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.

We were asked in German class to think of German names and one of the ones I came up with was 'Gisela', after the OG Head Girl.

That’s all very well PhilSwagielka ... I doubt I was reading a CS book on the day in Upper IVth (age 13/14) when, for French, we were asked to produce phrases including the word ‘menage’. For which I brilliantly suggested ´ménage à trois’. And then wondered why the French mistress’s mouth twitched.

(Stupid bloody dictionary said something like ‘a household of three people’. )

Yes, Camp was also one of my first books(weirdly, I think the only one I'd read before that was Barbara!) , and as I didn't understand what a 'lay-figure' was, I was a bit baffled by that whole episode.

The bit I remember being struck by, though I think I was around eight? was the bit where the hornets attack, but it wasn't the danger/excitement I was fascinated by, it was the fact that one of the Guiders (Bill?) throws her skirt over her head while jumping into Jem's car to escape stings.

I was a 70s child, used to very short skirts, so I could not envisage how you could do this without actually taking your skirt off and wrapping it around your head, plus I could not imagine a teacher exposing her knickers to the world, even if there were hornets!

As an adult and I don't think I've read this in forever the bit that amuses me is when Jem or Jack shouts 'Throw the women in!' as they escape the hornets in their car. (Or is it 'Fling the women in!')

I didn’t enjoy any of the Guide stuff and Camp was my least favourite book.

@Quatermiss after I did work experience in Germany, the teacher asked if we knew any new words. I said 'Liebficken', as it was the name of a song that was on the radio a lot, by a German indie band called Sofaplanet. Unfortunately, it turned out 'Liebficken' means 'fucking'.

Top of the class, PhilSwagielka!

Wish me luck - I’m starting the Mary Lou years

@QuaterMiss

Do you now have triplets, Pascha?grin

God, no 😱. I had plenty of special milk instead.

Mary Lou is actually quite sweet as a little kid, it's just when she gets older and Clem isn't around to tell her to wind her neck in that she gets annoying.

Weirdly I’m only just beginning to realise that it wasn’t Mary-Lou as herself that I cared about, but Mary-Lou as a nexus/fulcrum/standard bearer.

Her extraordinary family set-up. I grew up with a furious hatred of the whole European missionary / anthropologist / explorer thing - so this story of a man gone for years and his pale, patient wife just limply waiting, in limbo ... Of all the family stories EBD presented us with, that was, for me, by far the most compelling.

Her cool girl Gang. So attractive, individually and collectively, in a story. So utterly grim taking up half the class in your new school, making everyone else feel left out and second-rate.

Her utter perfection in EBD’s eyes. Her film-worthy alone-ness in the midst of never-ending family tragedy. Given that EBD’s ideal female story was represented by Joey and Joey’s eldest daughter, Mary-Lou seems an astonishingly brave creative decision.

I think with Mary-Lou and Joey I realise that it's not simply that I dislike them both as they get older I mean, there are lots of fictional characters I don't care for it's just what you said, @QuaterMiss, the fact that their author is visibly in love with them both, and thinks they can do no wrong.

As a result, we keep being hit over the head with the fact that absolutely everyone thinks they're the cat's pyjamas (to use an EBDism), and if they don't they're either Plain Bad (evil Matron who locks Robin up, Thekla Von Stift, the nasty Saint who gets expelled) or just misguided and need to be re-educated to see the error of their ways (Kathie Ferrars, Stacie Benson etc).

AND we keep being hit over the head by everyone banging on about how similar they are, all the time and how M-L has 'inherited Joey's mantle' as 'butter-in' which really isn't true. Schoolgirl Mary-Lou isn't remotely like schoolgirl Joey, who was charismatic and prominent because it was her sister's school, but did not 'lead' a gang and was frankly (and realistically) selfish when asked to look after new girls or take on a position of responsibility.

But I think my most annoying Mary-Lou moment is that EBD, having made her a plain-ish sturdy schoolgirl with plaits, decides that her favourite has to be gorgeous, so gives her an accident that magically changes her to a tall, slender type with glamorous curls.

Mary-Lou reminds me an awful lot of Naruto Uzumaki, in that they're both blonde, the children of dead heroes (an explorer and the Fourth Hokage), and they're always interfering in other people's lives and talking them round. Though Naruto is a child soldier in a military society, as opposed to a boarding school pupil.

