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

@QuaterMiss what was the 'one utterly gobsmacking, crashingly wrong-to-our-contemporary-eyes episode'? I haven't read Steps In yet, just Maids and Seven Scamps (which I liked, but wanted to smack the dad and felt so sorry for the stepmum).

The Ozannes are the super permissive parents, the Chesters are the snobby strict ones who refuse to let Beth hang out with the local kids on Guernsey and the Lucys are the cool ones. And Janie and Julian are around the same age as well! Nancy is best Chester, definitely. The Ozanne girls get the least screentime and are as dumb as a box of hair.

I went to Guernsey when I was little and loved it. CS books are one of the things I associate with it, along with Matt Le Tissier (former Southampton footballer, now pundit and internet troll).

May I have the Dropbox link too please? I adored these books

Oh, PhilSwagielka it would be a shame to spoil the sheer horror of it for you! Hmm ... A man comforts a woman - in a way that EBD must have intended to portray as perfectly innocent - but it’s ghastly and would have led to divorce in any well ordered household.

Do read it - I suspect it’s one of the best of the series.

Am about to start on the non CS books - any suggestions of which I should read first?

Old girl here! Please could I have the dropbox link @parker231 I had the original onedrive link and have managed to lose a few.

@Parker231 please may I have the links to both Dropbox folders? Thanks.

funnelfanjo when I got my new Kindle I couldn’t open some mobi files I’d converted on calibre. After massive panicking, and much googling, I discovered converting them to AZW3 files on calibre works.
So glad you got your Kindle back and hope you managed to find something to read on holiday.

Just remember that when you email them to your Kindle they generally go into documents. I've now downloaded the Guernsey ones so I shall probably be reading until I'm 100!
Was 'Maids' in the Dropbox?

Parker231 - Other than the two Janie volumes from the La Rochelle series I’ve never read any of EBD’s other work, so can’t offer any recommendations.Hope other people can provide suggestions. (Which I’ll try not to see ...)

Not as far as I’m aware, Howyoualldoworkme.

Thank you Parker231

@Parker231 may I have the Dropbox link too please? I loved the Chalet School books when I was younger but my parents lost mine when we moved.

Now I am intrigued. Have GGBP published it yet?

Phil, Seven Scamps appears to be the only La Rochelle book published by GGBP.

Quick query - the CS book - A rebel at the Chalet School - isn't in the dropbox list. Does anyone know if it's under a different name?

Am working my way through the list and marking them off on Goodreads hence why I noticed it was "missing".

@Parker231 - may I have the other Dropbox folder links please?

@daisychicken - it's Part Two of The Chalet School and the Lintons (which was divided in half when Armada produced the paperback editions - they did this to a couple of the titles.)

Oh, I'd lost this thread off my 'threads I'm on list'.

To get it going again, what words/things/concepts did you only notice on an adult reread of the books, whether because you just didn't notice it as a child, or because it was left out when the Armada paperbacks were omitted?

I've only just noticed a reference to 'fairy cycles' in Goes To It -- the incident when the Ozannes and Bride Bettany decide to do trick cycling through hoops and all crash and get black eyes. I looked them up and apparently they were a popular brand of children's bicycles and tricycles in the 20s.

Also just observing in Go To It the beginning of Joey as Special Spirit of the School Person, when the prefects are discussing the problem of Betty Wynne-Davies and Elizabeth Arnett and say they wish Joey wasn't so booked up now, but decide to invite her to their next prefects' meeting anyway.

Obviously, that reads quite naturally when you look back from the later books when Joey regularly intervenes, but at this point in time it seems quite arbitrary that they want to consult her -- they have loads of recent CS Old Girls that they remember as prefects and Head Girls actually on the staff (including Mary Burnett, who has just arrived), who are physically present, whose job it is to control naughty Middles and who are not three miles away dealing with three small babies and a husband absent at the Front...?

Ah that makes sense, thanks @ReanimatedSGB

Rereading as an adult I wonder why they thought it would be a good idea to reopen the school on Guernsey given its proximity to France. Surely with war about to break out in Europe, the Channel Islands would be the last place you’d want to relocate to? If I recall correctly, they weren’t there very long before relocating to...was it Herefordshire before Wales.
I’ve just read Joey and Patricia, where Jo is pregnant and the school is about to reopen. It’s written very much in the style of EBD. Patricia is an odd character though, and there’s lots of angst about having trained as a doctor, whether she should give it all up to get married.
It’s quite a shock to remember that in those days, women were expected to stop work when they wed. I guess the war changed all that.

Possibly EBD moved the story to the Channel Islands because it was a place she liked/knew well (what with her other series being set there already). And I think there might still, at that point, been some general belief that the war would be 'all over soon' and the Channel Islands safe enough.

The La Rochelle books predate the CS moving to Guernsey, don't they? I think I vaguely assumed she was just choosing a familiar location that still counted as slightly 'exotic' for her UK readership where she could give existing characters a walk-on role.

Though, reading the unabridged Exile, one of the things that strikes me as well as the fact that the Anschluss allows EBD to go to town on the machismo of her alpha male doctors! Jem driving around like a bat out of hell, knowing much more about the Nazis than Schuschnigg (who's been dealing directly with Hitler's government for years!), saying the school will be safer with the 'British colony' at the Sonnalpe and coolly telling Madge after the event that he's arranged for her brother's children to be sent out of the country! is how arbitrary the decision to go to Guernsey is.

Jem says they had a child patient at the San from there (for a broken ankle!? so she was brought over from Guernsey to Tyrol for a broken ankle?!), so he wrote to her parents after the Anschluss to take a house for him to send the Bettany children and Margot and her girls to, and then Madge arbitrarily says 'Oh, why don't we move the school and the San too?'

I can see the logic of moving the school to the Sonnalpe so the pupils and entirely female staff are under the protection of the respected and powerful doctors, but the school isn’t up there for five mins before having to move again! To Guernsey for a short time, to Herefordshire (?), to mainland Wales, where they have to move again because of bad drains, to the island off Wales, and finally to Switzerland. Must have been an expensive business, all that moving.
I guess we are looking at the Guernsey move with the benefit of hindsight as well. No one back then would have guessed the Channel Islands would be occupied.
On a completely different subject, there are a few mentions of the girls wearing house shoes or slippers indoors including for lessons. I wonder what these would have been. Surely not slippers like carpet slippers?

house shoes or slippers indoors

My mid 1970s uniform list had house shoes and outdoor shoes. They were simply a less bulky style of leather shoe (one choice was a T bar type) as opposed to our heavier lace ups for outdoors. Not slippers and not plimsolls, which CS girls only wore for gym. I haven’t been into a Clark’s for decades but perhaps very traditional ;and expensive!) children’s outfitters still make the type of thing I mean.

Sounds very sensible to me - my primary school made us wear pumps inside, and the floors were mostly clean and dry. My secondary school did not, and a lot of rain and mud got trekked in, which could be unpleasant on stone or tiled floors.

I assume their house shoes were like our ballet flats

Things that I notice as an adult - there’s more scrimping and saving from Joey and general money worries mentioned.

Although how Jo Scott’s feckless, mauled parents land on their feet in Switzerland after the Mau Mau rebellion is anyone’s guess