To think we are all ready to remove to Inter V at the Chalet School.

[SDTGisAnEvilWolefGenius]

New thread for all the Chalet School fans!

King Herod and his Cock???

Dd is 9 and is a convert to the CS, I'm reading them to her (I still read to her every day and this was a good excuse to re-read them). She says we're going to read them all without a break, I can't wait to read exile to her because it's my favourite.

I'd like to read them to her actually, might have to see if I can rejig bedtimes a bit now the baby isn't having a bedtime BF. Otherwise it'll have to wait until the summer holidays or something. I like Exile too, although the first couple of times I read it it hadn't really sunk in that real people actually did go through some similar experiences (OK, not completely the same, this is EBD after all :o ) during WW2.

TooExtra I'm not convinced EBD really understood about the KKK - she mentions them in several places, usually saying they had "thrilling exploits" and so on. The "Elsie" books that Jo loved apparently talked all about them and made them out to be a whole lot more exciting and less murdery than they were.

Are the Elsie books real or did she invent them?

The Elsie books are real. They follow Elsie, a beautiful child and immense heiress, through aeons of unfair treatment by a worldly set of relations who don't appreciate her religious fervour.

(gets to thread a few days late after being shoved into the wrong train at Bristol)
I've read a collection of anecdotes about being at girls' boarding schools from the 20s to 70s, and until at least 1960 the idea was "we were children at school; grown-ups when we left. None of this tiresome teenager nonsense" And children too young for secondary school were all lumped together as infants. Which suggests that EBD wasn't completely bonkers calling Robin/Amy babies aged 9 or whatever - I think EJO and Brazil do similar.

When I started collecting all the Chalet books age 8 or 9, my dad asked me why I liked them and I struggled to explain and said they were "realistic"! What I meant was that unlike Blyton they included lots of the deliberations by teachers about arrangements and opinions of girls, and moving countries because of various events, and again unlike Blyton or Jo's first book with Malvina, EBD claimed no-one was wholly good or bad. Subtext was lost on me until I was 14 or so - I was gutted the first time someone else I knew said "Oh, Chalet School - my god, Jo is so annoying and that awful Robin!". The characters had been my companions for 6-7 years and I'd just taken what EBD said about them all at face value, and then learnt the truth...

Gave away half my books then and sold several of the others on Ebay a few years back. Only now can I happily revisit them in all their madness and appreciate them on both levels. And get why my dad was killing himself laughing!

I like the way EBD gives us some of the teacher conversations. I can' think of another school story that does that offhand-Jennings does occasionally, I think, but not in the extent EBD does. MAybe because she was a teacher-although can you imagine the staff having to be so careful what they said in the staffroom in case it got put in a book.

New Mistress is one of my favourites for that reason, it's really fun to see the worries and concerns a new teacher had-was she the only new teacher for ages who didn't have any connection with the school before?
I also like seeing a teacher seeing a different view of Mary Lou. And very realistic. i think she's right in when she thinks that evryone just has got into the habit of thinking "oh Mary Lou doesn't mean any harm" and actually she was right to pull her up on some of the occasions she did.

Was it Gwendoline Courtney who decided to stop writing when the name "Teenagers" took off as she disliked the concept. her or Violet Needham, I think.

I love New Mistress, it is much the best of the Swiss books. Actually I like all the Staff scenes generally, both the serious and light-hearted ones.

Someone mentioned Elsie Oxenham earlier; inspired by this thread I have been sorting out my children's books and found my Abbey trove. In one of them Maidlin, then aged 21 going on 9, talks of when she was 'a mere babe of 14'...

Whatever happened to Juliet, by the way? It's been a while since I reread the earlier books and I've completely forgotten.

Fab thread, I'm going to have to set aside a couple of days to read it all properly!

Violet eyes - I'd forgotten about them! Is that even possible to have violet eyes??

AIBU to suspect that if I was a pupil at the Chalet School I would really really want to be invited to Freudesheim for English tea and be allowed to call the head Auntie Hilda?

