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.)

Hah! On the one hand I can’t wait a year and a half for Parker and her 37 orphaned wards (with Margot tagging along after being thrown out of her convent) to return from Canada.

On the other hand I don’t want pontefractals to be inundated with a billion individual requests for books ...

I haven’t read Prefects, I don’t think, so will look forward to it.
In Joey Goes to the Oberland, Jo has just smacked 11-month-old Felicity for crying. And Felicity stopped crying!

The one drive.live is no more? That would explain why I can’t get in..... was sent the details last year and had a good read.
Pretty please might someone let me have the Dropbox details? There are a lot of CS books I’ve not read (and can’t get hold of) unless you spend silly amounts of money (which I didn’t do at all recently.. ahem).

Thank you
(Drops regulation curtesy on way out)

I'm starting again from the beginning as I realised I'd missed a few. I'm halfway through Head Girl and having an absolute cringe at Deidra's Oirish acent. It's worse than a Murder She Wrote Irish episode and all and all!

One of my three eleven sons bought me one of the spin offs "Hilda Annersley, Head Mistress" for Mothers Day. It's disturbingly well written so I couldn't take to it

Maybe Matey’s special milk took care of periods too?

I don't think the Chalet Girls hit puberty till 6th form, to judge from the descriptions of mid-teens girls as 'little girls' and 7-10 year olds as 'babies'.

'Nearly 15-yr-old' Jo ripping up her cellular vest for an escape rope suggests that there wasn't a lot of development going on yet.

Deidra was clearly the prototype for Biddy O’Ryan, How!
Cat, alas we need the Dropbox pree, Parker, to return from holiday.

Well, I started my periods at 10, nearly 11, Tails, so it’s lucky I didn’t go there.
Re-reading them (or reading some for the first time) as an adult, I am seeing obscure references to breast feeding, like in Joey Goes to the Oberland, Simone or possibly Frieda asks if the babies need Jo, and she says no, they’ve been weaned for a while.
I also pick up on the even more obscure references to pregnancy such as Jo isn’t to be worried, Madame won’t be down much this term, Jo won’t be having the new girls to tea, etc, that would have gone over my head when I was a child.

I’ve assumed that mention of someone, usually Joey, going off to ‘attend to her baby’s needs’ was code for breastfeeding. I guess Anna or one of her numerous colleagues dealt with nappy changing.

I’m sorry to say this thread has pretty much ruined all innocent enjoyment of the books. I’m doing this face at every single doctor. And worrying about all the wives who had beautiful younger sisters come and live with them in the marital home.

When Emerence spends a morning at the foot of the stairs because she went down the main staircase, not the back stairs, I always assumed her 'can I go and wash' was a euphemism for going to the loo - Miss Dene says she'll take her to the splasheries.

Given the evidence in the series, EBD had never actually met a baby or a toddler. Or an Irish person, for that matter. Deira O’Hagan is presented at Court as a debutante after she leaves the CS, and there are references to her home being a castle (hence presumably a landed estate), all of which points to an Anglo-Irish Ascendancy background, yet she has the same cringe-inducing stage-Irish accent as Biddy O’Ryan, the child of a servant, and no Anglo-Irish family would be called O’Hagan, anyway.

Though I suppose we should be mildly grateful that EBD got past the Pixie O’Shaughnessy ‘Wild Irish Girl’ stereotype by the time Biddy arrives and Biddy doesn’t run around roaring ‘The curse of Cromwell be on you!’ and burning priceless last letters from beloved grannies.

Again, using Cromwell’s name as a curse would be very odd for an Anglo-Irish girl, even if she did hear it from her ‘old nurse’, as it’s likely her family originally came to Ireland with Cromwell’s army and was granted lands by him, as many A-I families were.

Taking a step backwards in chronology I’ve just finished Joey Goes to the Oberland and I’m bound to say it was excellent. Really delightful with all the minutiae of packing and leavetaking and travelling with a heap of small fry. And the meetings with and descriptions of the domestic life of old friends was oddly gripping. I felt I was entering into life stories that actually mattered. Was also interesting to see the school utilised as just a bit part in the drama - underlining the fact that Joey and family very much viewed it as a property and possession of theirs.

Full marks for this one!

Me too, Quater, finished it last night.
I missed the school in one way but I felt it gave s much better understanding of Jo as a wife and mother, and showed the Maynards’ marriage to be a jokey, squabbling, “drive each other mad but love each other to bits” one.

Gosh, I've not read Joey Goes for aeons, but I remember thinking that you'd have to be the most dyed-in-the-wool hardcore Chalet fan to be interested in the minutiae of the Maynards' packing, and who sits where in the various conveyances on the interminable journey. And Joey is so insufferably bossy and opinonated about Simone's newly-inherited chateau and how she should redecorate it to look as much as possible like Freudesheim.

Is this the one where Joey vocally pities Simone for only having one child for so long 'while the rest of us were steaming ahead with real families' or is that somewhere else? Or is it this one where Simone dares to be mildly proud of her baby, and Joey just cannot resist pointing out that she has dozens more than Simone/her latest one is bigger and better in every way?

