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

Aspiring doctor not adoring doctor for Reg!

@LastSamurai EBD didn't half write some questionable things sometimes. I was always very cynical about the CS girls' claim that they weren't snobby, honest, you're just Not Like Us.

Just catching up on the thread, regarding Joey's height, in the 1930s, 5'8" would have been tall - my mum was 5'7" and was considered tall.

Wolferl would have been a nickname for Wolfram, although he wouldn't have been the first character to change names!

Maybe they’re stalking the doctors.

Once your spies have figured out the dog walking routine, for example, it’d be relatively easy to accidentally bump into Dr Graves.

And wasn’t there one mistress who bagged a doctor when they met after a pupil nearly drowned?

That was Hilary Burn, wasn’t it, who met Dr Graves when a kid fell into a lily pond? Can’t remember who the kid was but Carola jumped in after her.

Biddy met her doctor via a near-drowning incident with Margot, as well.

Maybe all those near-drownings, cliff falls, strandings, accidents etc were all set up as attempts to bag a doctor? Gosh, maybe the whole idea of a school full of delicate girls following a TB San around Europe was as bait for doctors??

Talking of Hilary Graves, I'm just finishing Coming of Age and Dr Graves pops in to Joey to say that Hilary has given birth to Lois (for the second time?) and he says that Hilary is very proud of giving birth to a 10lb baby.
So all dear Joey says is 'Oh that's nothing, I had a 10 and a quarter pounder!'
No wonder she had a misplaced organ. It was probably Jack's!

Jo gets more annoying as the series goes on.

Jo's not a great adult, is she. Always written to be doing or saying something to be the centre of attention.

I can't work out if that's because EBD wanted to keep Joey as the eternal schoolgirl to please the earlier readers who fell in love with the Tyrol years. Or if her stated 'spirit of the school' intention for Joey isn't quite brought off because it's coexisting with the storylines involving 9 children and being about 40. Or if EBD was so besotted with the character she didn't notice her becoming a bit more of a caricature while the rest of the school moved on, up, out.

It feels as though the only way Joey has developed is to have (as an adult) a far wider scope for being bossy, overbearing and officious. As a schoolgirl she was less good at it, so it didn't grate so much, but she's had practice now...

Perhaps I'm just too annoyed to do her justice, because of her casual treatment of her household staff. All lovey words and gushing, but happy to accept them working like slaves because they're 'devoted' to her.

I've just also read Jo to the Rescue which I really liked. It's quite a 'grown up' book and Jo was actually thinking about the consequences of what she was doing.
The domestic detail was really nice and for once EBD actually seemed to know a bit about children, teething, housework etc. The relationship between Jo and Jack is lovely and quite touching.
It's making Coming of Age seen very clunky.

Oh and nobody fell in a bloody lake!

There were just a couple of things about Jo to the Rescue that grated with me. One was the total lack of mention of nappies - surely Stephen, Gerard and Tessa were generating a small mountain of dirty nappies to be laundered. But I suppose that is consistent with EBDs apparent horror of mentioning anything toilet related, and the euphemistically named ‘splasheries’ instead.

The other was Jack’s chat with Margot. While I applaud having the father go and do some childcare and talk down a disturbed, angry, upset child rather than smack her into submission (as I know would have happened in my family in the 1940s), the concepts and insight and understanding that EBD gave Margot seemed far too advanced for a child of four.

On the plus side, “tonsils and adenoids!” had me giggling, not just for comic timing, but for clearly showing Jo to be an inveterate interrupter of adult conversations and who really does blunder around making everything about her.

I see in the Mail online that a descendant of Napoleon has married a distant relative in Paris.
Joey would be thrilled!

Oh! I had exactly the same thought after clicking the link in another thread.

Also reminded me of how many times they all managed to get the words “The Countess, you know” into Rescue.

Lol, yes. And the bride’s surname was similar to Marie’s (ie a mouthful)

Apparently 'von und zu' are nobiliary particles. Who knew!

"In Germany and Austria, von (descending from) or zu (resident at) generally precedes the surname of a noble family (in, for example, the names of Alexander von Humboldt and Gottfried Heinrich Graf zu Pappenheim). If it is justified, they can be used together ("von und zu"): the present ruler of Liechtenstein, for example, is Johannes Adam Ferdinand Alois Josef Maria Marko d'Aviano Pius von und zu Liechtenstein"

I’m not sure anyone ever specifically explained that to me - think I just absorbed it through reading, from childhood onwards, including CS!

Oh I loved reading the Chalet School books as a child. I'd love to read them again. Please could I have the Dropbox link?

Please can I also have the Dropbox link? Read the chalet school as a child and hoping to get DD hooked too!

Please can I have the Dropbox link too, loved these books as a child

Re-reading Peggy I once again want to slap Jo. Peggy is told that she is head girl and Jo visits to congratulate her (so far, so good). Jo then says that when she gets home she will tell Peggy's parents and Madge. Poor Peggy doesn't even get to tell her own parents that she has been made head girl.

It's as if EBD couldn't conceive that anyone might want to convey their own good news in a way that didn't involve it being transmitted via Joey -- I think she genuinely thinks that any good news being important enough to have Joey as its towncrier only becomes more important by association!

And actually, EBD is generally a bit obsessive about people especially Joey, but not just her wanting to be the ones to pass on bits of news, often other people's news. I wonder whether she was a huge gossip in real life? The world she depicts in some ways is such a large, international world, but in some ways it's more like a small-scale soap opera where everyone is fascinated by even the smallest thing everyone else is doing.

I've genuinely always found it one of the unlikeliest bits of the entire series (including the Richardsons' father jetting off into space) that the teenage triplets ask nothing better in life than to hang around listening to their mother's old school chums banging on about school pranks from years before they were born, most of which really fall into the 'you had to be there' category.

But I’d imagine by that stage of the series it was less about writing to character and more about finding devices to re-hash past stories ...

To be fair I absolutely love hearing my mother’s stories of her youth, and they become more and more precious as we all age. But I’m not sure I’d have appreciated quite so much time with her old school chums in my teens.

I think that's entirely true and that she must have been aware she was by this point writing for adult fans of the series who had grown up along with Joey and co, too it's just that it reads strangely to have these gorgeous, popular teenagers oohing and aahing over their mother's old school friends in the vac, and saying 'Tell us again about the time when Cornelia started a jazz orchestra/you rescued a princess/were rude to Bill when you fell down a hole at camp, Mamma!' and keep describing their mother to various new girls as a 'poppet' and 'just like a schoolgirl'.

As EBD doesn't appear to have much enjoyed teaching actual girls, perhaps it was wishful thinking, imagining clusters of girls being terribly impressed to be in the company of a famous writer of girls' stories?

I spotted you on a thread about uni students sharing rooms, QuarterMiss, and you said it would be like being at school.
Most of the Chalet School dormitories slept about eight - it gives me the shudders!
One reason to strive to become head girl, I guess, with it’s privilege of a tiny single room