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.

Re Thekla, she always seemed like a baddun from the moment she turned up hissing about hochgeboren and the Junker class and I think I even recall a charming little scene when she called Sophie Hamel untermenschen. No such thing in the Chalet School - they even had shopkeepers' daughters!

Of course we could see it as the unfortunate influence of her stepbrother continuing to assert itself even after she'd been packed off to school. If we were being really fair.

Not so very different to the scene in I think it was the Twins at St Clare's when Sheila the frightful nouveau riche girl says "You didn't ought to have spoken like that" and gets accused by Janet of sounding like the offspring of her charlady. Lovely! Enid Blyton really was the most dreadful woman.

Thekla would have made a great Muggle wifie for Draco Malfoy.

"....frightful nouveau riche girl says "You didn't ought to have spoken like that" and gets accused by Janet of sounding like the offspring of her charlady. Lovely! Enid Blyton really was the most dreadful woman."

EB certainly knew her classes - years ago I worked in the public library in her home town and more than once she telephoned us saying she had received a consigment of her books translated into Chinese/Korean or whatever and 'if you would like to send your man around' [a.k.a. the Branch Librarian] we could have them for our stock..... I don't think there would have been many takers in those days! Alison Uttley was another contemporary resident but her greatest crime was to phone in for information and then wander off for half an hour or so before returning, thereby rendering our phone unusable by anybody else. But she was rather a sweetie really - just a tad exasperating.

Revenge - you do realise this will mean you can never have a weekend away without a good bookshop rummage?

I found a set of 7 original Jennings books in a charity shop in Chepstow (the proper hardback ones not the 80s paperbacks) and the chap asked me if £14 would be too much, then gave them to me for a tenner anyway. Made my weekend.

I don't usually find Chalet School or Dorita Fairlie Bruce ones in charity shops - or the ones that are there are the common ones I already have - but I now can't resist anything similar, even the super-pious ones with inscriptions in showing they were awarded for Sunday School attendance!

Revenge - you do realise this will mean you can never have a weekend away without a good bookshop rummage?

Oh yes. Absolute perfect weekend. Beautiful.

Last time I went away, my friends left me in the bookshop and went to the pub.

Just imagining a children's bookshop in a pub. Ooh and it will have to have too

In defence of Malory Towers, there were plenty of non-sporty shy quiet characters who didn't get bullied - Clarissa with her weak heart and ugly braces and glasses, who Bill takes horse-riding when she sees Gwen leeching onto her, the girls really turn against Gwen when she pushes Mary-Lou who can't swim into the pool and is really scared, Violet who is just there to make up the numbers of characters and friendly with Mary-Lou. Silent Sally is just ignored.

And Alicia is criticised all the way through for being sharp-tongued and taught a lesson by getting measles which gives her a woolly brain during School Cert, her young cousin is nearly expelled for nasty notes to Moira, who then realises she deserved it and had been bullying, there's the twins Ruth and Connie where Ruth damages Connie's stuff because she can't take her pushiness any more, then regrets it, and the bit with Jo Jones bullying Deirdre and getting expelled for it. Having re-read them a while back, there's a lot of trying to show complexity of characters only within language and concepts five-year-olds would get.

The only nastiness that isn't condemned is when characters are seen to deserve it (as opposed to piss-taking and jollying along when characters are homesick) - Gwen's lies and refusing to apologise, Maureen's whinging and baseless boasting, Mavis' boasting, Amanda's boasting and dissing MT's sports facilities. If you read only the text and don't notice any subtext, they're simply classic morality tales.

Love your author anecdotes, Alice!

Did someone say they had transcripts of various CS books they could email, pretty please? My MIL would love them (as would I but I've read them all at least once, if only the Armadas).

I've known dh to groan out loud when we're on holiday and I announcy I've spied a second hand book shop up the road. He has no heart and he laughed at the Chalet School when I made him read them

Plus he said we didn't have too few bookshelves, just too many books. Definitely Ltb isn't it? then I can replace his wardrobe with another bookshelf

PM me your email address, NotCitrus.

Jo's a much more attractive character in the early books isn't she? She comes across as a real schoolgirl, who has flaws and makes mistakes, rather than the glorified cross between matriarch and dotty schoolgirl-at-heart that she turns into later on.

I'm lucky, I have an enabling husband who points out second hand book shops. Probably because he's a bookworm too!

