To ask all Chaletians to get ready for Madame's birthday?

[LonnyVonnyWilsonFrickett]

Pop to the splasheries my lambs and after you've brushed your hair till it shines we'll have a quick practice of 'I sing of Margaret so fair'.

Once we've finished casting the movie, that is....

And I'm getting my jigsaw out for Jack Lambert Day.

Or is it Inga? I think it's Inga.

For Jack Lambert day I'm going to hit and pull hair of anyone who's doing something I want to. Particularly if they speak all luuvey. And everyone will blame them for doing it, despite them not knowing I wanted that job.

Then I'll be a true Chalet School girl.

Robin has a friend called Irma Ancoszky in CS and Jo. I actually think EBD mixes up Irma Ancoszky and Irma Von Rothenfels and there really only is one character!

Thanks Ruebarb, I'll have a look, certainly not paying 110 for any book.

I have about thirty of the Armada paperbacks in reading condition only I would be willing to sell as a lot.
Tom Gay is my Favorite character. I ready admire her dolls house talent, but wonder why she never built a school.

I am looking forward to introducing my DDs to CS when they are old enough. Can I ask those of ypu who read them to DDs how you deal with the dodgier passages? There are the "working like a n**" references (and in one I read recently, Vi calling ML a "coon" ). There are things like Jack bullying Jane or Margot flinging bookends and the victim being blamed. Or the references to corporal punishment. Do you skip, or explain the cultural and historic context?

Irma Ancoszky/von Rothenfels divides the online community! There are those that say that von Rothenfels is Ancoszky's married name and that there is no connection with Paula, and others who point out that there is an Irma von Rothenfels, who is Paula's sister, in United Chalet School.

No wonder it took so long to produce the first volume of the encyclopedia!

I read on a website yesterday that EBD sending Joey off to Canada for a year was actually an experiment in writing her out of the series.

To be honest, though, annoying as she is Joey and her multiple births and constant interfering and inability to leave her schooldays behind her are part of the battiness of the Chalet School that make me so fond of the books.

EElisaveta, I am currently reading them to my dd, I tend to skip over the words like n because I feel uncomfortable saying them, but everything else we discuss. I probably should mention to dd about the words as well as at some point she may read the books on her own as she loves them so much, maybe next time there's a reference I will explain to her.

I don't think I'd really want Joey completely written out, but I do appreciate the books (among the later ones) where she is mildly suppressed by pregnancy, or being in a different country. Balance in all things! I would rather Jo written out than Madge or Bill, though maybe that's just a bit of wistful grass-is-always-lime-greener thinking.

How old will DS have to be before I can bore him to tears share the books with him?

He's a boy Nell. He'll be too busy with his medical dictionaries to be bothered with girlish trivia.

Thanks for the Irma info, I thought I was going loopy for a moment. Should have realised it was only EBD typing a few pages after drinking her lovely bedtime milk.

Vintage - of course. I'd better send him off to whatever place it is that boy children get sent to, to later return to the Sonnalpe in a white coat and driving a convertible.

on EBDisms, and related issues: that website I linked before, with the birthday list, has some writing tips from EBD. It includes things like 'dialects can be your undoing unless you are really certain about how you're writing them' and also something about not repeating yourself too much. I love this kind of disconnect between what she says and what she does (also seen when Jo writes up character lists for her first novel, in order to not get confused). I can imagine exactly how easy it is to play fast and loose with relative ages etc, given this mindset. It is exactly what I find so comfortable about the books - the perfect combination of soothing predictability with a certain suspension of, not only disbelief but also pedantry, politics, critical analysis...

I used to think it was about the synthetic maps safety, the way people nearly die but never really do, but actually I don't think that's even true - it's true that she doesn't kill off her tubercular angel-child, in contrast to the norm, but she doesn't really gloss over death and other permanent Bad Shit as wholly as I had remembered. A lot of parents and other relatives die. Children die, though only off-stage and never Chalet girls.