As you will grasp, I find adult Joey insufferable. She has the classic 'Elevenerife' habit, and I suspect that in real life people would have crossed roads to avoid her and uncontrollable Bruno, and faked their own deaths not to have to attend CS 'reunions' in her house which involve compulsory paper games and mountain hikes led by her dutiful teenagers.

Poor Eustacia. Not only is she an only child but both her parents die in quick succession. Her late parents sound batshit and she has never been in the company of schoolgirls before.

Nobody at the Chalet School seems to give any consideration to this.
The Middles are perfectly horrid to her.

However Eustacia saves herself and shows us how you really become a Chalet Girl.

All you have to do is run away from the Chalet School (and who could blame you) but make jolly sure you don't simply pop down to the railway station (as a normal person would) but plan your journey a la von Trapp family, and hike along the Tiern Pass until you reach Germany.

Of course the unfortunate Eustacia wasn't prepared for the weather or the floods or the rocks or all the other things which caused her to lose consciousness and have to wait for a bunch of peasants to rescue her.

If only she'd just gone to the station.

Anyway...…………...the whole experience of needing months at the Sonnalpe s a result of being trapped on the Tiern Pass, unconscious, causes her to have a massive personality change for the better.

So that's how you do it.

Yes, CamdenLoaf it does have all those faults. In addition to the aforementioned lead-blacking incident - which one does now read through horrified, screwed-up eyes. But I find it relatively easy to set aside the authorial infelicities of times gone by - otherwise I’d have to cut out great swathes of literature over thousands of years.

Papergirl I love the fact we were reading and enjoying it at the same time!

You pretty much do a Katy Carr in What Katy Did back injury from disobedience requiring prolonged bedbound convalescence and complete personality change but at least Eustacia didn't get ambulance-chasing saintly Cousin Helen telling her about the School of Pain and her duty to lie holding her forehead smooth with her fingers, lest the lines of pain disturb visitors, who like an invalid with a 'dainty' appearance.

Hey FrauDoktorTalbot née Jemima! Weirdly I opened Eustacia and read the first couple of chapters yesterday - but decided I couldn’t face it and turned to Joey’s travels instead. (I admit to feeling rather sorry for Eustacia as, in adult life, she’s still intermittently suffering from her youthful adventure. Also she seems like a fellow INTP - so I kind of recognise her ... )

Now the Robin...…...a thoroughly irritating child.

She suffers a decline in health (is "put back" a whole year, according to Dr. Jem) when she spends a night worrying about Joey, who is (as ever) trapped overnight on a glacier.

Fortunately, when The Cruel Matron locks her in a cupboard for a few hours and she cries hysterically until Madge releases her and sacks the Matron, there is no concomitant decline in her fragile health.

I am heartily sick of everyone calling her "the baby" when she is six years old. She is even put to bed in a cot at Frau Mensch's house. And she seems to be incapable of dressing herself. And her diet consists of a great deal of milk, prescribed by Dr. Jem to ward off TB.

And they gave this guy a knighthood?

CamdenLoaf I was waiting at the doctor's last week and read What Katy Did again. (It was in the children's books, in my defence.)

Yes, Cousin Helen has a lot to answer for. What card-carrying invalid goes and lives next door to her ex-fiancé and his wife?

I have similar issues with the holiday books, Camdenloaf. I get quickly bored by endless recitations of who is eating breakfast when and who goes on which walk etc. And they are too Jo-centric for me. I haven’t read many of them more than once, mind, so again it’s old memories.

You know ... I’m beginning to think the likely criminal convictions would go beyond repeated drugging of schoolgirls.

We have:

a system for luring (mostly) well brought up girls to a central location far from parental or independent oversight

a cohort of medically trained men with access to tranquilising drugs

extensive historic knowledge of secret transportation routes via mountains and roads.

hundreds and hundreds of unnamed young women (making up the bulk of the school) whose subsequent lives are unaccounted for.

Frankly I suspect the Chalet School was a highly successful front for what used to be called the white slave trade.

How well did EBD know Evelyn Waugh???

(And having written all that out it occurs to me it’s probably more than adequately covered in all the fan-fiction - none of which I’ve read.)

Ladies.

I have written an account of my varied and interesting life as a gynaecologist.

I also spent a good deal of time as a TB specialist.

My memoirs now run into several books, detailed below. Do contact my publishers (www.jemimabooks.com) if interested.

James Talbot and the Medical School

The Medical School and James Talbot

The Princess at the Medical School

Travels with my Speculum

Vaginas I have Viewed

I am Knighted for Services to Female Organs

Sir James Talbot goes to the Oberland

Sir James Talbot steals Dr. James Russell's Thesis

Sir James Talbot tackles the Chalet School

Sir James Talbot tackles TB

Sir James Talbot tackles Mrs. Jack Maynard's Displaced Organ

The titles which I have deleted were not accepted by my publisher, unfortunately.

And if any of you wish to read my books as a OneDrive or Drop Box...….

You can fuck off to the other side of fuck.

Dear Sir James,

Your publishers are fools.

I hope you will permit me to make use of the title of your final volume as a title for a future MN thread detailing your numerous triumphs. (Possibly other CS related matters may be included in said thread.)

Many thanks,

A grateful well wisher (who could never afford your fees).