To ask the Abbess to find me a solid lump of comfort and a cream cake

[CarrotVan]

Shenanigans at the Chalet School featuring sales of work, sub text and full fat menu

Could I please have the Dropbox link too @Parker231? I have about half the books on Kindle and my mum threw all my old books away!

Yes refering to the postwar books on using old blazers and dresses etc. Prewar it may have been buying fewer quality items? So a school blazer was the autumn/spring jacket.

Janie is such a revelation. Though it seems EBD reserved an unfair amount of irony for poor Beth Chester. I can’t recall whether she had a year at Welsen/St Mildred’s - but what was she doing between the end of her schooldays and going to be Mother’s Help to Joey? I know she got engaged while there. Given that the La Rochelle book shows her deeply resenting having to look after her younger siblings, it seems a shame EBD couldn’t give her any adventure not related to school or domesticity.

I can’t imagine much worse than being mother’s help to Joey

Can you imagine? She'd be all chummy and zany, get the smallies wildly overexcited and then carol 'All yours, Beth!' and land you with them for the dull stuff while she popped through the hedge to intervene in a staff meeting, or bequeath them the school some jam.

And can you imagine passing Joey and Jack's bedroom at night on the way to the loo and praying one of them had a headache tonight, and scrutinising Joey for signs of another, probably multiple, pregnancy all the time? I like to imagine Beth, Anna and the Coadjutor conspiring on a plan to put ground-up contraceptive pills in Joey's coffee, only they clearly didn't...

Front Row has an article on the culture of boarding school right now on Radio 4!

I think Beth Chester went to Oxford before coming to be Joey's nursery minion. She's an interesting character, I wish there was more of her! Presumably being willing to look after the Maynard hordes was supposed to be an indication of how much she had improved..

Wasn’t she going to train as a gardener as well at one point?

I tell you what I never noticed before in Exile, or maybe it was abridged from the Armada edition — the Swanley-trained Miss Everett, when she first starts coming to the school in Guernsey one day a week to teach gardening, is not just the Lucys’ gardener at Les Arbres, but their head gardener. If she normally does high-end garden design, no wonder she is unamused by the Middles mucking around.

So ...

Janie & Julian Lucy: Julie, John, Betsy, Vi -and Barnaby; born during Janie Steps In. Sparkling storytelling (though one utterly gobsmacking, crashingly wrong-to-our-contemporary-eyes episode). And the whole weirdness of married couples welcoming beautiful teenage orphans into their domestic set-up ...

Elizabeth & Paul Ozanne: Nella and Vanna + reams of boys including Bad Bill.

Anne & Peter Chester: Beth, boys, terrifyingly sickly Barbara ... Excellent portrayal of troubled family dynamics.

Rosamund and Nigel Willoughby; Blossom, Toby, Judie (born during Janie Steps In )

Even the Rosomons were mentioned as Guernsey natives, though they didn’t play an active part in this story.

I now want two things in life: to re-trace Nan Blakeney’s off screen progress through the CS books, and to be invited to stay with the smart set in mid 20th century Guernsey. (The thing about the flower-arranging was spot on, though that household did have particularly useless staff.)

Ooh how have I missed these threads?! I read my mum’s copies from the 70s when I was a kid and I just found them so fascinating.

I think they were all totally random ones though which I definitely didn’t read in the right order! I remember feeling very confused about the fact that Joey went from a schoolgirl to being married with kids (and back again) from one book to the next

@Parker231 please may I also have the Dropbox link, so I can join in with you all

Question, is the only period when the CS junior school has boys in it during the Guernsey bit?

I don't ever remember there being any discussion about admitting boys as a thing -- you just get six year old Edmund Eltringham (I should remember who he is, but I don't?) mentioned as form prefect for the first form when the school reopens.

I'm reading the unabridged Exile at the moment, thanks to @Parker231 , and fascinated by the bits that were left out, like the fact that Jack growing a beard when they're on the run is treated as a big deal, and Joey is clearly being rather forward to declare that not only would she still marry him if he had a beard, she'd marry him if he were bald! The hussy!

I'd also completely missed the fact that when Joey, Bill and co escape through the secret tunnel from Vater Johann's church, they do so entirely in the dark without even a torch or a lighter, and despite this, they somehow manage to walk, in the pitch black, from Spartz all the way to Robin's cave, which is near the summit of the mountain the Sonnalpe is on!

I think Joey's boys went to the kindergarten in Switzerland

Clearly Joey, Bill and co had all been eating plenty of carrots.

Clearly Joey, Bill and co had all been eating plenty of carrots.

In the form of little golden carrot balls swimming in melted butter, probably.

I think Joey's boys went to the kindergarten in Switzerland

Oh, did they? I never noticed that. I have only some vague memory of Mike being sent down to share a tutor with Winnie Embury's children as a sort of weekly boarder at what seemed to me an unfeasibly young age, and being a bit shocked at how casual everyone was about the fact that when the snows started, he was going to have to stay down there all the time. Mind you, this is the household where you are a FT boarder even though you live next door!

Yes, that was in Carola, I think, as I’ve just finished that one, that Mike would be about seven and staying down in Basle or somewhere Monday to Friday.
Con was only nine and having nightmares and sleepwalking and I thought how horribly young to go to boarding school. I’m not sure if living literally next door makes it better or worse.

I may also have read Janie of La Rochelle - even though it’s a slightly terrible book. Set about 4 or 5 years before Janie Steps In, it has no plot whatsoever, a cast of zillions, all related, wealthy, good-looking, fertile, living lives of relentlesss joy ...

Think I’ve had enough Guernsey now ...

Are there more La Rochelle books in the Dropbox?
I got 2 from the old one, can’t remember what it was called or how to access it, but I can only see CS books in the Dropbox.

Thank you all so much for how happy this is making me.

I have 4 of the La Rochelle's as transcripts, I'm more than happy to share them if required! I've got Gerry Goes to School, Heather Leaves School, Janie of La Rochelle and Janie Steps In.

And there shouldn't have been an apostrophe in La Rochelles - that was autocorrect!

To clarify, those of you who, like me, received a file named ‘Chalet School Books’ 3 months ago should find, from the La Rochelle series:

Gerry Goes To School
Heather Leaves School
Janie of La Rochelle
Janie Steps In

nestled amongst or beneath those volumes. (They are not in the later Kindle ready file.) Thanks again to the lovely poster who shared these.

There are a few others in the series. Google ...

I’ll arrange to put these extra books in a separate Dropbox folder and if anyone wants them please email [email protected] and I’ll give you access to them.

Thanks very much to @Chouetted who has sent me a copy of Jo to the Rescue, which I will type up and should complete the main CS series on Dropbox. Give me a couple of weeks to get it done.

I sent Parker “Excitements” in Word doc and Kindle mobi versions. I see people reporting difficulty opening them - any requests for other versions I could do? PDF?

And to complete a good day, I retrieved my Kindle from Lost Property at Manchester Airport on my return from holiday. Just got to work out how to restore it after I deregistered it for safety.

Oh does the extra file include the abbey books mentioned upthread? Yes please :)

I got the kindle ready folder which is great, but would love the extras.

What bliss - have just got to the end of binging all of the threads...

Incidentally, I think Jo to the Rescue is probably my favourite (follwed by the Oberland one) I just adore all the weirdly hypnotic domestic detail, I quite liked the quartet of friends at that stage, at one point there's a massive thunderstorm that makes me feel all cosy... Ahh such a comfort read