Not to have realised until now that Joey Maynard’s ‘displaced organ’ was a prolapse?

[QuaterMiss]

I know there is or was an enormous Chalet School thread but I can’t spend six weeks trawling through that.

Fascinated to note (because I’ve been reading the complete synopses how all the CS women taken seriously ill either went straight to the San or journeyed - over days - for a consultation with Sir James Talbot. It was he who diagnosed said ‘displaced organ’. At which point Joey had iirc nine children. May be wrong, lost count.

(I read and reread the entire series over my first three decades.)

Fair enough- but if you read the extract it really is pure snobbery!

Thanks, @BertrandRussell. I'm relieved, as I have always far preferred Harriet to her parrot-profiled paramour. I can continue to think him insufferable.

I don't think acquiring a doctorate is equivalent -- one would hardly expect a total stranger on whose door you have just knocked late at night to know your academic credentials, especially if you had just picked up your DPhil that afternoon and were not actually poncing around in your scarlet and blue.

And I think the point of Peter's remark is that she got the form of the title right -- she didn't address Harriet as 'Lady Wimsey' for instance.

'Smatch of honour.'

D'you think I should read the whole book as well, or am I ok on the Cliff Notes there? I'd hate to waste time reading.

cutpurse - at 'poncing around in scarlet and blue'. Which is itself a form of snobbery, isn't it?! Not all doctorates being Oxford DPhils. So maybe we can't be too quick to condemn Harriet.

I do see that it is not the same, but I still think there are ways to read the conversation as other than 'OMG the lower orders'.

It is a weird book, though.

If I confess to naming my youngest child Josephine in honour of Joey, will someone please PM me the one drive details?

I had so many of these (and st Clare’s/Malory towers/Trebizon) etc.

Wow.

I've just finished Rivals of the Chalet School and was horrified by the casual racism within it.

Also the bland mention of the Ku Klux Klan's activities as a method of *paying out" the girls of St. Scholastoka's.

But it was the insistence that starting Guides at St. Scholastika's would sort out their girls' bad behaviour that surprised me the most.

Guides? Really? The antidote to gang warfare?

And YUK to the Robin singing to Joey as she lay apparently dying, and this being the means by which she recovered.

I have more and more sympathy for "the" Robin now.

@RobinHumphries

Come back and I'll stop being horrid and nasty about you.

@BertrandRussell

It is always Peter who says things like that.

My least favourite from Harriet is "Can you eat your egg less splashily" to one of the DC she managed to have despite being over forty when she married Wimsey.

Anyway - back to the Chalet School...…………..

I am beginning to wonder why I want to read the books, having just finished one.
But I do. I really, really, do.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3631713-Th-think-that-Miss-Climpson-should-have-been-in-The-Nine-Tailors

Anyone wanting to dissect the Sayers books?

@FrancisCrawford

Are there any bookstores online which sell the old hardback CS books?

Does anyone know - apart from Amazon?

I never was a Chalet Girl sob however Lord Peter is only just edged out of first place of Man I Was Meant To Have Married by Francis Crawford of Lymond. And possibly his brother Richard as well, there are times it is a close call...

Edged out by Richard as well as Lymond, I mean, not that I want both brothers at the same time. That would be altogether Too Much. They would probably start fighting.

And you have all inspired me to look on archive.org and find they have The Marlows and The Traitor, which is one I have never read. An act of true sisterhood to one who has been in the San all day. Without wandering organs, though, something rather more mundane.

one of the DC she managed to have despite being over forty when she married Wimsey.

No, she is 35/36 - someone has helpfully done a timeline. She is 10 years younger than LP.

Ancient for a first-time mother in them days, of course, but still plausible to have had 3+ DC, as long as she got cracking.

I always felt that "the misplaced" organ was suspended half way down her body. I don't think I had studied any science/biology at that point!!

Love the CS, although agree with many PP about Joey being a complete pain in the last few books. Absolutely hated Len and Reg's romance - why were all the proposals so mundane?

Anyway @BertrandRussell I'd love that link too please. Thank you so much.

I do see that it is not the same, but I still think there are ways to read the conversation as other than 'OMG the lower orders'.

@SarahAndQuack, that's not really how I mean it, more that it sits oddly with me that a title newly borne by Harriet is used (about which you would expect both P and H to feel slightly self-conscious as they've very newly married and trying to get into Tallboys to consummate their marriage!) as a way of reading the social savvy of a stranger. (And I said scarlet and blue doctoral robes because that's what mine were, back in the mists of time, and I have no idea what any other doctoral colours are. I do realise other doctorates are available.)

