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 was listening to Half Man Half Biscuit the other day while reading a CBB thread about folk dance, and ended up writing this poem:

Scottish girls are wearing kilts
All the Dutch girls wearing clogs
Janet's Bacca Pipes got smashed
By Joey Maynard's dickhead dog
Gloria gloria in excelsis deo
"Please can I go to the toilet, Miss Annersley?"
"I'm sure you CAN, but MAY you?"

OMG you are truly wonderful, wonderful Chaletians! I didn't realise so much of the drop box was uncut!!!!!! What joy! Reading Tom and it's a completely different book!

Is there a list somewhere of which manuscripts on the Dropbox aren't uncut? And can I - I mean, may I - have it?

As an aside, I am just back from Basel my lambs, I didn't see Winnie but I did eat fondue and luscious black cherry jam.

I don’t think there is a list but i went through them a while ago and tried to work it out and I think they are mostly uncut. The archive was cobbled together from several sources so not sure.

Did you get to take a plate and fork and select your own cakes though? Was it delightfully continental?

Ah @Yugi we did go for kaffe und kundchen but it was waitress service! No feather beds of whipped cream either. I blame Brexit. Cakes were bloody good though and DH did say if I didn't stop going on about the jam that he was going to divorce me...

My dd, 15, may have caught TB. She came into contact with it during a recent hospital stay. Chest x Ray was clear but blood tests inconclusive so need to be repeated in a few weeks.
Thank goodness times have changed and it’s not the killer it used to be.
On a lighter note, my aunt visited when it was raining the other day and brayed, “what beastly weather!” It could have come straight out of a Chalet School book

That's nasty news even now. Hope it is all clear.
Did you give her a fine for slang?

Should have done, shouldn’t I, and made her write lines for being so noisy. What was it now, “her voice was ever soft and low, an excellent thing in a woman?” Something like that anyway

I hope that you also popped her into san for a week to ensure that she didn't get a cold/pneumonia or die.

Papergirl, sorry about your DD though. Hope that she is ok.

I’m sure she’ll be fine. According to the NHS website, it’s not really a big deal these days.
Might book myself into the san though, especially if there are any single hot doctors

Hope your daughter is ok.

Have just ordered Refuge for the Chalet School from Amazon.

Description
The girls and staff of the Chalet School are seeking a refuge from the growing threat of Nazism. Austria has become part of Germany and the Chalet School has had to leave the country—some members more precipitately than others. Luckily there are people in Guernsey who are waiting to welcome them as they arrive on the island. They make friends, a long-awaited wedding is celebrated and Joey and Jack set up their first house together. There is birth, and death, parting and reunion and though the school itself is in abeyance its spirit lives on. As war clouds gather everyone hopes that the Chalet School can once more open its doors to pupils and work and serve in an uncertain world.

A Refuge for the Chalet School is set during the ‘missing’ chapters of The Chalet School in Exile

For information about Amy Fletcher please see here.

A Refuge for the Chalet School was published on 29th November 2019.

There’s an article on the Mail online with loads of photos of Innsbruck and the Alps. I don’t know how to link but googling alps and Daily Mail brings it up.

Just read all three threads with great pleasure, I adored the Chalet School books but sadly gave away my collection of Armada paperbacks back in my teenage years! I would absolutely love a link to the Dropbox if possible at some stage. Many thanks in advance and Merry Christmas to you all

@Parker231. Please could I have the Dropbox link? So many memories ...

Happy Christmas everyone. While at my parents I did some rummaging in old papers and found a copy of my mum’s old school magazine from 1955. Very hard not to think about the Chatelian while reading it. Posting some pics, hope they’re readable.

I can quite imagine Lady Robinson being asked to open the Chalet School fete.

My headmistress in her end of term speech used to say things like ‘...and Upper V have been up to Town to see a production of ‘King Lear’. Which always used to make me feel like she was channeling EBD. (And I’m not that old. We’re talking 1990s.)

My mum was Head Girl! She wasn't like Joey though, she was more like Peggy.

I'm reading Barbara atm and oh G-d the bit where Barbara and Beth see Carlotta and discover she's got olive skin and black hair, and Frieda goes 'tee hee hee Joey calls my daughter 'n baby'" and acts like it's some kind of compliment. Yes, I know they were written in the '50s but it's still not a pleasant thing to read. I find the whole calling dark-haired white people 'n**s' really weird. That's a slur aimed at black people, having dark hair doesn't make you black. Josette calls baby Cecil that word as well, even though both the kid's parents are white.

Happy New Year!

Currently listening to teenage DSS bellowing at his online gaming friends and noted with interest that he’s calling them “my child” - rather than mate or bruv.

No doubt he would not be amused to be compared to a character in a girls school novel set nearly 100 years ago. Tbh, I always found it quite patronising, I may revisit that opinion now. Although I chuckle at the idea of Joey dealing with some of the other language emanating from the lounge...

"Mike, my lamb, could you please get off the X-Box?"

Just finished Refuge. It is extremely EBD-y. I did like it but as it’s effectively a non-school book it suffers from the endless domestic detail and people arranging that they all d that I find irritating. So it’s very much not the book but me. Well researched though and one bit made me cry.

Please please please may I have a link to the Dropbox?
I've been lurking for months and was inspired to re buy the Armada Exile and Goes To It/ Twins. I think I must have read them into the 100's when I was a teenager. After a Christmas spent with my DC I'd quite happily ship them off to a boarding school in another country right now

I bought CS girls grow up before Christmas, I can't get in to it, I can normally read a fill in in 2-3 hours but I haven't managed to read half of it yet.

@Doubleraspberry, I suppose that’s pretty authentically EBD! I find many of the non-school books absolutely unbearable because of the weight of domestic minutiae — especially anything where there are large amounts of small children to be disposed of before Joey can get on with something, or in which there’s endless detail on what has to be done to St Scholastika’s or Freudesheim to make it habitable. But some people love Jo to the Rescue and Joey Goes to the Oberland!

(Do we get to hear all about Joey settling into her marital home? I admit to finding it wildly irritating when they all have to leave Guernsey again and Bill says ‘shrewdly’ that Joey won’t like it, because ‘she loves her pretty home’. Whereas everyone else was thrilled to be fleeing Nazi occupation, Bill... )

@Nat6999, but that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? MW wrote it to be intentionally troubling, as a kind of joke at the expense of a fictional world where nice girls bagged masterful doctors and lived in babied-up bliss forever and ever or were blissfully happy CS staff, and Joey’s zany eternal schoolgirl ways charm everyone . It’s the reverse of an immersive comfort read.

I've just had a thought. In French, 'con' is a swear word. Con Maynard would have had the piss ripped out of her so much in a modern day CS.

Also, I liked CCGU, it's basically grimdark CS fanfic. It does have some happy moments in it. I love Len's kids, especially Maggs - she's like a modern Joey, almost. And then there's Felix becoming an actor and Josette supporting Aboriginal rights and Margot being an angry badass nun and Miss Annersley living well into her 90s and still being as sharp as a tack. Williams clearly hates OOAO though.

I discussed CCGU on another forum and one person made the point that Len's family would have helped her more than they did. She's basically left on her own after dickhead Reg dumps her and barely gets any support. Joey is too wrapped up in her own world to care, but you don't hear anything from Bride or the Russells, Sybil aside. Madge, of course, is conveniently dead and Mollie doesn't seem to have much of a relationship with her nieces (and where's Dick?)

I also would have had the school move back to England. Btw anyone else get the feeling Williams wrote Miss Ferrars and Miss Wilmot as an actual lesbian couple?