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 started again from the beginning (oh, the hours spent!), and have just started 'the new chalet school' which I've not read at all before, never mind only having read the armada versions when I was young.

So have just encountered Sir James Talbot appearing for the first time.

Am keeping a stern eye out for early intimations of wrongness

I loved the Chalet School books when I was younger!
What’s this Dropbox link please?

I always feel failure when peeling potatoes, so much so I've given up and pretend it's for health purposes to max out vitamins.

I found myself confidently telling someone about the goodness being just under the skin the other day, and then thought (having been re-reading) HANG ON. You don't know that. You're just parroting Frau Mieders. From reading a book over 40 years ago. And never fact-checking since.

I wonder what the hell else I just absorbed and never questioned. Apart from the Tyrol being heaven on earth, of course. if you're well off

I would have been the disobliging new girl who told Frau Mieders that in that case, we shouldn't be peeling the potatoes at all, thereby improving our intake of vitamins and saving food preparation time.

Presumably we're supposed to grasp that the thick and unwieldy potato peelings are from the (majority of) the UK and US girls who come from households with at least a cook and a parlourmaid, and who have literally never peeled a potato in their lives. The thin, skilful ones are from the continental girls who are schooled in domestic arts from birth.

Could I possibly (wonderfully) have the Dropbox link too?!? I have been an avid reader for years and have even invested in some of the books from Girls Gone By publishing. Although if I wait for all of them I will have 1. Invested a small fortune and 2. Probably be 90.
Kaffe und Kunchen is a fixture in my house. Does anyone else have to read CS with cake? Or is that just me

howdoyousolvethisproblem Hello other how!
I'm practically carb free and I hate milk so I would be the awkward girl at the Chalet who starved to death. But as I'm fat it would probably be my own fault.
Hence no kaffee and kuchen

As an aside, I was reading about The Children's Crusade on Wikipedia and they mention that it is part of the Christmas play in Barbara Goes to the Chalet School. I'm looking forward to that!

If you're going to the passion play please make sure you get back to your comfortable guesthouse before you faint, overwhelmed with the experience....

@Howyoualldoworkme - I also hate milk, so I'd have starved too! Much as I love reading them, I know I wouldn't have survived as a pupil or a teacher.

Does anyone else long for a new girl to not love Joey's books and to be a bit startled and distant, whilst polite, at the attempts to be her new best friend? And to just carry on her own way, making friends without being the ideal CS girl?

Or for a teacher to walk into the staffroom and declare they need a drink because Lower IVb were little shits today? I've just read Reunion (bits of which are very good) and I notice Marie carries a flask of schnapps on the walks, is that in case the tedium gets too much?

I hate hate hate coffee. I think it tastes vile. Even with lots of milk and sugar added. And hot milk (unless the chocolate variety) is an abomination.

I’d have probably died of thirst.

I think this was discussed the other day but rereading New Mistress I’m astonished by how much food Biddy and Kathy put away on the journey to Switzerland. Candies, followed by tea and biscuits, followed by a stop in a patisserie in Paris where they pile their plates at what appears to be a cake buffet-type thing, followed by breakfast in Basel followed by another stop in a cafe en route to school where Kathy eats three cream cakes. And they’re no sooner there than it’s a three course supper, sorry abendessen. I am fat and I love my food but that would be too much even for me!

Please mAy I have a Dropbox link. I used to long to live in foreign parts with a gazillion kinder and have kaffee und kuchen

I’m reading Jo from Kenya (not got to the inappropriate native dancing yet) and they are reading a book called Titania Had a Daughter by the author of The Rustication of Randy

Which sounds like Victorian porn and not at all about a cat that moves to the country

@Papergirl1968

yes I agree. Also I can’t help feeling that had one of the supposedly fat characters eaten like that then Joey would have had something to say!

I can eat for Wales but that seems an alarming amount of food for a journey. I also get travel sick so I wouldn’t have been popular.

Maybe they’re all secretly bulimic.

The overweight characters in the Chalet School do seem to have their size brought up rather a lot.

I'm still failing at the Dropbox. All attempts to send the files to Kindle app are now resulting in this . Grateful for any technical help! I've got an android phone

Much as I love the CS, I would have struggled.

I’m not much of a linguist so the three languages would have floored me,

But even more than that, the cold baths in the morning. For fucks sake, who does that to themselves? Mornings are bad enough without douching oneself in ice cold water. The entire morning routine, with the bossy dormy prees and ‘shake a leg’ is hideous.

Thankfully Kingscote didn’t go in for that kind of shite

I suspect that most of the pupils just didn’t wash properly.
You’d have to be very committed to good hygiene before thoroughly scrubbing yourself all over in a cold bath. Especially in the winter.

I'd love to know what Haile Selassie's granddaughter's thought of their school...

I still remember one school story I read, I think in Bunty - the school was going to get a new girl from St Lucia, and the girl asked to look after her had all kinds of very "racist" ideas before she arrived (obviously a white colonial girl). I often think how racist the story was even though it was trying to teach "don't jump to conclusions".

Can you expand on Haile Selassie’s granddaughters please? Where did they go to school?

Can I get the Dropbox link too please. I haven't read any of the later ones. The ones I did read seemed so exotic compared to St. Clare's and Mallory Towers.

Sorry I'm late but I appreciate the bowl of flowers and the honeycake you've set out. :-)
Wow! I have actually never met anyone else who's ever read these, in my life. This feels so weird. I read them in the 80s/90s. Are they having a come back or something?

I was talking to a friend about the cold water thing, she suggested that the boilers probably weren’t up to 200 girls having warm baths! Given that the hot water at work has been known to run out when the place is full of students (university building), this is a fair point. I hate cold showers though.

They only had about 5 minutes to run the bath, get in and wash, out and dry and clean up! What about the girls with long hair or Kenwigses?

Btw I might have solved something that was raised earlier about different language days. I'm just finishing Barbara and someone asks Biddy O'Riverdance if they have to do their homework in French.
And she says that the homework is done in the language the lesson is taken in!

I think I remember in one of the books (the Lavender one) a reference to some sort of evening hot bath schedule - IIRC Lavender wanders off while the hot water is running and forgets about the bath until the whole bathroom is flooded and the ceiling below collapses.

I suppose the evening hot bath would be the sensible time for hair washing? Although I do wonder how often the evening hot baths happened. It doesn’t seem to be an everyday occurrence.

I think hair washing, at the CS (and in RL to an extent) was a comparatively rare event — hence all the emphasis in the past on brushing your hair 100 strokes a night etc. (You were redistributing the oils.)

All the mentions make a big deal of it and suggest it wasn’t daily or even weekly. Madge isn’t taking Joey and Grizel for a haircut when Grizel mixes up ‘Heisses’ and ‘Heileges’ — it’s a shampoo before they go up to the Tiernsee. A big deal is made of the cornflour incident, and the punishment is washing the hair of the victims. When Joey takes a bath after they get stuck in the herdsman’s hut overnight in Eustacia, we’re told she’s ‘clean even to her hair, for she had given it a rubbing’, which makes it sound unusual. (Plus, this is a hot bath!)

I doubt anyone was washing their hair in the morning baths. Plus no hairdryers, and can you imagine Matey on delicate girls going around with wet hair in winter? They probably had a hair washing evening periodically, and towelled it dry by stoves...?