Guides? Really? The antidote to gang warfare?

Phone Sadiq Khan immediately.

You're right, the KKK stuff in Rivals is mid-blowing, especially the way in which it's viewed as sort of colourful American 'fighting for your rights' stuff.

@Alicecooperslovechild Thank you for the 'problem' book ref. A day searching the web, and I should just have gone on Mumsnet.

I’m still here.
I think of all the characters it’s Sybil I feel the most sorry for. I mean she was pretty, but supposedly not clever, but was working really hard in order to do well in her exams and then she doesn’t even go to needlework school. Gets dragged to Australia instead as her mum wants the company (although that must be some consolation as Australia is my favourite place on earth).

'Mary Lou runs off with Reg, doing Len an enormous favour in the process.'

I agree as Reg is a total drain on Len, and what my father once described in a different context as 'a male chauvinist pig of the most oink-oink variety'. I don't think Mary Lou and he would really have tolerated each other, however. I'm ambivalent about Mary Lou; she could be very self-centred and bossy, but intelligent teenagers often are, and ambitious females possibly had to be a bit pushy in those days if they didn't want to get totally trodden on. Reg should have run off with almost any school Matron in almost any school story: they would have deserved each other!

@Jemima232

I don’t know about acquiring old hardback CS books, but I filled in a lot of my CS collection via Girls Gone By Publishers.

They’ve reprinted a lot of the Chalet School books using the original unabridged text. Plus they’ve published a lot of fill-in books by different authors.
They don’t have all the CS books in print at once though, I had to keep an eye on what they were publishing until I’d completed my collection.
Hopefully a clicky link to Girls Gone By Publishers below:

www.ggbp.co.uk/

I have found my spiritual home. Chalet School and discussions I’d class in DLS. That exchange re poor Miss Twitterton always grated with me - however I rest secure in the smug knowledge that I have the ability th address the wife of a Duke’s second son appropriately! Can’t say it comes in useful in rural Ireland. Given the dearth or second hand Chalet School books here and the fact that I am languishing with abridged Armadas - is there any way I too could have access to the
One drive? I have an embryonic Jack Lambert here who needs to be educated in the benefits of Home Economics Classes and the art of fainting gracefully at the feet of a suitably capable doctor (said child is 6, hates pink and wants to be a naval captain slash superhero slash archeologist but brainwashing can never start too early!!) graceful obesisances in advance

And I agree that the casual racism in some of the books can be horrific.

It is rather a pity Emilyclimbs that the two series don’t run in tandem. We run out of Peter and Harriet just as the CS gets really good - with Exile at the start of WWII.

I have an embryonic Jack Lambert here who needs to be educated in the benefits of Home Economics Classes and the art of fainting gracefully at the feet of a suitably capable doctor (said child is 6, hates pink and wants to be a naval captain slash superhero slash archeologist but brainwashing can never start too early!!)

Tsk, you need to nip that sort of thing in the bud right now. Make her write out, 'Her voice was ever soft, Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman' 100 times, then darn some socks.

I fear it would be pointless. Last week I attempted to instigate reward charts and was stymied by the small ones (6 and 3) assigning them to the aged parents instead. Intensive brainwashing is required - I’m envisaging headphones at bedtime to deliver the Chalet School Way of Life to the subconscious. And yes I mistyped obeisances - blasted iPhone keyboard.

@Emilyclimbs, we could add in a discussion of purple-eyed, slow-smiling young Canadian aspirant writers who get the flash, clash with their aunts, and are fought over by men, including a decades-older creepy cousin who remarks on her white neck and kissable lips when she's about 13 and says he'll wait for her to grow up, the perve.

I imagine the 'misplaced organ' to be similar to Susan's 'wandering spleen' in Desperate Housewives.

'Has anyone seen my uterus? It's escaped again.'

Sorry for the confusion people, when I said I'd read the 10 kingsctotes I really meant the ones about the family. And not the one's that was not about them (Thursday kidnapping?)
I also enjoy re reading the Trebizon books, they were fairly lightweight but I liked the mystery each books and they were far more present day. Wish they had shown the sixth form.
Though nowadays it only takes my 45 minutes to read one!