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

Yes, it is dark CS fanfic, like those grimHarry Potter fanfics where Harry and Draco are in a doomed relationship, Draco is framed and sent to Azkaban, and Harry and Hermione get there with the evidence just too late to stop him having the Dementor’s Kiss and Harry becomes a hard bitten, hard-drinking Auror who never loves again...

I didn’t invent that, incidentally, I think I actually read it.

@FeigningHorror I didn't mind Joey Goes too much, apart from the use of the n-word and Joey calling her kids 'brats'. It was one of the first CS books I read - I got it for my 12th birthday, along with Gay from China/Gay Lambert and A Future Chalet School Girl - so there were tons of references I didn't get. I didn't know who Evvy was or what happened in Austria that made Joey and friends look like shit. It's one reason why I sought out books like Exile, New House and Lintons (which I'm getting this year when the GGBP version comes out, yay!), because so many of the later books refer to when this thing happened.

I find the incessant detail about where to put your stuff and how to make your bed and the Abendessen routine a lot more boring, though it's only really bad in the Swiss books. The absolute worst bits are the bloody pantos though. The sales are quite fun to read about, and the Christmas plays are heartwarming, but the pantos are so unfunny.

@FeigningHorror Joey settles into not one but two marital homes. You can imagine. Also there’s the initial arrival in Guernsey of everyone without the furniture and then the furniture arrives. Every single beach picnic has ten attendees who have to carry things etc. The writer says she’s always preferred the non-school books and you can tell. I think readers prefer one or the other and I bet those who enjoy the minutiae would adore this book. Personally my interest in where Jack’s desk would go didn’t even survive the first move.

I'll be honest, I'm not arsed about any of the fill-ins. The only non-EBD CS book I've read is CCGU. I do like the little fanfics at the end of the GGBP books though - some of the writers are on the CBB, and they get the characterisation spot on. There's a really sweet one in Two Sams about an armchair that's been passed down the Bettany/Russell family for years.

@Doubleraspberry, thank you for that vivid evocation! I can imagine the full effect with alarming readiness. She does love a picnic planned with military precision, doesn't she?

I always think the interior decor in Joey’s various houses that EBD clearly finds ‘fresh’ and ‘charming’ sounds scarily twee and matchy-matchy — but I suppose all that floral chintz and stands of flowering plants probably seemed enchanting from the depths of a small, typically 1930s/40s overstuffed English parlour.

Though I always want to a suggest a Jackson Pollock when she makes that inevitable remark about one or two copies of good pictures on the wall.

I’ve only read CGGU, too, @PhilSwagielka, probably, because it’s very much not trying to be EBD-ish.

I hope I haven’t put anyone off reading it who was thinking of it. It’s a labour of love, and well edited, and it does fill the gap in Exile. It’s just personal preference on type of book, and there are bits that I really enjoyed.

Yes, the fresh look doesn’t to me mean matching floral fabrics on every surface! But compared to Victorian interiors it would have been novel.

I disagree about Merryn Williams hating the books and wanting to tear them apart. She's clearly a fan, if you notice some of the little references she makes, and you can tell which characters she liked (Miss Annersley and Ros, for instance - I love the way she writes Miss Annersley), and I like the way she writes about the scenery, and she even makes Jack of all people human and vulnerable rather than being a Big Manly Alpha Male. I wonder if she was trying to write about the role of women changing over the latter half of the 20th century and using the CS and triplets as a backdrop. People get angry about it, and I know she misled the New Chalet Club or another fan group into thinking it was completely different. But it's just one person's interpretation and New Beginnings is an alternative for people who hated CGGU. The worst thing about it for me was the punctuation, the way barely any of Len's family seemed arsed about her, and what Jack did (not sure whether to spoil it or not), because it's very OOC.

Also, it's not as grimdark as other stuff I've read. I've read and written some depressing fic myself. Not everything EBD herself wrote was fluff Exile is as dark as it gets and there are some dark moments in the Tyrol and war books as well. Some of the reactions to the book are so OTT, like people saying it was 'evil' or that they burned it.

Can anyone help me figure out why on Earth Mary-Lou and Verity-Anne aren’t stepsisters? I know they call theirselves sisters by marriage but surely they are steps

They are, it's because OOAO wants to be special.

Sorry OOAO?

Our One And Only.

