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.

Could I get the DropBox please? I had the OneDrive, but didn't get everything and the rumours of new books are enticing...

I'm noticing that post-Exile everyone seems to have forgotten that Hilary Burn and Lorenz Maico were part of the flight into Switzerland. There's a reference in one of the later books asking if people remember her (after she marries the nice Dr Graves) and Joey only refers to her Head Girl days and teaching days! Clearly one of the Joey-mythologising aspects.

In Camp one of the locals has come to look for the body and is described as having a good natured, stupid face.
EBD really was very rude about the locals.

What I want to know, and I speak as a former legal practitioner, is exactly when the law was changed so that boarding school staff could no longer sedate pupils at will, without permission. In Shocks Julie Lucy has just been put to bed and dosed with a jorum of Matey’s special milk after an involuntary mud bath. I think I can safely say that both in my own schooldays and in the current generation it just couldn’t happen - however much easier it would make the management of a school.

I wonder if EBD ever tried it at her own school ...

her tableaux would be perfetto for end of term entertainment.

I yearn for that!

Although how things would work between the epicentres of both worlds...
I reckon "Superman Vs Batman"* would have nothing on "Lucia Vs Joey".

Add dearest Olga to the mix and you've got something more explosive than Evadne in a science lab in "Exploits".

Trying to remember how she did that - was it iron filings and something?

*Or do I mean "Alien Vs Predator"?

I love the way that Julie's mud bath is narrated with nearly as much Sturm und Drang as Peter Wimsey and Bunter almost drowning in the quaking bog, but in fact all that happens is that she jumps into an unexpectedly muddy proto-streambed and sinks in to her ankles. But still needs rescuing with the tug-of-war rope and special milk.

But getting wet is dangerous! A cold can have you out of school for weeks, the mere act of getting your feet a bit damp is risking it all.

Matey would have fits at my habits of never drying my hair, walking around barefoot inside and out (at home), messiness, and habit of reading unimproving novels. Although I do have two brothers who are doctors and love a sale of work

Oh, there's a scene in one of the later ones (I think it's Prefects) where some kid gets a thorn in her foot and ends up raging with fever and nearly dead in the space of about two hours. I mean, OK if you get a puncture wound and it's dirty, you might well get tetanus or at least cellulitis, but not in that short a time...

I would be classed as a problem pupil at the Chalet School with lots of staff room discussions about which form I should be in. Am trilingual but appalling at science and art, can’t cook or sew and am never tidy. Like sports but hates walks. Likes to spend a long time soaking in the bath!

Am trilingual

I'd be happy to trade art and sewing for that.
I'd even give up long baths and emerge rapidly, glowing and hypothermic, from the splasheries if I could be trilingual.

However my grandmother could do beautiful invisible stitching so would have been useful for all those ripped uniforms which seemed to happen so frequently.

I can sew, knit, cook, make preserves and enjoy mending. I am good at English Lit, History and anything similar but crap at maths, science and all sport. I would have been an ace stationery prefect as I live organising things like that despite being woefully untidy.

I am good at maths and science so would definitely have been sullen and moody like Phil Craven or Miss Slater 😂

It's Triplets, Jack Lambert and her mates decide to wander off and annoy Len because Jack was mad at Len over some bullshit, and they get lost and one of the St Hilda's girls gets a thorn in her foot and nearly gets blood poisoning and ends up in San. That's also the bit where they have a prayer session in the woods.

I speak five languages, but am an atheist vegetarian non-joiner who hates milk and cream, so I doubt I’d have lasted a week at the CS.

Thorn poisoning sepsis / tetanus/ whatever if in 1963 seems to ignore tetanus jab discovered in 1890, or antibiotics which must have been starting to come into use, or ...

Coming to these as an adult with a bit of health protection training does make me wonder why nobody mentions this marvellous BCG vaccine thingy and how that and antibiotics might be about to put the San out of a job.

Wiki has just told me that one of the pioneers of BCG worked in a sanatorium in Canada - perhaps that's what they were all doing there besides picking up colloquial French, having twins and becoming nuns?