And yes, Mary-Lou and Joey are both major Author's Darlings. As children, they aren't always right, they have flaws, not everyone worships the ground they walk on, they get called out for misbehaving and they're more well-rounded. But around the time of the Swiss books, they become these wise, all-knowing paragons. Margot is a little psycho but it isn't Joey's fault because Joey is the Perfect Mother. Mary-Lou suddenly becomes super religious and keeps banging on about Jesus, and has a Big Damn Heroes moment in Challenge where she rescues Jocelyn. Anna makes greengage jam and the girls go mental and act like Joey and Mary-Lou are the only people who've done anything so generous for the school (which is a bit unfair on Tom and her awesome dolls' houses). Someone on the CBB said Mary-Lou was intended to be EBD's ideal schoolgirl. They've got a point. And it gets very irritating to read, because flawed characters - to me, anyway - are much more interesting, even more so when you don't have the author telling you what to think. When it's blatant that an author loves a character and wants you to love said character, it can get annoying very quickly. Antonia Forest is great about this. The Marlows are interesting characters, but they all have flaws and Lawrie can be a little shit sometimes. And Lois Sanger, their arch nemesis, is a lot more grey than CS baddies are. Like when Tim points out that the Marlows might hate her but for Tim, she's the one who saved The Prince & The Pauper from being a disaster.

And yes, Joey was charismatic but wasn't as good at helping people as Mary-Lou was. Mary-Lou would never have treated Eustacia the way Joey and her friends did.

Mary-Lou is actually my favourite character (I know, I’m sorry. Doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a good picking-apart of her more annoying facets. ) The descriptions of her as a small child are lovely. She does also get quite a bit of criticism for doing things without thinking - before Verity becomes quite so wet she’s described as the one who stops Mary Lou from doing stupid things. She gets into trouble for climbing on a wardrobe, and for falling down the stairs (bit mean, that, I always thought...) and for being part of a class fight, among other things. She does get an unlikely number of ‘hero’ moments, but actually the rest of the school don’t find out about them - I think the fact that she rescues Jocelyn is kept quiet, and she doesn’t want to tell the others about saving Kathie from a falling glacier. And she does have moments of self doubt (which I don’t think we ever see from Joey?) - when she finds one of Nina’s compositions and sends it into the magazine without telling her she then worries that Nina will be upset, and before Jack comes and rescues her and Jocelyn from the snow she’s described as realising just how much she’s taken on - again you could put both these things down to being impulsive (I’m not saying she shouldn’t have a bit more self-control, at the age of 21 or whatever...)

Also she doesn’t great deal of sympathy, considering her father dies, her grandmother dies, she has a stepfather who presumably becomes important to her; he dies. Her mother dies, and there’s a throw away line in ‘Reunion’ thats she was there as her mother died of a pulmonary haemorrhage. That’s a horrific thing to have to see. She’s left with Joey and the school, who have been dumping extra responsibilities on her ‘because she’s Mary-Lou’ since she was a little girl.

Plus she does some really amusing things, like when she’s waiting outside the office and tries to ‘kick her own height’, and when she puts too many people on her sledge and drives it through a load of Middles and is told off by Miss Wilson.

I like Joey as a schoolgirl in Tyrol. Although some of the ‘sensitivity’ is over played, she’s not presented as a paragon and she’s lively and fun.

It’s the fact that her development is kinda arrested after that that gets me. Elinor couldn’t bear to let her go so she’s a grown woman trapped in this schoolgirl world, howling at the middles, writing books about it, hanging out with the trips. It’s just odd.

Marylou I struggle with even more. The sturdy little girl we first meet is fine, but the obvious authorial favouritism (I’m still not over her being the one and only ‘head of the middles’) is nauseating.

Plus on a personal level, I don’t find any of her supposed good qualities remotely attractive. The bossiness, constant interfering, piety are all massive turn offs.

I loved CS Grow Up because I felt massively vindicated in my dislike of her.

And then Len is dull as ditchwater.

Yet she wrote so many attractive characters who I loved despite (or perhaps because) not being top dogs. Margia, Corney, Evvy, Biddy, Gay, Tom, Daisy, Gwensi, Julie, Vi, Bride, Josette, Con, Jane.

