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

My DDs had Scarlet Fever a few months ago. Antibiotics are wonderful, eldest had two days off school, youngest one day as she got it on a Friday. They barely noticed being ill. Their hair was untouched.

It would have been useful to have class lists in the books to keep track of everyone. It was a lot easy to track in the short series like Malory Towers.

Oh goodness, Tinuviel! How could you? Here I am, on the foothills of recovery, trying to get my life back after two (three?) solid months of CS re-reading ... And you introduce me to La Rochelle.

I have scanned the Goodreads reviews and decided I can skip all but the last - Janie Steps In, which, wondrously, is nestled amongst the CS Dropbox haul. (Maids looks interesting, but - time.)

‘Temple’ was the three sisters’ maiden name I forgot to include above.

I’ve just met Blossom Willoughby as a tiny child! And am about to meet Janie I guess.

Pre-historic CS Guernsey clan and an historic constitutional law judgement ... Frabjous day!

Thing is they are grouped according to ability in the Chalet School which makes it confusing. In new Mistress, kathy’s class range from the triplets at nearly 13 to Yseult at 16 and a half.
The New Chalet Club have been posting pics from their AGM on Facebook. Some of them dressed up as chalet school girls, they went on a heritage train trip and they laid a wreath at EBD’s grave. I have a strange desire to join so I can go next year!

I’ve tried all the fixes suggested but I still can’t open any of the books. I think I need some special milk and a week in bed to recover

I might have to fire up the laptop and try it via android then transfer via cable to my kindle. And if that doesn’t work I’ll sign myself into the san. I’m sure the chalet school could take my 3 girls as borders whilst I recover...

Hello, Bonjour, Guten Tag... I was on an earlier thread. 'Tis I who dared move to some European mountains 15 years ago and not immediately open branch of the Chalet School, despite having no training as a teacher!

I had almost the whole chalet school set as a teenager child though they were the Armarda paperbacks, and absolutely adored them,! Hélas! They are in my mother's loft in the Home Counties, and I am in aforesaid mountains. Therefore I would love the dropbox link @Parker231 ... I was very kindly sent one before by BertrandRussell I think, I'm not sure if it was a different one, but I couldn't get in as it kept asking to authenticate my device.

Particularly loved the above dissection of why the trilingual learning would be so impractical... am surrounded by children trying to do extra GCSE-level learning in French and English and it seems they just do twice as much work as their French-only peers. Meanwhile younger ones are wasting time in English lessons with their French classmates where the English ones are not aloud to speak...

Did anyone have a feasible answer re Joey and Jem in the cave?

I always thought he was telling her that she was up the duff and had better get married. But it's probably more likely he was telling her that Madge was up the duff again.

Much though I love the idea that Jem was hissing ‘SHOTGUN WEDDING!!!’ in Joey’s ear, he was clearly saying ‘I’m not really a TB specialist, I’m an international spy!’

Oooo - I’d forgotten the Jem = Spy idea. Maybe he was giving her a message to take back to HQ in London

I am a long time lurker on this thread and would love to have the Dropbox link @Parker231. My sister is a long time Chalet school reader and I now feel it is time to join her.

Julian Lucy crept up behind his wife (Janie) with scissors and chopped off half her hair without a by your leave! Abuser.

But I’m loving Janie Steps In. Completely wonderful to discover some of my best-beloved CS characters in earlier times.

Inspired by this thread, I'm reading Jo Of for the first time in years, and got thinking about the original CS uniform, which is described in Jo Of as a 'brown tunic with a tussore top'. I think when I was a child reading them first, I didn't know what tussore was, and assumed it was the tunic that had a tussore upper section. But reading it now, it seems clear that it's a gym tunic with a tussore silk blouse underneath it? Or does the fact that EBD says 'top' rather than blouse suggest something different?

There's no mention of a tie, or any flame colour at all, at this point -- we're told girls with long hair wear brown hair ribbons. When do they start wearing the flame-coloured tie?