I've loved this thread. I've always been slightly obsessed with the CS series and have read the whole series several times as an adult - to much derision from DH for reading childrens books, I'm glad to find I'm not alone in my obsession, and now I'm reading them to dd I have another obsessive fan in the house (and means I can re-read them legitimately)

Mind you dd is 9 and is already musing on such subjects as to Robin's continued delicacy and why it would be so bad for her to be punished for misdeeds.

My favourite book it Exile, I bought the Girls Gone By one last year and can't believe how much was stripped out of the Armarda one. I always struggled with Miss Wilson's hair turning totally white in the space of a few hours (although later she confesses it's not totally white because she finds it difficult to put her hair up without revealing her natural colour). Does anyone know if it is possible for it to change like that, I thought it was only the hair that would come through that would change because hair that has grown already got it's colour and won't change.

NotCitrus, you're right, but I just think that the punishments of EB's school morality tales are pretty skewed - Gwen was deservedly criticised for pushing Mary-Lou into the pool or ducking her (can't remember), but from what I remember, she was copying what other girls repeatedly did to her. Yes, Mary-Lou was a sweet, shy type and Gwen was vain and dishonest, but they were both genuinely afraid of the water and weak swimmers.

Claudine in the St Clare's books does a lot of the same things Gwen does - both fake illnesses to get out of things, both lie, both hate exercise and cold water, both are vain of their appearance - but Claudine is allowed to get away with it most of the time because EB has constructed her as Likeable Stereotype, rather than Villain.

And poor Jo Jones never had a chance, because she's nouveau riche, has a fat, red-faced 'road hog' father who drops his hs, digs Miss Grayling in the ribs etc etc. His daughter is reduced to trying to buy friends with a wodge of cash she keeps up her kicker leg.

As far as I know it's not possible for hair to turn white with shock over the space of a few hours, but EBD's knowledge of how human bodies work was fairly non-existent. Still, the same could be said of many of her readers at the time - and indeed quite a few medical professionals at the time. We forget how much healthcare changed over the second half of the 20th century.

And she was expelled. Her father thanks Miss Grayling for it! He realises the error of his common, nouveau ways.

Wasn't that a common theme of books of the time, that weak mothers cosseted their children into bad behaviour (or absent mothers meant the child was spoilt) but the fathers recognised that they needed reform? Emerence Hope, Jo Jones, Grizel Cochrane, Richenda Fry… all sent to school by despairing fathers (although the latter two aren't blamed like the first two.)

There's a really interesting reverse of this in Michelle Magorian's book "Back Home," a boarding-school story from the perspective of an evacuee to America returning to an English girls' boarding school. Her mother, having gained independence during the war, broadly supports her American ways but her father, desperately trying to gain control over what he sees as his 'wayward' wife and daughter after a long spell of absence in the Army, tries to force compliance with violence and threats of a convent school (as indeed Richenda's father threatens her with.)

It's really interesting to see how the theme of the brash American / overconfident girl bullied for her own good at school and home is played out on the other side. And Michelle Magorian's writing is beautiful.

Oh I love Back Home, and all of Michelle Magorian's books really (except her most recent one).

I can't read Back Home without crying so much I can't see the pages. I feel so sorry for poor Rusty.

Yes, reading Rusty's experience at Benwood House next to Zerelda's at Malory Towers is very interesting!

The mothers theme is really interesting - one could almost say its the inheritance of what Mary Wollestonecraft was saying in Vindication of the Rights of WOmen - girls shouldn't be brought up by stupid mothers who praise them for their beauty and accomplishments rather than actually educating them: then they grow up into airheads who parent their own daughters in the same way, in turn...

I was a pretty friendless and awkward child/teenager. I was desperate to go to the Chalet School as it seemed like a very kind place. The Blyton schools sounded horrendous, and I suspected I was a Gwendoline, or a Maureen, and very possibly an Alma Pudden.

The Chalet School was very much about inclusion, wasn't it?

Hello all, apologies for my late arrival at this thread. I am AuditAngel's DSis who has a pile of CS books!!

I've been through my collection and this is the list of books I DON'T have!!

Highland Twins at the CS
Jo to the Rescue
CS and Rosalie
Changes for the CS
A Problem for the CS
Richenda and the CS
Joey and Co. in Tirol
A Future Chalet Girl
Althea Joins the CS
Summer Term at the CS

The rest are split between eBooks (29) and paperbacks (24)!!

And I've got a paperback copy of the book The CS Companion by Helen McClelland

Which was the first CS book you read? Did you start at the beginning or plunge in somewhere and get hooked?

The first one I read was The Wrong Chalet School - I was confused about the uniform for some time after that!