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

[SDTGisAnEvilWolefGenius]

New thread for all the Chalet School fans!

Is a bed jacket a dressing gown, or is it something else? Like a little blazer that you put on over your yellow pyjamas?

Came across this little gem of feminism this morning in Rivals:

'"But I think it will be very pleasant to grow up," said Marie. "I, too, shall be betrothed and have a good fine husband as Wanda has. I shall like to make my own home pretty and pleasing to my husband, and I shall try to have everything as he likes it, just as mamma does." '

Woman, Know Thy Place.

Did Wanda and Maria et al have arranged marriages?

God that's depressing, Cheddar!

A bed jacket is basically a cardigan, so you can sit up in bed and read without getting cold, in the days before central heating.

Marie meets the Count of Bad Wurtemburg (or whatever his name is) when he comes to give prizes at her final sports day, and they fall instantly in love.

Yes, Marie's ideas for her future (and Frieda's, which are much the same) make me want to stick needles in my eyes, and hand her a copy of The Second Sex, except it hadn't been written yet.

But I think EBD was trying to think about how a pure-minded innocent schoolgirl from an unusually sheltered environment in the 1930s could talk about marriage, without implicitly mentioning sex and babies - so she makes marriage sound as if Marie is planning to tiptoe around the house moving ornaments into the 'prettiest' positions, and nagging the cook to have his favourite dinner ready the second he comes home, while she brings him his monogrammed slippers and smoking jacket.

Mind you, not that much had changed by the late 60s, when EBD was writing the last books in the series - the unmarried Hilda Annersley lectures Len about how marriage is about darning your husband's socks and pouring his coffee. God knows where she gets that idea from, though - as far as I can see, all the marriages she would have seen close up mostly involved wives being dosed with sleeping draughts/fertility potions by doctor-husbands...

Really EBD should have stopped writing in the 1950s. The 1960s books were just ridiculously out of kilter with the society they were set in. It's like those stories you hear of explorers discovering tribes still living almost pre-historic lifestyles, totally unaware of the modern world.

Yes, in the 60s you get casual, supposedly eternal schoolgirl, teen-friendly Joey and her latest ward turning up their noses at the Beatnik girls accents and nails on the train, and Joey saying you only present yourself like that if you have no self-respect or any respect for anyone who has to look at you. Unfortunately you don't get the Beatniks wondering who on earth the disapproving looking woman in the 'dainty' lime-green twinset and earphones is, and why she looks like she's smelled a drain...

There seem to be class limits to Joey's melting sympathy. Her limit is Rosamund Lilley, who is 'deserving', aspirational working-class, and even then she deliberately sets a trap for her in order to see whether Ros will admit that her father is 'only' a market gardener. Interestingly, EBD chooses not to have Joey be the one to intervene with the 'flashing her cash' permed pools winner Joan Baker, which would have been interesting to see. It seems perfectly possible to me that Joan would have thought Joey nosey and interfering, rather than a pansy-eyed delight.

Mooncup, I think that the count (what was his name? Not Friedel Von Gluck, that's Wanda's husband) spots Marie at Sports' Day and then approaches her parents (the Graf and Grafin Von Eschenau) to ask for her hand in marriage. Marie tells Jo etc about it in New House. What she doesn't say is whether he asks her first, or at all.

Was just looking at the covers of my old Armadas from the 70s and 80s. Girls who had enjoyed the books in the 40s and 50s must have been horrified at the horrible updated covers of pupils with layered hair and short tunics etc. If they republished the books now they'd probably be wearing Ugg boots and designer sunglasses. Why do publishers do this?

Gosh, Cheddar, that's much worse than I remembered! I wonder how authentic it is for the time.

Okay, have found it now. Eugen von und zu Wertheimer does speak to Marie first and they agree that he will approach her parents. So it's not as bad as I remembered. All the same, I'm not really sure how they come into contact between him spotting her at Sports Day and whenever it is that they decide this. There's no reference to any other meetings or letters or anything - surely Marie wouldn't have been allowed to receive letters from A Man at school or at home, given the fuss there is in CS in the Oberland when Elma Conroy does?

Cheddar were those really Marie's exact words? Sounds off.

Maybe she sneaked out of her dorm after lights out every night and met him behind the games pavilion for some passionate snogging?

I don't know about all this pinko feminism stuff, but I'm just dying for some kaffee(klatsch) and kuchen...

Didn't he buy her an ice cream or something at a regatta that she attended with Jo and Frieda and Simone.
I mean he had to make an honest woman of her after that

It's amazing any of the nice young gels managed to get married at all, what with not being allowed to consort with the opposite sex - no ice carnivals, no walking from one end of Innsbruck to the other at 5.30pm, a 6-foot fence round the school and certainly no meeting film makers, no matter how fresh and trim they looked in their dainty uniforms.

EBD really did have the strangest ideas of what constituted courtship/falling in love - remember Madge getting a letter of proposal from a man she'd met once on a train, months previously?

Mind you, I remember reading Agatha Christie's autobigraphy which would have covered the same period and she received tons or proposals from young men she'd met a couple of times at a dance or gone on a picinic with or things like that.
Mind you, she had the sense to turn them down.

Maybe he'd fallen in love with her as well.

Imagine accepting a weirdo proposal from someone you'd met only once.

Oh how simply wonderful, Cecil Farquarson has sent me a proposal of marriage.

Oh wizard!

I met him at Smythe-Cavendish’s picnic. I’m going to be Mrs Cecil Farquarson

Oh wizard, what’s he like?

Can’t remember. I think he was the man who was handing round the fondant fancies.

Oh wizard!

Squoosh.

CorusKate and squoosh

It goes both ways, of course - because men didn't have the opportunity to spend time with girls, if they wanted a wife they pretty much had to propose to women they barely knew. So EBD's depiction may not be as unrealistic of all that.

I suspect EBD intended at the time for Marie and the Count's relationship to come across as terribly loving, romantic and modern.
Because from his background I think he would have expected an arranged marriage with one of a similar class-which I don't think Marie's family would have counted despite Thekla's ideas that they were above the ordinary people.
And from Marie's point of view, I suspect she also would have had a quietly arranged marriage, arranged by the parents with perhaps a slight say but expected to give up her opinion if it differed from theirs.