I also noticed that Joey, Grizel and Juliet wear their tunics and blazers out of termtime at the start of the book, which struck me as a bit strange. I mean, I know they're all living in the school this is before Madge meets Jem, so home is the CS buildings but surely the girls still have civvies for vacations, and it's ten days till the start of term when the Robin arrives...

WTF?

What kind of person sneaks up on someone else and chops their hair off? And what was Janie’s response to this outrage?

I seem to have missed that book completely!

Jo also wears her blazer in the holidays in the book where she becomes head Girl, think it’s the Chalet School and Jo.
And Kathy wears her old school blazer in New Mistress. So she’s 23, has kept it throughout uni and carts it over to Switzerland with her.
I guess clothes were expensive and less plentiful then.

I think I assumed in Kathie's case that it was a matter of Old Girl pride, given that she's bought herself an entire new set of clothes to go to the CS, and so must have had plenty of choice for jackets. Otherwise it seems like an odd decision for a nervous new young mistress to cart to Switzerland part of her old school uniform that underlines precisely how young she is!

I suppose I just thought it was odder that Joey, Grizel and Juliet were wearing, not just their school blazers (which I could see them throwing on over a dress before going for a walk because they're warm and practical) but their entire school uniform in the vac! Do you suppose Madge enforced it to make them a kind of human ad campaign for the CS?

Clothes being more expensive and less plentiful is surely an argument for making children wear something other than their school uniform during the school holidays.

I’m sure that all the Chalet School pupils would have been able to acquire at least one tatty old dress for the holidays so that no one had to worry about their nice school blazers getting accidentally ruined or worn out.

I have a feeling that it was quite common for kids a few decades ago to have their school uniform, their 'sunday' clothes, and nothing much else (underwear and nightwear aside).

It’s not a CS book, NewSchoolNewName - but the last volume of an earlier series called La Rochelle which I’d never looked at until yesterday. It’s in the Dropbox files and well worth anyone’s time.

Regarding wearing school uniform out of term-time - iirc my boarding school blazer was pure wool and something I’d very much have liked to have now, if only it hadn’t been sent to the school second hand shop. And I’m envious of the men and boys I’ve known whose uniforms included beautiful Harris tweed jackets. They carried on wearing them until they fell apart (where they could still fit into them). I can quite see, though, that the more usual polyester blazer wouldn’t be something one would willingly wear for a second more than necessary.

Absolutely, @ReanimatedSGB, but further down the social scale, surely? OK, Juliet is penniless, but the Cochranes are comfortably off, and Joey and Madge are from a very genteel background, and only fell on hard times after their guardian mismanaged their money -- plus at this point they've been at the Tiernsee for less than a year, so surely, in a world where every item of clothing is kept and mended, Joey would still have a dress or so that fitted her from England even if it was fairly shabby? (Unless the pure Austrian air has made her grow a foot and put on two stone? )

This thread is reminding me of all those occasions where the prefects invite the CS staff for an evening's violent entertainment, and they all write home for old clothes (whereas I suppose in an equivalent situation now, we might wear old tracksuit bottoms or gym gear, if we knew we were going to be jumping over lighted candles or rolling around on the floor doing Follow My Leader, rather than 'proper but mended or stained' dresses?)

Kathie Ferrars writes home for a dress that she had a nosebleed all over, and from which the stain won't come out, but the dress has been kept anyway, despite being unwearable...

pure Austrian air drug laced full fat cream

Tussore is the sort of silk they use for saris. It's more like a raw silk than a fine silk

Clothes rationing didn't stop until 1949. Clothes thriftiness was probably an ingrained habit for quite a while after that.

Clothes rationing didn’t start until 1941! I do take the wider point about the expense of clothes and innate thriftiness, though.

I had psoriasis when I was at primary school round about 1960.
I wasn’t at all ill but the doctor said I could have my hair cut short as it may be sapping my strength. Fortunately not shaved though.
It didn’t make the slightest bit of difference.

Without the flame ties, and wearing brown tunics, blazers/overcoats, brown stockings and brown berets, the early CS en masse must have looked very brown indeed! Maybe the fact that so many of the girls were thought to be 'delicate' was just down to the draining effect on the complexion of so much brown.