take a squiz at that one again. I'm willing to bet the blindness was only temporary.

Richenda spends three weeks in quarantine (possible scarlet fever IIRC) during which they christen her Ricky and speak only German, having ascertained that hers is deficient. German boot camp works, and nobody gets scarlet fever.

It's ammonia the child throws at her, and she doesn't quite go blind. She is also reconciled with her grieving (widowed) father - they are Quakers so she struggles with the "Catholic or Protestant" question, saying at last "Protestant, I suppose".

Margot showed sociopathic tendencies. How did her life pan out?

Would you believe she became a nun? A medical missionary.

I really can't imagine Margot hacking it as a nun. Surely after three weeks of getting up before dawn, praying for hours and keeping her eyes lowered at all times she would have escaped over the convent wall and made a dash for London and the Swinging Sixties.

Did she really? Maybe that was EBD's punishment to her for being such a bad egg, she was denied the chance to spawn 14 offspring.

I should think ten siblings and a strict man-pleasing Catholic background would have you running screaming for a nunnery. And she got to practice medicine instead of being chained to the house, family and school forever.

I always thought she was canny.

Fatal I think it's Theodora who spends time in quarantine with Rosamund and Len After a small pox scare from running into a cottage child on a ramble.

She learns German as they all talk it to help her.

Margot becomes a nun because she spent her whole childhood being tempted by her devil.

Still the putting up the hair annoys me most! Teenagers in the 1950s? EBD just didn't update her books at all.

From what I hear about some nuns of yore, a sociopath would have fitted right in.