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

Given the fact that there wouldn't have been all that much in the way of concrete pavements or tarmac roads in the Alps in those days, I can imagine most people wouldn't wear their outdoor shoes in the house (especially with all those Alpine storms and blizzards).

Have just finished Chalet Girls Grow Up and while I cannot recommend it as a book of literature I was glad to see that the author clearly despised Joey and described her books as utter rubbish.

She always came across as insufferable in the CS books and the author has brought that out beautifully.

I don't blame Jack for topping himself either.

I’d always assumed that Jacqueline Le Pelley (is that right? The name is lodged in my head but maybe for a different reason) was on holiday in Austria when she broke her ankle! And yes, no one thought the Channel Islands would be invaded until very shortly before they were. Remember the shock of Dunkirk? Who would have thought France would fall, and so suddenly? People in the UK were encouraged to holiday there at the start of the war. After Dunkirk, the islands were essentially ‘set loose’ by the UK and all military defences withdrawn, something still a subject of some resentment today, so the Germans just pitched up (not without some preliminary bombing raids that were unnecessary as the UK had demilitarised without telling them). So it’s entirely plausible that Guernsey would seem a suitable location in 1938 - and obviously offered EBD a great chance to join up all her characters.

Encouraged to holiday in the Channel Islands that should say. Not France. That would have been a bit too relaxed.

35 years ago, my old fashioned girls prep school required indoor shoes (buckled Mary Jane style), outdoor shoes (laced - I remember having to learn to tie a bow aged 4 before starting school) and plimsolls (or when over 7, Dunlop green flash) for games. I assumed the Chalet School did something similar.

Looking at EBD's personal life, where following her mother's death she moved in with another female writer of school stories, it seems entirely unsurprising that there's so many intense female friendships amongst staff and pupils. Suddenly the lesbian sub-text seems less "sub"

Has anyone read any of EBD's non-CS or La Rochelle books?

I've read most of EBD's other books. Not the Chudleigh Hold series or the Geography readers but most of the others. I loved the La Rochelle series - although I liked Janie Steps In the least: perhaps because it was written much later and because Janie seems to be turning in to Joey with all her doing good and understanding people.

Both Judy the Guide and Kennelmaid Nan are in the original dropbox and are worth a read.

Jean of Storms - her only adult title - is currently on Kindle Unlimited if you have that. It's not her best but it's interesting to see her trying to tackle slightly older themes.

I have Carnation of the Upper Fourth, The School at Skelton Hall and Trouble at Skelton Hall all on Calibre. Oh and Beechy of the Harbour School and A Leader in Spite of Herself (if you fancy something evangelical). If anyone can tell me how to put them on Dropbox I am happy to share them. Or perhaps I can email them to @Parker231 and you could add them? Just let me know.

Yes, that was Jacqueline Le Pelley who broke her ankle. Perhaps she was on holiday in Tyrol, though why you would take a child with a broken ankle to a remote TB sanatorium (unless she fell while actually mountain climbing at the Sonnalpe) remains a mystery.

I'm still reading Goes To It, which occupies some weirdly double positions on certain things. Obviously, that someone is showing lights during blackout in the school grounds is a serious one, yet the Colonel who shows up to investigate is viewed as a buffoon, and Joey, who can do no wrong, is allowed by EBD to mock him openly by swanning in late and answering for the behaviour of the baby triplets in front of the whole school?

And Gwensi, Daisy and Beth, when they catch the poachers who turn out to be the ones using lights, say they won't turn them in if they join up??? Despite the fact that the rest of the novel is about the suffering of war, and Jack being missing...?

And the snobbery about the evacuee children, who, understandably, have never been around farm animals or around wildflowers you're allowed to pick, annoys me every time I read it, especially when it's CS girls who have been leaving gates open so livestock gets out....

There has been a lot written about the nature of female friendships in the late Victorian - mid Twentieth century era. The intensity of them, the economic necessity of house sharing, the value of them for those women in generations with missing men. Although some female friendships would of course have been lesbian relationships it goes well beyond that. There’s a scene in the second series of Fleabag set after her mother’s funeral where her best friend offers to take all the love that she had for her mother that makes me think of that period. Society made relationships between unmarried women and men so difficult, and men in any case may not have been the best place to turn for emotional fulfilment. Adults were not expected to need their parents for support in the way we see as normal today. Adult women often only had each other to lean on.

Ooh please could I have the dropbox link? I've only read a few of the books but I love them...

@alterego2 I rather love the title They Both Loved Dogs

It sounds both dramatic and banal at the same

@CarrotVan - suits the book to a T then

It sounds both dramatic and banal at the same

This is the author who presents an entire school raising the roof with hysterical cheers when their next door neighbour gives them some jam.

