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.

Perhaps in EBDs day, cream cakes were dainty little things, the size we associate with petit fors?

I think cakes have got bigger over the years. I remember how the first time I went to Starbucks (or Costa?), I was shocked at how big the individual cakes in there were. And now that seems to be a fairly normal cake serving size in most cafes.

If both the cakes, and the plates used, were smaller than the typical size used today, then the meals may not have been quite as calorie laden as one might imagine.

I agree about the size of the meals being important, and that they were probably much smaller - look at old dinner services, the plates tend to be smaller than modern ones, as do the wine glasses. I eat a "healthier" diet than the Chalet School standard (eg less cream and butter, lots of steamed veg, very little deep-frying) but I eat an absolute shed load and am fairly sedentary so I'm still fat.

Yes, just looking at my mum and grandma’s “bun tins” for baking. They were both excellent bakers and we were always well provided with buns and pieces of cake. And I wasn’t fat until puberty*. But thinking back, the portion sizes were what we would these days call “petite four”. And having more than one would be considered shockingly greedy. A pack of Jaffa cakes used to last ages, we were allowed three at a time as an “afters” at meal times.

*dinnerladies crossover there. Like Dolly, I was a dainty little thing until puberty when I too looked like a dinghy with plaits.

Yes, we're told at the start of New Mistress that Kathie is 'barely average height' and that Biddy is shorter than her by enough that it's the first thing she notices when she meets her at Victoria (as well as her prettiness).

I can well believe that portions were smaller in the past in RL, and people usually point out the lack of availability of snack food in the past, but we do see Kathie and Biddy sitting down on a train and immediately starting to snack on sweets, with pre-booked coffee and biscuits to arrive within a few minutes, the coffee and pastries in Paris involves them putting away 'plates loaded with cakes', and we're told Kathie puts away three cream cakes for her elevenses the day after. And this is during a journey where they are sitting down on a train and a car for a day and a half.

I think myself that EBD must have had a very sweet tooth, and that the lavish CS food she dwells on was a kind of Continental food porn for her from the days of rationing and its aftermath -- I don't for a second think that people actually ate like that.

a kind of Continental food porn for her from the days of rationing and its aftermath

• Brilliant thought!

What exactly are 'American candies' in the sense that EBD uses the term in 1950s England, incidentally? I think Joey produces another box of them somewhere else in the series. Presumably EBD specifies 'American candies' to distinguish them from a box of chocolates and make them sound special, but what would they have been?

Presumably not hard sweets, either, because Kathie describes them as 'luscious things' and they 'munch' them, so some kind of soft/chewy sweets? I think I imagine them as sort of giant fruit pastilles covered in powdered sugar, but that doesn't sound very American...

funnelfanjo That wasn't puberty, that were pies!
Just reading 'Bride' and Joey has sent a huge box of Kelowna candies from Canada. Maybe they were like continental chocs due to the French influence in Canada?

Howyoualldoworkme

I too looked like a dinghy with plaits.

I shall now forever think of pre-accident-and-transformation Mary-Lou like this. Before she magically transformed into someone tall and slim with a 'fuzz of curls' and finely-cut lips.

Aren't American candies like a hard jelly? Pretty sure you can still buy them

I remember liking 'American Hard Gums' in my teens - they were, as ~@Yugi says, sort of hard jellies, somewhere between a fruit pastille and a wine gum. It's possible that what EBD meant was some kind of selection box mixing those and boiled sweets and things like peanut brittle.

This really dates me but does anyone remember Weekend by Mackintosh in the late 1960s?
They were advertised as a box of "chocolates and candies". The "candies" part consisted of things like montelemar (sp?) nougat, jelly orange and lemon slices, a very sugary and very green lime one (possibly described as a fondant)...

I always assumed the American candies consisted of that sort of thing.

Aren't American candies like a hard jelly

American hard gums?
Like Frangible, I always imagined them as soft so you could scoff half a box or so quite quickly.

I could easily eat a box of fruit pastilles in seconds.

It’s all sugar and carbs in the Chalet School with the occasional apple and wild strawberry

LaMarschallin I'd be outside a box of Weekend in about five minutes!
"Candies and chocolates, they're all in Weekend"
My grandmother used to buy them. And Newberry Fruits

Maybe these American candies were like that?

I'd forgotten about Newberry Fruits!
Jilly Cooper described sex as the "liquid centre in the Newberry Fruit of friendship".
How different, how very different, from the home life (and friendships) of our own dear Queen Lucia.

(Georgie's face! He'd have dropped a bibelot!)

LaMarschallin

I found a solitary vegetarian Percy Pig in a cupboard and ate it in honour of this thread.

The other thing, as well as the mad meal timings, that struck me about the start of New Mistress is just how mentally young Kathie is portrayed as being. I get that EBD was essentially using the 'new girl' model to introduce her new mistress, but Kathie does feel like a total child at the beginning (for a 22 year old graduate who has persumably just spent three years away at university), wanting her aunt to open the CS acceptance letter for her, tumbling down on her knees beside her aunt in a way EBD usually has children doing, declaring that she's going to buy all her own clothes for the CS as though this is a first, telling Biddy that controlling a classroom 'doesn't sound awfully easy'...?

I know we're supposed to feel that she's essentially a good egg, like one of the 'good' new CS girls who just need some corners knocked off before they're 'in the mould', but it did make me wonder why the CS, which presumably has its pick of applicants, would choose someone without the slightest life or professional experience (and without teacher training, unlike some of the other younger staff like Sharlie Andrews, who came through teacher training college rather than university)?

Presumably we're to imagine that the CS likes to get its teachers very young and mould them, so they don't rock up like the unfortunate Miss Bubb, with wild ideas of their own (like prioritising the school's academic performance)?

Mind you, Kathie is clearly some kind of linguistic genius, as she appears to have acquired French and German fluent enough to teach in without doing a modern languages degree (at least I assume not, given that she's hired as a maths and geography teacher, so I assume her degree was in one of those?) and without ever leaving the UK, apart from two holidays in Brittany and Normandy?

So that's why they hired her!

Well, when you put it like that ...

In the manner of schools everywhere younger teachers with fewer qualifications are cheap

The Chalet School may have it’s pick of applicants, but I’m not convinced that the Chalet School has a big pool of applicants to pick from.

There’s presumably not a huge proportion of job hunting teachers who are fluent in English, French and German, and also keen to work in a boarding school in Switzerland.

There’s presumably not a huge proportion of job hunting teachers who are fluent in English, French and German, and also keen to work in a boarding school in Switzerland.

Presumably that's why so many of them are old girls of the CS, but to be honest, I just think EBD handwaved over the sheer unlikelihood of recruiting women who were trilingual as well as qualified to teach their subjects AND wanted to live up a mountain at a school prone to accidents and delicate girls!

Like Kathie, who is so shy at the beginning that she can barely have a conversation en route to the Platz with Sharlie Andrews, and who has only ever left the UK for two holidays in France, and but is nonetheless competently trilingual and all up for taking her first teaching job at a remote Swiss boarding school!

Have finished reading Excitements. Was good to read one I hadn’t read before but not sure where the ‘excitement ‘ was!

I’m in the middle of that, Parker, and finding it disconcertingly superior in every way to Mary Lou which I finished recently. It swings along nicely, with due attention given to an interesting range of characters.

I was a bit dubious over Kathie having a spirit stove in her bedroom to make early morning tea, but Google tells me they’re no more dangerous than any other sort ...

BTW that last post was number 950.

I won’t be starting another so feel free to put yourselves forward ...