Maybe Jack was sabotaging Canadian BCG research because if a reliable vaccine were developed then his San would be defunct.

I always thought the San diversified and became more like a general hospital.

There was certainly less TB in the later books, so it's possible that EBD had some awareness that it wasn't quite such a danger as it had been in the 1920s (because antibiotics). But she still seemed to follow, mainly, the 'medical' ideas of her own youth, with people being 'delicate'.

It’s kind of hard to imagine the Swiss San being a general hospital because it’s on a small mountain shelf at a distance from bigger centres of population. My theory is that it became a high-end addiction clinic like the Priory, or an expensive cosmetic surgery clinic — I’m sure those adaptable TB specialists could turn their hands to liposuction, Botox and cocaine dependency.

Given its geographical position it would certainly have to become either a venue for extremely high cost private treatments or the site of under-the-radar multinationally funded experimental science ...

👽

I assumed addiction clinic too. Especially given they’ve got the school as a front for county lines style drug smuggling to generate patient numbers

Oh, and to go back to food, I've just reread New Mistress for the first time in years and years, and dear me, it has some very odd food timings throughout, in that people seem to plan/discuss/take for granted very frequent, sometimes giant meals.

Biddy O'Ryan and Kathie Ferrars meet to get on the train at Victoria at ten, and Biddy tells Kathie that while they'll have lunch on this leg, and dinner on the Basle train that night, she wants to stop off in the middle of crossing Paris from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de l'Est to have coffee and cakes, because she likes 'something in the afternoon.' After which she gets out a box of 'American candies' which they start eating, and tells Kathie she's ordered coffee and biscuits on the train at half past ten. When they have their afternoon coffee and cakes in Paris, they eat 'plates loaded with cakes they had selected themselves from the heaped-up trays'. Then they arrive in to Basle at 6.30 in the morning in time for a 'piled up plate of horseshoe rolls', jam and coffee, and Biddy tells Kathie to dig in as 'we won't have our elevenses before half-past ten', at which time they break the journey in Berne because Biddy says 'I want coffee and cream cakes!', and we're told Kathie has three cream cakes. Then, after they've arrived at the school, they have a three-course Mittagessen, of soup veal and a 'huge hollow bun stuffed with jam and cream'.

Maybe Biddy has a tapeworm?

Mind you, the halfterm day expedition to Wahlstein also involves astoningly close-packed meals -- a half-past-seven breakfast is porridge and cream and 'a generous plateful of scrambled eggs', which makes sense ahead of a day that involves a lot of walking, but makes less sense when you realise it's a short train journey and a twenty-minute walk to the Wahlstein Gasthaus which gives them a big elevenses of buns, bread twists and coffee, and they go back for a midday Mittagessen and then have Kaffee und Kuchen again at 4 before getting back on the train down, to presumably have dinner at school?

Maybe they all had tapeworms...?

So true, Frangible! I was thinking the same yesterday, reading Barbara. There was a day trip somewhere and quite honestly it seemed to be just an expedition from one eating venue to another - including arriving at a town and immediately getting a bus out of town to find a place to eat their sandwiches. Then a walk/bus straight back to a patisserie for the cream cake thing. I was genuinely puzzled ...

(I can say that when I have guests I try to account, one way or another, for breakfast, elevenses, lunch, tea and dinner/supper - but there’s not a chance of my fitting them all in on a normal day.)

And Biddy and Kathy were meant to be small, weren’t they, especially Kathy.
It must have cost a fortune. There was no Greggs or other chains then. I wonder if they paid per cake, or whether it was like a set price buffet and you could eat as many as you wanted.
I’ve now finished Camp, and it was good to reread it as it had been so long since I last did, but it’s definitely up there with the least favourites, because I found the descriptions of all the guide business and the camping very tedious, not having much interest in either.
Now rereading Exile. I’d like to have read Excitements as I’ve either forgotten it or never read it, but can’t open it for some reason. Is anyone else having trouble with it?