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.)

Um, Sir James, aren’t you a TB specialist? What’s with the vaginas?

@QuaterMiss

My publisher would allow you to use the title of my final volume if you paid her a large fee. I advise you to seek legal advice before (ahem) messing with Jemima

I myself would waive all medical fees incurred by your good self if you wished to consult me regarding TB.

I would probably pay you if you allowed me to make an extensive gynaecological examination.

@DoubleRaspberry

I view vaginas as a side-line.

🥴🤮🥴🤮😈

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?

A passive-aggressive genius, that's who. I imagine her lying about gracefully in her wheeled bed on the verandah saying 'Yoo-hoo, darlings!' every time a curtain twitches, and the reason Little Helen is always in and out is because the ex-fiancé and his wife are terrified to go near her in case she starts going on about the School of Pain and reminiscing about the times she and ex-fiancé were in love before she nobly released him from the engagement.

@Double, your memory hasn't failed you, that's pretty much exactly what they are. I think EBD's love of repetition that usually manifests itself in the school books via repeated reiterations of trilingualism, curtseying, Kaffee und Kuchen, the daintiness of cubicles, Saturday evenings and nativity plays, and the Place of Joey as Eternal Chalet School Girl comes out in the holiday books as a completely mad obsession with domestic arrangements. And because she has way too many child Maynards, she has to keep inventing ways of getting most of them out of the way so she can concentrate on whoever the new character is and their interaction with the Healing Power of Joey/Len/the Maynards in general.

Oops, posted before I meant to.
She’s an adult as she is married with a couple of kids and moved from Ireland when she was about six!

I’ve started Challenge now.
Inches, Biddy, described as having a voice faintly tinged with Kerry accent, has just appeared saying “Tis glad I am to see you, me dear.” Followed by ”isn’t that the good news?”

Oh, I didn’t post it the first time.

completely mad obsession with domestic arrangements

As written by someone who never had to organise a houseful or small children, even with multitudes of domestic help! At least EBD has run a school.

When I was a young Chalet devotee I invested far too much time in inventing enormous families for me to mother, and stories involving them doing all sorts of unremarkable things. I hadn’t got my hands on the holiday books at that point but I think there were similarities.

I see that Sir James Talbot has tried to convince you all that I publish his idiotic books.

I most certainly do not. And I resent his allegation to QuaterMiss that I would only allow her to use the title of his last, unpublished book as a thread title on MN for a large fee.

A small fee would be quite sufficient.

I do have all the proofs of his tedious books in a safe but they are poorly constructed and reveal a nasty, money-grabbing side to his character which he is careful to conceal in real life.

After extensive research I cannot find any evidence that he attended medical school anywhere in the world.

The man is a mountebank. I should very much like to know how he obtained his knighthood.

Priscilla belonged to the commercial class and she had typed out copies of the play for everyone.

Ok. This is hurting my head. If anyone cares to explain exactly what was going on in EBD’s head when she wrote that - I’d be grateful.

Coming to this late, but I'm pretty sure that this was a class for those gels who were going to have to earn a living, weren't bright enough to become Professors of Greek, weren't talented enough to become famous singers/authors etc, and weren't destined to spend their adulthood churning out twins and triplets. So they learnt things like shorthand and typing and probably a bit of bookkeeping, i.e. skills for commerce. Hence Priscilla's ability to type.

I should very much like to know how he obtained his knighthood.

Services to Displaced Organs? Or sidelined vaginas?

@Papergirl1968, don't start me on the unlikelihood of Biddy having the remotest trace of a Kerry accent or Hiberno-English speech patterns, given that she'd left Ireland considerably before she encountered the CS, after which she grows up among Europeans and English RP speakers who are concerned with training her out of her original accent, or what remains of it, after which she goes to Oxford, travels and then ends up back at the CS, having never apparently set foot in Ireland again.

And I always wonder at what point EBD decided Biddy was not going to be Comedy Irish Light Relief, destined to be sent to the local village school at the Tiernsee with the other peasants and trained to be a lady's maid, and is actually allowed to attend the school that has 'rescued' her and go on to a middle-class education and career.

