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

I've just finished 'Jane' and what an awful little bully Jack Lambert is! Trying to scalp Jane and then Jane gets some of the blame for trying to defend herself? It's just like Betty and the bookend.
And Margot slapping the girl in the lift in 'Reunion'? Has EBD got a soft spot for psychos?

As for Joey adopting random children, I think EBD was planning for her to have those blasted quads but even she realised that would be the outside of enough so diverted it into random child collection.

I'm another that skims over plays and sports now. I've read 51 books in a row, I could probably write one!

Jack Lambert is an appalling little git. And Margot is a right nutter.

Summer Term has the marvellous description of the 'beatniks' which makes Joey sound so very, very prissy

@Parker231, I've been fighting so long but now I give in - may I have the Dropbox link too?

I’ve sometimes thought about writing one too. I wonder if there’s much money to be made from it. As in, enough to earn a living.

I doubt it. Might give you some 'pin money'

My granny used to write doctor/nurse stories for The Lady and it kept her in hats (from Paris). They were very EBD I think - lots of young Catholic doctors meeting lovely and worthy young women who are choosing between lay nursing and becoming nuns until they meet dashing Catholic doctor and Their Path is Clear

Are those stories available anywhere, Carrot? I have an inexplicable yearning to read them...

I don't think so - they pre-date the internet by a very long way. My sister compiled them all and sent them around the family but I don't think they exist digitally

Shame, but at least your granny had her Parisian hats!

I too am beginning to think it was a mistake to binge-read. Am on 57 now, and have had quite enough of that 'golden voice' and soft black eyes, and bloody interfering and child-napping.

Carrot, that session in the train made me realise exactly how whatserface managed to write the whatever-became-of sequel where Joey gets dementia and just relives the same old tread over and over. It's because she always did, only times and customs stayed roughly the same so that it wasn't too noticeable. Until the 60s with those filthy, disgusting beatniks. Joey suddenly sounds like everyone's disapproving Granny, complete with entire train-travel washing, clothing, tutting, and entertainment kit.

If I read about the Freudesheim cabbage patch one more time...

@CarrotVan

That’s the trouble with reading them all at once.

If you only read one every few months, or read them in a random order, the cabbage patch transformation would be new and fresh and you’d be thinking how clever of Jo to turn it into a beautiful rose garden.

I think Jo would also be less irritating in small doses.

@CarrotVan that was definitely EBD talking through Joey. Joey's supposed to be cosmopolitan and open-minded but she goes on this weird rant about how being scruffy in public means you can't be trusted, and it's so obviously EBD using Joey as a mouthpiece. Unlike Antonia Forest, EBD always made her main characters parrot her own views. It's like when Miss Wilson does that big speech about how it's a woman's duty to be a wife and homemaker - it sounds realistic coming from someone like Frieda who isn't expected to work, but not from an academic and possibly lesbian science teacher.

And if I hear 'on our/your/my arched insteps' once more...

Look out for squalls, my lamb!

Isn’t Joey always described as kind of scruffy when she’s young anyway? There’s a lot of going on about how her hair’s always all over the place. (Another example of how young Joey is endearing because she isn’t perfect, and older Joey is just bloody annoying because she is!)

Yeah, Madge is always telling her to brush her hair and it's always described as looking like a golliwog's.

I’m not a doctor so can someone confirm that removing my blazer will immediately result in pneumonia? 🤣🤣

Don’t know, sorry, but standing by an open door in winter for ten seconds definitely will!

I was standing by an open door last night waiting for my cat to come in. If I was a CS girl, I'd have been given such a bollocking!

Boiling hot bath and special milk for you straight away!

I got soaked to the skin at work last week and had to stay outside in wet clothes for hours. I would certainly be in the san for weeks if not months, not back at work the next day.

No special milk either!!

Ooh, this thread has reappeared!Yay!

I have just been re-reading Oberland which has some interestingly weird moments. Good bits are a really good and convincing depiction of a girl with HFA (though obviously EBD wouldn't have known what it was) - in fact, I sometimes think Eustacia was another girl who, these days, would have been diagnosed as HFA.
Less good bits - the complete cock-up she makes of depicting the 'illicit relationship' between Elma and Evil Stuart - it's another example of her really not understanding dating or burgeoning heterosexuality except that it's a bit icky and dangerous.

I headcanon Eustacia as autistic.

Also, more thoughts on The Lost Staircase - while I myself am a bit scared of big dogs, Miss Mercier was such an arse to Jesanne about her puppy. And wanting her to play the piano instead of the cello and knit instead of playing chess with her mad old cousin. Shame Sanchia didn't poo in her shoe.

Sew, even, not knit.

EBD had a thing about Alsatians/GSDs. I think she had a couple herself. They are cool dogs tbf, Jurgen Klopp really reminds me of one. My mum hates them but that was because all the drug dealers in our area had them when I was a baby.