To wonder why MNHQ still haven't given us our Chalet School topic?

[TheObligatoryNotQuiteSoNewGirl]

Because we probably shouldn't still be hanging out in AIBU, four (or is it five?) threads later.

I've been reading all the lovely transcripts, and although I started Prefects yesterday, I don't want to finish it, because it's the last one! :-(

Elisaveta try downloading Calibre (a free ebook reader) and opening the books through that. There's another one called Moon reader that I've downloaded on my phone that works too.

I guess New has a bit of excitement with the Balbini twins plot and has the school growing by merging with St Scholastikas as well as the new girl resentment plot on a greater scale, so all the classic EBD plots.

According to McClelland (no, don't get your hopes up Nell, I've not read it am just plagerising another site) the reason the Margaret Roper School failed was because EBD was not head mistress material. She was too distracted by her writing and although she was a good teacher and good with individual girls she wasn't suited to being headmistress.
From what I read the war years actually saved the school because it was based in Herefordshire, the refugees swelled her numbers (although some of the girls weren't so desirable).

I think Emerence was about the only notable character from the later books.

YY to the French teachers. Coffee and experts on needlework and French chocolate.

nell yes I bet Daisy could have combined a career but i
Of course only Joey can do that.

It's inconceivable that Joey wouldn't have invited Madge and how hurt would she have been aye about being left out. But of course EDB can't have Joey outshined.

I have just got very wet in a sudden storm and have neither been rescued by a doctor with a big dog( sounds rude) and I don't need dosing or 10 days in bed just incase or pleuro pneumonia.

Thank you Nell I can open the ones you sent me! Oh dear, I have work to do this afternoon (cutting ribbons and opening fetes obviously, being a princess and all). Must. Not. Start. Reading.

Glad it worked Elisaveta.

Thebody I think you had better have ten days in bed just in case. After all, how can you be sure of your own health? Hadn't you better consult Matey or the San Pros? You'll be putting them out of a job you know and then who will everyone marry?

Robin I think I've read that too. I've also read (same source? Can't remember) a former pupil describing her as a kindly head with no effective discipline or authority - not so much 'justice tempered with mercy' as 'untempered mercy'.

I love the bit in Gay when Matey takes such umbrage at the suggestion that (perfectly healthy) exam girls might need to work a bit harder, and suggests that it will be in her remit to stop this from happening. I could be wrong - I didn't go to the kind of school to have a matron! - but, whilst the force of her personality seems to ensure instant obedience from even the headmistresses, that's not technically her place in the hierarchy, is it?
I don't remember the bit you're referring to Irene, but isn't there also an ongoing theme of the inherent value of education? Especially if that line is from the science teacher... I think there's a really interesting contradiction in EBD seeming to take academic achievement as absolutely normal for girls, but not really being able to approve of any useful application of it in adulthood, unless induced by necessity.

I forgot Emerence. I like Emerence. And Margot shows great promise as her sidekick.

Ok I did a bit of work, so I earned a break to rwad a couple of chapters of Jo Of. Captain Humphries is definitely a spy, isn't he? First the undefined work in Germany after the Great War, then a sudden move to Russia in the years before the Second, not to mention his suspicious 'climbing accident' demise. As for his DW, rapid decline my arse, clear case of polonium poisoning. So he leaves his daughter with an unrelated acquaintance he hasn't seen for 10 years under an assumed name.

I'm right, aren't I?

There are a number of occasions where exam girls are made to promise not to open another book for a couple of days before their exam, or else forcibly removed from the school environment (which book is it when Len etc are sitting their GCE/General Cert/whatever EBD calls it? Anyway, they get sent off to Lake Thun for the day before the exams start) so as to be suitably rested for the exam itself. That wouldn't have suited my leave-it-to-the-last-minute style of revision at all! But of course Chalet girls are all v well-prepared - and if they worked late they might get brain fever, after all.

It's either Madge or Bill who tries to explain to Miss Bubb that lots of the girls don't go on to have careers after school. I suspect Madge, because she has Miss Bubb over for tea a couple of times to try to din some sense into her.

I did/do like the younger Joey, probably because she didn't do as she was told, had lots of thrilling adventures and aspired to be a writer some day. Then I just sort of accepted her as a given when she was older and didn't think much about her personality. After that, it was mainly the mistresses I liked - Miss Annersley, Miss Wilson, Miss Ferrars - because they are constants in every book and are much more developed than the later girls become.

Elisaveta - yes! Only explanation that makes any sense. Other suspects are Jem and Mr Flower. Jem has an acquaintance who warns him of the Anschluss coming by setting up a secret code phrase, which he then sends to him in a seemingly-innocuous letter. Jem also manages to hold a top-secret conversation with Mr Flower by speaking in Afrikaans during one phone call - no explanation given of why Dr Jem speaks Afrikaans. He also takes Captain Humphries into his household as a secretary - very fishy behaviour! It's either that or Dr Jem is a master villain (witness his seemingly endless supply of cash for buying schools and hotels at the drop of a hat) who turns Captain Humphries. Captain Humphries is then assassinated by his own side.

I think Captain Humphries, Jem Russell and Mr Flowers are all spies. In fact the san is probably just a cover. Which would explain why Jack Maynard can afford so many kids, because he is the real head of the San.

I am worried that Captain Humphries was captured by the Russians and sent to Siberia.

Ha ha yes to Captain Humphries.

Her male characters are invariably hilarious. Mostly jolly solid good eggs and able to understand high finance and property development as well as being skilled doctors.

The baddies are really bad though like Mr Carrick and Mr Venables. By the way why would all of Margot's boys pined and died in the cruel Australian climate what's that about?

Then you have the mad professor fry/Johnstone who despite being a top scientist doesn't realise his dd is 15! And shy wouldn't Carolas mother have flown with him to see her daughter?

