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.)

I was a member of the CBB absolutely years ago.

I think I got suspended for pointing out in some heated fight about why Madge and Joey, who had actually had to escape Nazi-occupied Austria, seemed to have zero interest in the war effort once they get to England — no minor references to sock knitting, donating saucepans, taking in evacuees etc — and someone kept saying ‘Oh, of course they did, but EBD didn’t write about it!’

And wouldn’t grasp that these people were just words on a page, and if EBD didn’t say they did X, they didn’t do X. It’s not that they were real people and she chose only to document parts of their lives. Someone got very upset at this.

I left.

Please may I also have the onedrive details? I also used to have them but lost them with device changes

The first books were written in the late 1920s/early 30s, when TB and quite a few other illnesses that are NBD now were absolute killers. A few other mid-20th-century books tended to have people being carted off to sanitoria for months at a time, as well (anyone else read the Sue Barton series?)

YES! I adored the Sue Barton series! I have never met anyone else in real life who read them, I still have copies of most of them. I couldn't get over the fact that the author lived with Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter, Rose when I found it out.

Oh, of course they did, but EBD didn’t write about it!’ 😀
Love that!

Another one who'd like the log in details please. I loved the chalet school as a child. My mother gave all my books away

I didn’t know of the connection between Rose Wilder and Helen Dore Boylston, wow that’s a coincidence.
I was a Sue Barton fan and seem to remember Sue having to be rescued, Chalet School- style, by a hot doctor herself a few times - 😁

I would love to check into a luxury sanatorium in the Alps for a few months of rest!

I'd love the OneDrive details please. I've still got about 20 CS books (I won the battle with my sister and they live in my spare room) plus I've still got most of the Sue Barton books too- I liked Kit best Sue was just too implausibly beautiful. My absolute favourites are the Kingscote series, although I have some gaps as I have the 4 term books but not the ones set in the holidays, don't suppose they are available as ebooks?

Antonia Forest is so brilliant @bracken, but no, I don’t think so. The place to ask would probably be the Trennels community, it as AF’s literary executor is on there, or used to be, it’s probably not the most tactful approach...

I think maybe one of the reasons why a lot of them (not just Joey) are still so involved in/interested in their old school well into adulthood is because EBD would have been aware. at least on some level, of how narrow the world was for most women once they grew up. At school girls had adventures, friends, could achieve things and be 'mischeivous' but once it was over, there was nothing but marriage and domesticity. I can imagine a lot of women up until at least the 60s harking back to their schooldays as a time when they were people not just wives and mothers, and clinging to them...

I think what annoyed me at times is that she paid lip service to careers for women, and then frequently forgot about them. Is it Daisy Venables who becomes an award-winning paediatrician but EBD has a mindslip and later talks as if only Daisy’s husband is a medic? And Stacie Benson at one point is a major Oxbridge classicist, the next she’s renting a suite of rooms at Freudesheim, which must be the least likely place for a sabbatical ever...

Oh please could I have the one drive login too? I think I reread lots the last time and read some I'd never read before.

Hello everyone. I have been lurking for ages on here, but wondered if someone could send me the OneDrive link please?
I have most of the CS books in paperback from the early 80s and have a couple of the fill-ins on my kindle.
Merci/Danke/thanks

I still have the one drive details but it doesn't seem to work anymore (security confirmation). Not sure who the library prefect is this term?

@brackengirl - Antonia Forests aren’t available as ebooks, sadly. But Girls Gone By periodically republish them. I think only The Thuggery Affair is available at the moment, but it’s worth keeping an eye on them. Nice paperback editions- and only(I) £13. ^www.ggbp.co.uk/ here.]]

Or even here

Please may I have the one drive link as well? I will confess to having the entire collection (in first editions, with colour dust jackets - god that was an expensive hobby!) but they live at my Mums house. This thread has got me dying to read them all again

Rose Wilder Lane and Helen Dore Bolyston moved to Albania together.

The recent biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder is fantastic and includes loads of detail on Rose, who sounds frankly unbearable in many ways, but with a stack of childhood trauma.

I reread Reunion very recently randomly and found it almost unreadable. But then it’s a holiday book and they all have far too much Joey and far too many dull domestic details involving barely seen children! Grizel (who I have always identified with) finally gets her reward doctor though.

I am sorting books right now and found my first ever Chalet, an Armada that I bought in a jumble sale when I was about 8. I was shocked at how fragile it looked before I realised it was only about ten years old when I bought it and that was around 35 years ago, so it’s now mighty old!

Oh, I bought my first one - Mary-Lou - at a school jumble sale! Think I must have been nine or ten.

I went to boarding school because of CS. (+ St Clare’s and Mallory Towers.) Still not over the dearth of almost fatal running away to climb mountains schoolgirl adventures to be had in a southern England town ...

Oh, and on the subject of this thread! EBD shies so very hard from any sort of gynae mentions that I think it’s very likely she was talking about the bogus ‘displaced organ’ rather than the prolapse Joey would have been very likely to actually have had. Great point about diagnosis lying down rather than standing - when I was eventually referred to a proper gynae physio she did examine me standing up, which felt so very awkward but obviously makes far more sense.

Sue Barton fan here! I read the district nursing one about 100 times.

Almost everyone at the CS was fantastically annoying- Joey, Grizel, ghastly Simone. And how anyone got through a day without slapping the Robin, I'll never know. Strangely, though, I still loved the Pre-WW2 books. Could never get on with the ones where Joey is an adult though trapped in a perpetual hinterland of highly fertile wannabe schoolgirlhood

Was it Sybil who poured boiling water over a younger sibling? How did she turn out?

Aroundtheworld yes it was Sybil sone kind of accident with a kettle, I don’t think it was deliberate. But sounds like two young children had been left unsupervised. Joey found it almost impossible to forgive her for years I seem to remember. Sybil then turns over a new leaf and becomes very quiet and humble and eventually goes of to some needlework college - thrilling!

They were incredibly annoying @XXcstatic! How nice to meet someone else who wants to smother the Robin. The angel child who never actually gets TB, but gives Joey someone to be all emo about, and who’s still being referred to be everyone as ‘the baby’ when she’s around ten.

One of the particularly outrageous Robin/Joey plots was on some half term expedition where Stacie Benson pulled her arm out of Miss Wilson’s on a walk, and caused her to stumble and hurt her ankle, meaning they ended up having to spend the night in a hut and the Robin worried when they didn’t come home. It was a complete accident, but apparently Robin’s health was badly affected by one night’s worrying, and Joey blamed Stacie for weeks, before graciously forgiving her. Argh.

I think Sybil was playing with a kettle and her sister ran into her. This was, of course, all Sybil’s fault for getting above herself because people had told her she was pretty, not just what happens when you leave small children unsupervised with boiling water.

Poor Sybil then developed a complex about how she looked and was continually told that being pretty was nothing to be pleased about and had she noticed that she wasn’t very clever compared to the rest of the family?