Agreed, they are definitely stepsisters, EBD was just having MaryLou being annoyingly ‘original’ and perky. God knows why, as in Mary-Lou of the CS she has no problem using the term stepsisters of Jessica Wayne and Rosamund, the daughter of her mother’s second husband.

Someone somewhere is writing a PhD on this question.

OOAO is the CBB nickname for Mary-Lou cos they always call her 'the one and only Mary-Lou'. It's like when she calls her hairdo 'Kenwigses' even though it's just ordinary plaits.

I wonder if anyone has written a PhD on CS books. I know there are people out there who've written Girls' Own fiction-related PhDs. I'm applying for Mastermind and I want to do CS books.

I can think of PhDs on school stories etc with chapters on the CS it's interesting, of course, because the series was written over such a long period, even if it makes only occasional efforts to keep up with the times in later books (Daisy Venables' award-winning medical career still gets forgotten in favour of her husband's, but there's stuff about motorboats and drug addicts, and the Maynard boys sing pop songs, and Joey sees some Beatniks and is horrified) but generally, you'd need a meatier topic for a whole doctorate.

It would be a perfect Mastermind topic, though. Questions like 'What is Polly Heriot's full name?' and 'Who is Head Girl immediately before Grizel Cochrane?' and easy one 'What song does the Robin sing Joey back to life with?'

Is it wrong to admit that I have occasionally fantasised about Roald Dahl's Miss Trunchbull picking up Mary-Lou by her Kenwigses and shot-putting her over the Auberge fence for some piece of bumptiousness?

Was it Bette Rincini or Juliet Carrick before Grizel?

I wish Phil Craven had gone to Switzerland. Then OOAO would have had an evil rival. Phil was good at maths, so of course she was a bad person.

Some discussion on the CBB about what pop songs the boys were singing. Probably Cliff Richard - I don't think the Beatles were around then. EBD hated popular culture and rarely mentioned it, apart from the odd movie (like when the kids see Black Beauty in Three Go). I had an AU version of the Chalet School where it was set up in the '70s instead of the '20s, so you'd have '90s Mary-Lou and Bride and friends going to Glastonbury and the Swiss lot taking selfies on the mountain. And Jack Lambert watching Top Gear.

Hello, would it be possible to have the Dropbox link please? I loved these books as a child, but somehow they were lost when my parents moved ( I suspect my sister, but she suspects me ).

May I also have the Dropbox link please? I've only read three of the series in hardback - all the others were Armada and I'd love to see what I've been missing!

I've just worked out that I read the three HB's over forty years ago so will now be trotting off to request a dose of something to deal with shock

Re-reading Rivals and still weirded out by Evadne, Margia and chums talking about starting a branch of the KKK. At least they didn't burn crosses on St Scholastika's playing field.

The sisters-by-marriage thing.

I can't remember sadly but was Mrs Trelawney actually OOAO's biological mother?
Just wondering if she married Mr T after Mary-Lou's biological mother died which would mean Verity and M-L weren't official step-sisters.

Dull Doris was definitely Mary-Lou's biological mother -- it was just EBD trying to give her favourite bumptious schoolgirl a zany original vocabulary, as with her Kenwigses, as someone said up the thread.

Though I've always also assumed she had her own issues with what we would now call blended families and non-conventional familial set-ups -- didn't her father, who had been married before, leave her mother when EBD was very young, and start another family locally, but never resumed contact? And her mother remarried later on?

Some of the stepfamilies she presents are fairly dysfunctional, though often not for the reasons she suggests -- it's always annoyed me that Jessica Wayne is seen as at fault, when in fact her life has been turned upside down by her father's death and mother's remarriage to a man with an invalid daughter who seems to be prioritised over Jessica by everyone, to the point where she's sent to a foreign boarding school. Most of us would feel that even if she's able-bodied and Rosamund isn't, she's still being treated with remarkable callousness.

FramingDevice

Ah, thanks. TBH, I should have realised that if DD wasn't ML's mother it would have been picked up ages ago.

It didn't strike me as odd as a child, but it does make me wonder now what EBD thought step-relations actually were.

Could I possibly get a link to the DropBox too??

What is EBD’s obsession with certain minor domestic details, at least once a book a new character must wonder how the crockery doesn’t fall off the trolley and then notices the miraculous wire side. Same with humping the mattress to air it out

I think EBD was so hopelessly undomestic herself that the details of how other people managed to run a house were endlessly surprising and novel to her.