Oh and my top favourite loon Prof Richardson. His character is daft as he was so in love with his wife he eloped. Hard to match that to the neglectful dad.

Them we have the very very iffy Kester Bellever grooming beautiful Cherry Christie. Well dodgy.

Haha! Not just medicine + finance but also fluent Afrikaans and insider connections so they know that, and when, the Anschluss is going to happen before anyone else does. Plus they are universal medical specialists - not just world-leading in TB but also able to fix Naomi Elton where her actual specialists have failed.

Kester Bellever is so dodgy.

Then there are the various Herrs Anserl, Laubach etc who are foreign and express their creativity and love of great art by shouting at their pupils.

And Mr Denny, who speaks like something several centuries ago.

One of the problems with the Swiss books is that all the pupils are boarders so you don't get the lovely domestic scenes that made the Armishire books so interesting - Robin and Daisy cycling home before the blackout, Joey calling into the Lucy's for breakfast when the twins' train is delayed, etc. It lifted the stories above the usual jolly hockeysticks stuff that most writers of school stories focussed on.

It began to disappear in the Island books, as did the nice episodes of Madge and Joey dropping in to visit each other, and disappeared in Switzerland where the books just became the usual 'schoolgirl antics and prefects' meetings' type stories.

On yes the Naomi Elton thing is hilarious.

Obviously the only doctors to operate successfully on her have to be er TB specialists.

Actually they do a fair few appendectomies too.

Not sure EBD understood that there are specialties in medicine and that general surgery wouldn't be carried out in a TB San.

Fluent Afrikaans hilarious. Pehaps he had a flair for languages!

Good point vintage yes I like the home scenes too.

Can you imagine how elated the staff must have been to escape from Joey to a small island only to have her follow them!

She did an Emerence on those bloody drains so she could go to the island herself.

My papa... was a spy? Mamma was poisoned? My past was more tragic and more exciting than I realised.

So why was I delicate then if I didn't inherit my delicacy from my mum? (Why was I delicate anyway when you can't inherit TB?)

EBD was born way too early, just imagine, these days she wouldn't have needed a publisher she could have just churned out e-books and stuck them on amazon!

Which book was it that someone stuck a blazer down a drain and caused a flood only to be discovered because the blazer had her name in it?

Well Robin I did read a fan fiction story about you Robin which indicated you were the child of one of the Romanovs - it worked quite well too. (And they were worried about Haemaphilia not TB, and thats why you were so encouraged to be a Nun and not get married.)

It was one of the island ones and I think it was Emmy who did it Robin. Maybe Shocks for the Chalet School?

Love the spy theory - makes so much sense of the shady Captain Humphries and all-powerful Jem. Also explains his knighthood wink wink.

Is true, Lester Bellever is hugely suspect.

Also never got the Jem/Jack hoping Robin wouldn't marry/have kids as TB isn't sth you inherit. EBD doesn't generally seem to have much of a grasp of illness...Mega over exaggerates how sick you can get from basically nothing all the time!

Have to disagree about the 1944 act closing schools like EBDs. There were still masses of small independent schools around in the fifties and sixties and indeed I went to one such from the age of 7 to 18,, with fifteen in a class, a headmistress who called us her "gels" and a brown and flame uniform. Schools did go bust, but sadly the snobbery that sent us to private school wasn't changed by the arrival of grammar schools.
I like the spy theory though.

There's a great para in Three Go where Joey invites Hilda and Bill over for dinner and Hilda says that it will be great to get away from school for a few hours and thank God there's only a couple of weeks left until the holidays.

Very realistic and exactly what a teacher would say

I think it was more that when the war ended there were suddenly more teachers around (as they got demobilised) and the old codgers who'd been dragged in out of retirement and the frankly hopeless were gently got rid of.
Parents were back and able to notice their DD weren't learning anything (and EBD was writing instead of teaching and had her Mother teaching - untrained).

Good small private schools survived for quite a while, then had to become academic and expand or disappear. (But that is more 1980s than 50s).

Oh Emily I am v jealous of your brown and flame uniform.

On health stuff - was EBD of her time, though, or was she even then just completely wrong? I mean "of her time" in terms of what laypeople thought, rather than cutting-edge medical research.

I bloody love the phrase "to do an Emerence".

Vintage, maybe the loss of the domestic scenes was actually intentional? I agree, I think it's a big loss, but perhaps EBD/publisher/contemporary fans actually wanted to refocus as a 'normal' school story.
I think loads of lovely detail, as well as non-essential scenes which don't develop the plot so much but add to the general feel, is missing from the Swiss books - perhaps largely because it seems she had never been there and had no real 'feel' for it. It may be that I just read the Swiss books less, but the Platz never feels like a real place to me (other than as a rather sterile and claustrophobic enclave - do any mistresses actually escape from here? Even when they marry they are condemned to stay in this tiny expat community where the greatest escape you can have is kaffee in Interlaken or a walk around Lake Thun) the way the earlier locations do.
I can imagine postwar audiences would have appreciated the escapism and losing any reminders of war damage or rationing etc. And, indeed, perhaps she was just bored herself by this point and all the detail came from an enthusiasm she just didn't have any more.

There's a great para in Three Go where Joey invites Hilda and Bill over for dinner and Hilda says that it will be great to get away from school for a few hours and thank God there's only a couple of weeks left until the holidays. - Bloody hell though, it must be truly awful when you're welcoming such a "break" as having Joey ostentatiously present her children to you yet again (before shooing them off back to the nursery with Rosli) and then bounce around her massive house over-excitedly. No wonder Hilda can't seem to keep any kind of confidentiality where Jo's involved, she's probably been self-medicating to cope with her company...