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

[QuaterMiss]

Would I be unreasonable to initiate legal proceedings against this man?

Previous thread here:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3624032-Not-to-have-realised-until-now-that-Joey-Maynard-s-displaced-organ-was-a-prolapse?

With thanks to Jemima232 for rifling through Sir James’ archives to supply the title of this one.

Clearly all new girls and mistresses should wear national costume. Madge, Grizel and Joey should have shown up at the Tiernsee dressed as Beefeaters, with Mademoiselle and Simone clad in berets and strings of onions, to be greeted by Gisela and co in dirndls.

Weren’t the triplets toddlers at the time Highland Twins was set?

I know there’s 3 of them, but how many baby clothes must they have had for Jo to be able to refashion them into frocks for Fiona and Flora!

The dresses are made out of Jo’s cast offs, not the kids.

Sorry, my error! I’ll have to reread....

Glorious, what a fabulous picture that paints. Didn't they do a show of different nationalities at one of the fetes? I'm sure that Jo Scott gave one of the prefects a sample of Kenyan dancing (which they decided was inappropriate).

How did the Twins survive a truly traumatic time (the train being bombed) without Special Milk?

They’re hardy up in the Highlands

I think they had bannocks in their picnic baskets. They'll buck you up.
And probably some Irn Bru

But then they arrived at the CS and realised that Kaffee and fancy bread twists were better.

(Did some of the domestic staff come with the school to England? It just struck me that getting staff at all would have been very difficult, with women entering the services and working on the land/in factories etc without having to try to train them in making European delicacies during rationing!)

Could I have the dropbox details @Parker231, too, please.

Very much enjoying this discussion!

Have just read the whole of this thread in one sitting. @Parker231 could I have the Dropbox details please?!

I’m reading Peggy. Joey (for some entirely spurious reason) is now resident in Carnbach and so much less grand than she eventually became. She’s just picked up some of the schoolgirl clan and she’s stopping at the shop for potatoes! The same Duchess Jack Maynard who, by the time they return to Switzerland, pretty much takes out a full page newspaper announcement if all her staff are out and she has to make her own coffee.

(It’s weird. I used to love Jo. Maybe it’s the bad influence of the rest of you, but she just seems bumptious and smug now.

Yes, and the house is an ‘ordinary’ Victorian brick villa, and doesn’t have as many cupboards as her lovely Queen Anne house at home, and Joey doesn’t even have a separate study to write in, and the garden is across a lane. Woe!

And for some reason she is plucking her own geese/chickens in a headscarf at one point, which cracks me up, it seems so unlikely for sheltered, multi-servanted, undomestic Joey!

Isn’t she making Eilunedd sit in the garden plucking chickens in a gale as a metaphor for her spreading rumours about Peggy? Very subtle, Jo. Also I thinks she says they mustn’t get feathers all over the place as it will annoy Jack. (Which would make me want to suggest that if he didn’t like it, he could pluck his own fucking chickens.)

I mean. Who does that? Invite someone round for tea and force them to do domestic chores while passive aggressively telling them off. That would be the last time I went round there.

Probably the last time Eilunedd was invited, anyway.

Finished! I remembered slightly too much for it to be a complete adventure - but it was rather above average, perhaps.

And yes to whoever pointed out just how much ‘old girl’ material there is in all the books. I hadn’t consciously realised this before, but it really is a thing that distinguishes the series - and perhaps the reason why they’re still so fascinating for erm ... middle aged readers. They’re really not just about schoolgirls. Staff, parents, guardians, San patients, and former Chaletians in particular all make up an ever-changing community. It’s just a wee bit wonderful.

It makes total sense for adult readers to like the sense of ongoing community. What’s weird, though, is the way EBD depicts all the girls who are at the Swiss CS as being endlessly fascinated by tales of /updates from OGs who left the school decades earlier.

Every time I read a passage about how the triplets like nothing better than hanging about with their mother’s old school friends and listening absorbedly to tales of school japes from years before they were born — for many of which, really, you had to have been there — I wonder whether EBD had ever met a teenager.

I dunno though, I still get the alumni magazine, not even for my old school, but for the group of schools mine is part of, and I am genuinely more interested in the people in it just because of this extremely tenuous sense that I have a connection to them.

But would you have read the list of doings of OGs with breathless fascination when you were fourteen, @Squirrel26?

Good point. No, I wouldn’t have given a shit about a load of old people and their pathetic exploits.

Re the chocolate factory trip in Changes, it's based on a real life school trip EBD went on. Not sure if it was with her school or someone else's.

Incidentally, you know you read too much CS when a footballer coming back to manage a team he used to play for (especially when some of his old team mates are still there) reminds you of an Old Girl coming back to teach and everyone has to call her Miss Whatever instead of her name. 'Bonjour, Frank...er, I mean, Miss Lampard.'

Umm, the prospect of The Dropbox (needs capitalisation, obviously) is making my Bank Holiday Sunday night (sad? Me? Kids in bed, chalet school thread, what's not to love...)

I think one of the most formative experience of my childhood was Miss Wilson's hair turning white overnight as they escaped from the Nazis. I have basically expected my hair to turn magically white at every moment of emotional stress ever since.

I am part way through New House and the Sainted Dr Jem has just broken bad news to the feral Balbini twins in the most twuntish manner possible. I can assume he’s trying to give them life long mental scars

Yes, he was very harsh, carrot.
PostmanPat, one of my mom’s relatives was given some bad news, I think it was that her husband had been killed, and put her hand to her head. Where she touched it, it instantly turned white and stayed that way for the rest of her life. A bit like a Mallen Streak if you ever read Catherine Cookson!

Nothing to do with cats but just heard dd2 say to her best friend, “Ellie, turn lesbian like me.”
Ellie replies very dreamily, “Nah, I’m all right, thanks.”