The war books have quite a high level of death and misery. In Gay from China, which I just reread, we have:

• major bus crash affecting four mistresses
• Josette's accident
• Mrs Redmond losing her daughter in a bombing raid
• Jacynth's aunt dying
• one of the Austrian ex-pupils (Wanda?) losing a baby soon after birth

That's exceptional, but generally I would say there's much more death in EBD than most children's authos.

I love that stuff about 'dialects can be your undoing'.

Did she seriously think anyone on this earth spoke like Biddy O'Ryan or the Highland Twins?

The war books did have a high level of death. But in general they were the grittiest and most atmospheric of all her books.

I think between EDB and my mum a lot of my basic beliefs were formed (such as not shielding children too much from bad news).

Actually I recently read someone else's school story from a similar time, and what struck me was how much EDB tried to make her characters believable. She tries to give them a reason why they do what they do, rather than just "forcing" them. The psychology might be a bit lacking, but she did her best.

Id do also find the Geology really interesting for all the wrong reasons - such as explaining why we get volcanoes. It should almost be on the syllabus as part of explaining how scientific theories change.

I think a good number of her characters are very very good (as in, well drawn and plausible) indeed. Especially in the earlier books. The characters are the other thing I come back to the Chalet books for, and why I would probably reread the books yet another time before starting on a different school story.

Advice on dialects in full: "Write about people, places and things that you know. Otherwise you may make fearful mistakes. The use of dialect can be an awful stumbling-block in a story unless you know it pretty thoroughly. Slang can be another trouble."

This of course also heavily suggests she had been to Switzerland, which I believe is disputed. Or that she's again applying the odd and harmless disconnect I love her for.

Oh I've just spotted some bad news for some of you: Gaudenz is married, apparently to a housekeeper in St Agnes, and they have quarters attached to that house.

The best ones are always taken. :(

I've only just noticed that the time she was running her own school - 1938-48 - coincides with the time she was writing (what I believe were) the best books in the series. This surprised me a bit.

It's an impressive achievement, isn't it. But actually it makes sense that the best books were written when she was spending time with girls and other teachers on a daily basis and continually teaching and problem-solving. Hard to idealise or drift too far from reality!

(Did she teach geography, by the way? I've just been reading Heather Leaves School and there is a really detailed analysis of modern teaching methods for geography! And of course Kathie Ferrars is a geography teacher too.)

I'd always assumed she was a history teacher, but only because of Jo loving history. Thinking about it, she does seem to do more details of geography lessons than any other.

I know she wasn't a maths teacher . Someone had obviously told her one time that simultanious equations were hard, because she often comes out with that if she needs "hard maths".
Although the one that really made me laugh is in three go: It's the maths where the teacher sayd "two and six" and M-L responds "half a crown".

But what they're doing is she's giving two sides of a rectangle in feet and wanting the area answer in square yards. This is for 10yos... The teacher says "really easy" and "quick" about the questions.
Thing is, it isn't easy because you need to divide by 9 in your head. So M-L's example: Rectangle is 2 x 6 = 12 square feet.
To get to square yards you need to divide by 9. 12 divided by 9 in your head anyone? Well it's 4/3= 1.33333333333333333333333....
And that's probably one of the easier ones.

Personally I would prefer to do simultanious equations.

Ooh, do you reckon Kathie is an autobiographical figure, at least in part? Or just a favourite. And of course Bill also teaches geography. I don't know the answer, but it's interesting. I wonder whether non-geography teachers would think synthetic maps worth mentioning.

Rereading Oberland : Why is Miss Nalder now called Phyll? Is she in fact not the same Miss Nalder from earlier books? These are the problems I encounter with reading completely out of sequence...

"among her 101 published books are stories of schools other than the Chalet School; family, historical, adventure and animal stories; a cookery book, and four educational geography-readers" - from here

It would make a lot of sense...