I've been reading Enid Blyton's Five Find-Outers books to my seven year old, and am boggling all over again at how it's viewed as entirely natural by everyone that Ern, the policeman's working-class nephew, despite hanging around with the other children and solving mysteries with them, is sent down to the kitchen of Fatty's house to eat with the servants rather than eating with Fatty and his parents.

It's viewed as entirely natural by everyone that Ern, the policeman's working-class nephew, despite hanging around with the other children and solving mysteries with them, is sent down to the kitchen of Fatty's house to eat with the servants rather than eating with Fatty and his parents

Surely Mrs. Trotteville would not have admitted Ern Goon to the house in the first place.

Not even if he wrote her a pome?

I have just started The New Mistress at the Chalet School.

Apart from its being terminally boring so far, I was interested to see that Miss Ferrars is told to take a first-aid kit with her when accompanying the girls on a walk.

An accompanying ambulance with a large quota of paramedics and peasants with a hot-line to Mountain Rescue would better meet the case.

But Miss Ferrars has a lot to learn. She has already snubbed Mary-Lou...……………..

OMG CamdenLoaf I'd forgotten Ern's pomes.

Poor Ern Goon. What would become of him?

Enid Blyton is silent on this subject.

The beginning of New Mistress is really odd -- Kathy Ferrars, despite being twenty at least and a university graduate, is skipping around and being cutesy and ditsy like an ickle girl, trying to get her aunt/guardian to open the CS letter offering her the job and resolving to buy her own clothes like it's some kind of huge badge of adulthood.

I assume the idea is that the child reader is supposed to identify with her as though she's a new girl rather than a new mistress, but you'd still wonder why Hilda hired someone who seems like a total child.

Though I think it's an excellent sign to start off by snubbing Mary Lou. Go Kathy! Push her off the Auberge shelf and then pry her fingers off the inevitable projecting tree.

I love the minutiae of the Chalet School universe. It may be batshit crazy, but there’s so much depth to it. I imagine a whole world happily carrying on while EBD turns the spotlight on a particular group or form for a term.

I think my mum is roughly contemporary with Kathie; she told me that at university she once got into trouble for leaving her hall of residence to go and visit her parents for the weekend without asking permission from whoever was in charge. Plus I can well imagine my grandma telling her what she should or shouldn’t wear. I think it was still just normal for nice middle class unmarried young women to basically be treated as children until they got married.

It’s funny isn’t it, how Mary-Lou gets whacked on the head and it makes absolutely no difference to her personality? Must be because she was perfect before...

And as for a child being nicknamed Fatty, let’s not even go there!
I haven’t read New Mistress for ages but it was one of my favourites. I liked hearing about Kathy packing and being delighted when she saw her dainty little bedroom.
Strange that none of the doctors swooped on her as she’s described as very pretty. If I remember right, she didn’t marry.

I’m sure she would have got her doctor eventually breaking Nancy Wilmot’s heart in the process as she’s well under 30 by Prefects still surely? The triplets have only aged five years.

Or are they younger still when they first hit Inter V? But she’s very young so I reckon it still holds.

Doubleraspberry Sir James got the operating table the wrong way round and discovered a completely different avenue to research

That was a curious interlude Doubleraspberry - when we heard about the strength of Ms Wilmot’s feelings for Kathy Ferrars. Can’t remember where it occurred - Challenge maybe? It seemed unusually straightforward and unambiguous. So I rather hope Kathy didn’t go on to marry a male doctor.

‘Kathy, darling’.

If you read Chalet Girls Grow Up (which I thoroughly enjoyed!) all your questions will be answered

Aha! Interesting.

Right. This may be post # 950. And as lots of people seem to have started reading or re-reading from the earliest books you may want to carry on talking about them when this thread runs out.

I said I wouldn’t start another one - but we can’t waste Sir James’ brilliant title. If anyone else is super-keen to see their name in green - please say!

Nancy and Kathy - that must have gone over my head as a kid then!
Quater, you do the honours and start a new thread. This one has given me as much pleasure as reading the missing books!