To start a new term at the Chalet School?

[Vintagejazz]

Happy for this to be moved to Chat if posters agree but thought I'd start it here as this is where we've all been loitering without permission when we should be doing our housework homework.

So welcome to a new term everyone. Cases upstairs to the dormitories, form lists on the notice board. And you'll all be pleased to hear that even though we've moved to a different location, Joey has tracked us - -down moved in next door, so we'll still be seeing too much-- plenty of her

Incidentally, Maria Von Trapp's autobiography is a cracking read. It's fairly recently been republished in paperback.

Vintage - my own particular lump of comfort (not overly solid, but right enough) being away on business, I sat up very late in bed (in my cubey) finishing "Wrong" and starting "Carola".. Both are long-term favourites of mine because I find Katharine and Carola both quite "believable" schoolgirls. But I have to agree with you, the premises of both books are a bit far-fetched aren't they?
I was shuddering at the bit in Carola where I think it's her father who tells her that Cousin Maud (from whom she absconded) has washed her hands of her and therefore, as her parents are still working abroad, she will henceforth be spending all future hols. chez the sainted Maynard family. Except for when they bugger off to Canada, at which point the equally sainted Abbess will make arrangements. Poor kid!

I wasted farrrrrr too much time reading the Kathy-Ferrars-on-Facebook one the other night. It's an interesting idea and has some redeeming features but bits of it jarred and the central story (Nancy-Kathy) didn't really work for me. I often find this in fanfic romance, though - it is a bit too schmaltzy and too quick to get to love/marriage/happyeverafter, for me. I am too cynical I think.

Read the autobiography years ago, I may need to dig it out again.

I'm reading New House at the moment and there's another huge coincidence when Daisy runs up to Joey and Frieda (of all people) in Innsbruck asking them for help. Plus Margot has traveled all the way from Australia to Austria but gets confused on the last bit.

Does anyone know if the environment in North Queensland had that bad an effect on children's health, Margot loses her three boys due to unspecified conditions caused by the climate.

New House was the first one I reread, after seeing these threads reminded me. (I hadn't read CS since I was maybe 10, I think.) Accident, rather than a deliberate choice. Bits of it I remembered really clearly, but I'm sure the deaths of the Margot's sons more or less passed me by as a child - whereas this time I felt desperately sad for her.

This obviously doesn't help at all with your sensible question. But I was struck at the gap between my hard-hearted child reading and my weepy adult one.

Could I mention a name that I don't think has been mentioned before on here? Francie Wilford. Another of EBD's square pegs. My recollection of her - and I need to dig out some of my Swiss books to corroberate this - is that she was a crazy mixed up kid because one of her parents died, the remaining parent remarried, then went and died too, then the step-parent remarried, leaving poor old Francie with "parents" neither of whom were blood relatives. I always felt for her, poor lamb. I think she eventually, like all good Chalet girls, made good.
I seem to recall she was another, like Jane Carew, who fell foul of Jack Lambert?

Just come across a typo in one of the transcripts which salutes Mary-Lou as "our one and oily"!

"Does anyone know if the environment in North Queensland had that bad an effect on children's health, Margot loses her three boys due to unspecified conditions caused by the climate."

Oh, tropical climates are always incredibly dangerous for "white children". Standard trope for fiction of the time,

Let's remember that in CS-world, the air half an hour up a mountain is markedly different/better for white Europeans than the same air a few hundred feet down. It's the same bleddy mountain chaps! And what about altitude sickness? That can't be helping the TB...

So yes, EBD would think Queensland like living on Mars... (Mind you, I think people still live there now and, you know, manage to make it to High School)

Hot, wet climates (if that's what North Queensland is!) genuinely were dangerous in the days before reliable hygiene, immunisations and antibiotics. The mortality rate of children of colonial officials in Western Africa and parts of India was hideous, it's no wonder there was such an emphasis on sending them 'home' to school, even very young like the Bettany children.

Anyone know why the Abbess is called that?

Silver, I think St Hilda was the Abbess of Whitby (born in Northumberland). We Chaletians love our female saints...

Even children who were brought up in India were usually sent to the Highlands (of India) for school I believe.
Was it the Secret Garden where the little girl's whole family die, and so do most of the servants. She is eventually found and then sent to Yorkshire.

They did send people with TB up mountains, and I think one of the follow ons from What Katie Did, has most of them moving to altitude in Colorado.
This is quite interesting.

In the GGBP edition of New House there is actually an essay about Margot Venables' short-lived kids, the writer of which says that it was basically all EBD nonsense and North Queensland was a fairly unthreatening climate, certainly by the time the book was set.

There's a fantastic book called The Plague and I by an American author called Betty McDonald in which she writes very amusingly and movingly about her stay in a TB sanatorium in the 1940s. She does more than sleep and cry.

She does more than sleep and cry.
Next you'll be saying that schoolgirls did more than eat and fall down holes.

Actually I read/watched something about TB once, which insinuated that TB seemed to loosen inhibitions. Which seems highly possible if you think of the Romantic poets or Opera.

"Actually I read/watched something about TB once, which insinuated that TB seemed to loosen inhibitions. Which seems highly possible if you think of the Romantic poets or Opera."

That might have been the opium, rather than the TB

I believe TB sanatoria could be quite, er, lively. Unsurprising when you consider there were lots of young people there, suffering from an illness that might be terminal, without much to do all day. The Thomas Mann stories set in German sanatoria are full of passions, suppressed and otherwise. And there is a great book about TB by Thomas Dormandy called The White Death which suggests (as mummytime says) that the feverishness that is a symptom of TB gave patients a sort of nervous energy and reduced their inhibitions.

Of course, nothing like that would have happened at the utterly wholesome Sonnalpe.

I started Mary Lou at the Chalet School last night. I got really fed up of practically every pupil being described as 'pretty' 'exceptionally pretty' 'remarkably pretty'. Miss Annersley should have turned the Chalet School into a modelling agency given the huge number of gorgeous looking pupils on the roll. She'd have made a fortune.

There's quite a lot of evidence now that vitamin D is involved in immune defences against TB.

So it's not unlikely that being at a higher altitude with more sunlight and lots of milk did help. (Not Sonnalpe compared to Innsbruck probably but compared to industrial, polluted UK city, maybe).

I think the sanitoria did help, to an extent, and certainly in the 20th century progress was being made fairly steadily in all kinds of health care. Certainly just getting people away from hugely dirty and overcrowded homes, and giving them more nutritious food than they had been getting, would have made a big contribution.

Yep, I imagine the san as a sort of feverish Olympic village, full of young people doing their bit for industrial relations. And that is why they didn't want the young, impressionable girls spending too much time up there...

(I do know that TB was, and remains, a terrible disease, I am poking the loving fun at EBD's version of it of course!)

industrial relations?? international relations FFS!

"just getting people away from hugely dirty and overcrowded homes"

and from hideously polluted cities - Britain before the Clean Air Act, with factories belching smoke everywhere and coal fires in every home, would have been massively unhealthy, and positively lethal for people with lung conditions.