Too emotionally involved in her heroines I guess.

she’s not presented as a paragon and she’s lively and fun

I think that's the key for me -- that's she's not presented as a paragon. It's later on in adulthood, when her every sneeze/visit/multiple birth/gift of jam is greeted with a mass chorus of hysterical approval from her own daughters, CS staff, pupils and probably the entire population of the Platz, that it gets a bit tiresome.

I've always wondered whether that's why EBD didn't use the obvious storyline of having some girls/staff think that the triplets benefited too much from their family's Special Relationship with the CS and/or having a powerful mother across the hedge who tends to drop into staff meetings -- because she couldn't bear putting forward criticisms of her beloved Joey in the mouths of CS girls? It would be blasphemy!

I mean, the Marlow sisters in Antonia Forest's Kingscote books are literally and metaphorically the school's golden girls socially-prominent, good-looking, popular, high-achieving sisters but the fact that they have their enemies and detractors among staff and girls isn't presented as anything untoward.

EBD was brilliant at writing 10-11 year olds/tweens. Three Go and Exile are both examples of this.

Also, if the triplets had been at Kingscote, they would have had a lot of shit thrown at them by other girls for being Joey's daughters or Joey's overinvolvement or the fact Len gets to be HG and Con gets to edit the Chaletian. Or the triplets would be embarrassed and feel awkward, not proud, about Mamma dropping in all the time.

Cornelia is one of my faves, funnily enough. Bride and Tom too. If I could be part of one CS friendship group, it would be Bride's group. They're more equal than the Gang and there's less cliqueyness (Jo Scott even gets told in Kenya that she was on probation); they're just an organic friendship group, although Julie and Nancy are related.

@Squirrel26, I like Mary-Lou as a kid and she has her moments in the Swiss books. It just gets a bit much once she becomes a senior and gets Author's Darling status. She is a lot more interested to read about than boring neurotic Len though.

God, poor, dull, anxious Len, middle-aged before she's sixteen. Not hard to see why, though she's been typecast as the helpful/responsible one since toddlerhood, with Con and Margot as 'dreamy writer' and 'mischievous psychotic' respectively. Interesting that EBD includes several scenes where Len begs not to have some responsibility doesn't she ask if she can put off being a prefect? Only if I'm remembering right, she's asking Joey, rather than any of the school authorities!

And there's that rather awful scene in the one where Melanie goes to the Tiernsee with them and has a completely motiveless hate for Ruey? where all three triplets ask Joey to not invite a complete stranger on holidays with them that they will have to look after, and she guilt-trips them into agreeing by 'leaving it to your consciences.' But we're clearly supposed to think that Joey is right.

It's a bit rich in the circumstances for Mary-Lou to call Len interfering and fussy in (I think?) Theodora, when Margot is blackmailing T by threatening to expose her previous expulsions -- everyone in her life has conspired to make her like that. She's been HG of her family since birth!

And then, rather than firing his entitled ass, Joey and Jack both encourage Len into an engagement with ghastly Reg! As if poor, decent Len had ever 'played fast and loose' with anyone in her blameless life!

I think a lot of pressure is put on all three triplets. A lot of fuss about Margot not being in the same form as her sisters... When she is still working above her age group.

Oh definitely, @PhilSwagielka. I'm not really a fan of her as HG; too bloody overbearing. On the other hand, she'd be the person at school you could count on to be Netball Captain, organise 50p-for-charity day, write the class assembly and be in charge of lost property, while you ate tinned ravioli from the newsagent and skulked around smoking outside the gates. Just me then?

tinned ravioli? You knew how to live.

(Although, god forgive me, I do remember it being particularly tasty ...)

I was just on Amazon and noticed that for those with Kindle Unlimited, the fill in books India and Visitors are both free, along with the Chalet School Revisited and a biography of EBD.

I know. The man in the shop also used to give us weird expired biscuits for free, too.

The Chalet School it was not.

Joan Baker would totally eat tinned ravioli.

I’m afraid she would, yes ...

Highland Twins was a bit of a romp. I’ve always loved the exquisite detail of their journey from Scotland and Joey’s crack of dawn journey to collect them.

And Poor Bad Betty.