There is a pearl-clutching thread also on AIBU tonight about the free coffees that were given away from Costa machines today. The OP saw masses of schoolchildren queuing up for one and is wondering if it’s akin to drug-dealing. It has made me think of the gallons of kaffee that the CS girls seem to drink from a very young age with their tonnes of kuchen. It is a wonder that the girls aren’t permanently wired and grinding their teeth!

I was just trying to decide who was more annoying, Joey or Mary Lou. On balance I’d have to say Joey as Mary Lou, while a very annoying kid (“it’s not cheek, it’s just Mary Lou!”) at least grows up to become a relatively normal woman.
Whereas even as an adult Joey seems to have never quite got over her status as the school’s first pupil, and clearly thinks she’s the dog’s bollocks.
While skimming through some of the Dropbox copies trying to decide which one I wanted to reread, I came across a scene in which Jo orders the long suffering Anna to prepare lunch for an extra 18 people without any notice at all. If I’d been Anna I’d have flung down my pinny and flounced off long ago!

@BlueBilledBeatboxingBird, I wonder if that’s why she always insists that the coffee is ‘milky’, so we don’t imagine the Juniors wired to the moon in evening prep? I think I always imagine CS coffee as being very weak...?

I’d never noticed before that during the air raid when they spend the night in the cellars of Plas Howell, Bill, Hilda and Matey have a 2 am conversation about how they’d rather face an air raid with a cup of tea than any other beverage, which always strikes me wonderfully un-CS, as they’re generally so obsessed with coffee.

In Goes To It, too, Joey volunteers Anna to help make Simone’s wedding dress (in a day!) and to make the wedding cake, and then sends her off on a bicycle with a note to someone, while Joey sits correcting proofs and not helping at all!

I just never noticed when reading them as a kid how lazy and annoying Jo was. I just assumed that because she was the main character she must be wonderful. Now I just think what an arrogant lazy mare!

I think it's a bit of a trope in general literature of that era though, with a whiff of colonialism and feudalism - everyone loves the English family, especially the 'mischevios' kid...

That's true, @ReanimatedSGB -- I just think that those whiffs of colonialism sit more obviously oddly in a series that very much starts out in Tyrol as venerating the foreign, foreign food, customs, clothing, languages, people etc, and where the Saints, when they arrive, are satirised as Little Englanders, who mock the CS girls for having 'gone native' in their nailed boots and crossed-over shawls.

For me, it's one of the reasons Goes To It is a slightly odd mixture of things -- on the one hand, it defaults to the kind of knee-jerk British patriotism you often get in WWII children's books ('evil Jerry' rhetoric, singing patriotic songs in the air-raid) and on the other it has Karl Linders, unwillingly flying with the Luftwaffe and miraculously throwing a message into the school grounds on a bombing raid, and the Chalet Peace League.

The bit that always strikes me as weird if when the American Cornelia, in the middle of the air raid, says Madge says she trusts Chalet School girls to 'behave like Britons'.

I do love that scene with Karl Linders dropping the note.

It’s actually a bit weird that Cornelia is there at all.

Why didn’t her American millionaire father move her to an American boarding school when the war started?

And Anna - I can’t quite wrap my head around her staying with the Maynards out of her love for the job, when she could have had a husband and household of her own. Surely working for Jo couldn’t have been that fantastic?

I reckon either her boyfriend turned out to be some unsuitable scumbag, or the Maynard’s had some hold over her.

Because that would suggest there were schools as good as or better than the CS, @NewSchoolNewName? Like that bit in Exile before the CS starts up again in Guernsey, where Joey and Madge (I think) go through a list of all former CS staff and have to kind of come up with very good reasons why a few might not be prepared to quit their new jobs and return to the CS, because obviously that what most former staff would do?

I’ve always been very tickled by the bit in The Wrong CS where it emerges that not only is there another Chalet School, it’s also based in the same part of Wales and has a similar brown and flame coloured uniform. (Well, apart from the bright orange tunics...)

Not surprising we never hear of them again. Probably Madge sued for brand infringement.

This may be a controversial opinion, but I think that - for most American parents - an average boarding school in the USA would win out over an exceptionally lovely boarding school in the UK given the war context.

I mean, maybe Cornelia wouldn’t get taught in 3 languages and all that. But she’d be less likely to get killed in an air raid.

Why Mr Flower seemed to be wandering around Europe with Cornelia never made a lot of sense to me, let alone why he stays on and keeps her at the CS in wartime. And doesn’t he buy the old CS buildings when the school moves to the Sonnalpe? Because there’s nothing an American millionaire needs like an abandoned school on a remote Austrian lake, in a country that’s just been absorbed by the Reich...