I think I read them for the opposite reasons for NotCitrus, it was the escapism and fantasy aspects that got me interested. The characters may have been (sometimes!) realistic but the whole boarding school and abroad thing was so far out of my experience it was fascinating to me.

Juliet marries a guy called Donal, has a couple of sons and vanishes until nearly the very end of the series, when she sends a niece to the CS - Norah Callaghan, a wild Irisher who never actually does anything once she arrives at the school apart from be labelled as wild.

We say how out of touch EBD was, but actually I was at a boarding school in the 1980s. We were in the junior house until the end of year 7..and were still expected to wear dresses and white socks for tea on a Sunday. We were not allowed to wear trousers on any day other than Saturday afternoon (And then not jeans for meals), we had to strip beds every day and get a member of staff to pass each layer of our bed as being made.
Hair was only washed once a week although we could bath three times (hot thankfully!!).
Evenings at the weekend were either vidoes or plays/entertainments made up by us.

Even in the senior school there was no social events with bots until U5 (Year 11) when we had one dance. there were a few more in the sixth form. We had very strict bounds and were not allowed to the nearest town until U5 either...

I have to say I did not find her portrayal of life in a boarding school as entirely unrealistic.....in fact I would have welcomed some of the trips and evening entertainments!

We did however talk of boys etc....and the more adventurous members of the school did escape for various purposes involving boys/drink/smoking etc... (I was much to good for that though, I would have been a good chalet girl!!)

I think you are right hels - we had very similar rules and regulations at my school. And I've realised that the drawers in our cubicles were exactly as EBD describes them - right down to the lift up lids with the mirror and the place for your hairbrush!

I'm reading the transcripts at the moment (thank you!) and have just read Ruey. At the beginning there is a passage where Matey eyes Len's pony tail and tells her to go and plait it properly as pony tails 'aren't allowed here'. Len tells her she's been wearing her hair like that all hols and forgot. Perhaps the younger generation weren't quite as bad as we thought, out of school?

Three questions:

What is loess? Where is it found? What causes it?

What is a moraine?

How do you pronounce Empedocles?

Loess is silt. No idea where it's found - but not in rivers. The ice age caused it?

A moraine - is like like a murrain because that is a disease that spreads.

em-pe-doc-lees - with the emphasis on the 2nd syllable.

How many of my howlers are causing the staff to peal with laughter in the staff room? Or am I about to be put down to UIVb for poor work?

BTW - which one a re you reading at the moment Empress?

Just finished Shocks and Barbara, courtesy of New Year.

Yes to Empedocles. I know the other two are something geographical but that's it. The peals of laughter at the wrong answers did seem a bit OTT - EBD seemed to think all her readers should know this stuff instantly and be vastly amused that the CS girls got it wrong. Maybe then they would have done though.

I think the one reason so many adults carry on reading them is that they aren't just about children but include the lives of the adults as well, like others I love all the background of the teachers talking amongst themselves. I used to dream about joining CS before I went to senior school, we'd been told all sorts of tales about children having their heads shoved down toilets etc at my new senior school and the CS seemed much more gentile. Can't imagine any CS girl pushing heads down toilets.

If they did, they'd be having a conversation with Miss Annersley in her study. And while neither of them would ever tell anyone else what had been said, the wrongdoer would remember it in future and never shove anyone's head down a toilet again.

I've just noticed that the CS girls do ever such a lot of gasping. Someone changes suddenly from English to French, causing the other girl to gasp audibly. Someone else sees something, they all gasp audibly.

I don't think I've ever heard a gasp in my life. Was this a thing I was born too late for?

A moraine is something to do with glaciers, I think.

Can't imagine any CS girl pushing heads down toilets.

Toilets? In the CS?

Splasheries, surely? :)

A moraine is a glacial deposit. A terminal moraine is at the end of the glacier (or where it melts) and lateral moraines are where the glacier has eroded bits off the valley walls, so runs down the side of a valley as a ridge.

Loess is a rock formed by wind blown silt. (I did have to look that up, although I do remember learning about it!)

I knew that O level Geology would come in useful sometime!!

I have no idea who Peter Empedocles is!