AIBU To Think That The Chalet School Matron Would Be In Prison Nowadays

[TheShellBeach]

..........................for giving unprescribed sedatives to the girls so frequently.

(lighthearted) (in case a million people tell me that IABU)

The Chalet School Matron was forever doling out sedatives to the girls, without even asking Jack Maynard to prescribe them first.
Shocking stuff. Nowadays, she would be jailed and struck off the NMC Register.

I would have been a bad chalet school girl!

I think I would have been okay in the early Austria days where there seemed to be more opportunities to spend time by yourself. But by the time of the enforced group time from morning until bed I would have really struggled

Lol at shirtless Gaudenz strolling the corridors, popping into each classroom in turn to top up the fires with his strong, manly arms!

Gaudenz is Swiss books. In the Austrian books it's all Pfeiffers I think? Marie's family...

I'd forgotten about Joey fainting at the Passion Play! I was always a bit hmm at that. Mind you, I used to work as an opera usher as a student and was constantly taken aback by people in sobs at the end of La Bohème and so on. The only thoughts its ending ever inspired in me were along the lines of "will it finish in time for us to go for a drink?" Or "I'll have X for my supper when I get home." Clearly I'm a hard and insensitive type, like Grizel.

I feel like Joey would have screamed in the sistine chapel

OMG! Joey is the Sistine Screamer!

She's got to be hasn't she, although her Dh didn't knock her out quick enough with some hot milk and a dose

I was always a bit hmm at the drains until I read the Abbey books and they had the same trouble. Basically they kept getting diphtheria (Peggy even says they had the most awful sore throats). Another childhood vaccine we need to be grateful for

The DH in that thread thought his wife was a permanent, annoying PITA.

It could have been Jack Maynard!

It’d make sense if Gaudenz did all that. I suppose EBD thought her readers would be bored by explanations of who sorted all that out.................

Whereas, in fact, when you read this thread (and all the other CS threads which have appeared on MN) you can see that it's the school plays, pantomimes and other entertainments which we all don't bother to read because they're so fucking boring.

Other boring things in the CS books are the evenings where the staff the mistresses entertain the girls in the evening, frequently as Mrs. Jarley's waxworks.

Oh, and those BORING, BORING rambles! And equally boring expeditions, where they visit cathedrals etc.

FFS I find things like that boring IRL. I don't want to read about them.

So I think that long descriptions of how Gaudenz and his predecessors (Eigen, Jockel and sundry unnamed peasants, not to mention Evan Evans in Wales) did the maintenance for the school in its many locations would cheer the books up no end.

"Gaudenz took out another screw and the girls sighed as they watched him screwing.
Then Gaudenz was called by Miss Wilson, to rescue another girl who had inexplicably fallen down a mine-shaft. The girls sighed again. Gaudenz shrugged his manly shoulders and abandoned his screwing temporarily.

'Gott in Himmel! Why do these maidens then take these risks? I am BORED with all this rescuing! I need a pay rise!'

(AIBU to think this work is above my pay grade - employers are CFs and cunts)"

Also, I doubt Plas Howell was on a mains sewer, so that opens up the possibilities of all sorts of fun ways for it to go wrong.

What about the mistresses? So I've taken a teaching post in a boarding school (nc for this) and now I'm here I've learned that my duties also include rescuing girls from apparently life-threatening situations every day, administering sedatives, making jam and entertaining the eternal schoolgirl who lives next door eith her 20 children and assorted hangers-on. Aibu to think that this is not really the job that was advertised? Lessons also regularly get cancelled for health reasons (but skiing never gets cancelled 🙄 ) yet I'm still expected to get the students grades for top universities.

Lessons also regularly get cancelled for health reasons (but skiing never gets cancelled

So true. And yet you would think that skiing ought to be cancelled, when you discover just how many accidents occur whenever skiing takes place. Mary-Lou nearly dies, Naomi Elton falls over, Len and someone-or-other get lost coming back from skiing in a snowdrift..........

Does anyone else have trouble understanding how that last incident happened? One minute they were skiing, then it started to snow, and Len and someone took longer than usual to get back to school and nearly died..............

But Gaudenz saved them, of course.

I'm very old, someone will have to explain that to me, I'd love to reread them!

Click on this.

See you after Christmas.

www.dropbox.com/sh/sdcbk2zhq7o17iv/AAB_bGA_lbHT_rT6WRTACUCda?dl=0

BUGGER.
Try this instead.
www.dropbox.com/sh/sdcbk2zhq7o17iv/AAB_bGA_lbHT_rT6WRTACUCda?dl=0

I think EBD understood nothing at all about skiing -- the way she writes about it in the Swiss books, the girls go out to a gentle slope on the actual Platz, and both the complete beginners and expert skiers like Mademoiselle Berné just seem to spend an hour or two sliding repetitively down this same slope. The only thing she seems to have absorbed from somewhere was about not 'crossing your toes'. I think she didn't think of skiing as in any way really different from tobogganing.

But there's something quite odd about the way she writes the natural environment in the Swiss books, anyway, compared to the Tiernsee ones. The Platz sounds like a rather dull suburb halfway up a mountain, the only walks the girls ever seem to take are to the Auberge to show new girls the bloody echo, or up to the shelf above along a dull-sounding path running between a rock face and the railway line. There's no sense of 'nature' or ruggedness at all. Which makes it even weirder when girls fall into streams or get lost about twenty feet from the school gates, or have skiing accidents, or have their baby sisters kidnapped by baby-hungry madwomen. Because most of the time it sounds as if the school could be inhabiting chalets in Tunbridge Wells.

Chalet school definitely gave me false information about how hard skiing actually is.

The school was fun in the Tirol days! Do you reckon the switching language each day thing could work?

Also... CS alumni should have been very valuable in the war as translaters.

Also... CS alumni should have been very valuable in the war as translaters.

Or as secret agents for SOE. Some of them allegedly spoke French and German like natives.

Mind you, nobody knew that SOE existed until well after the war, so EBD could not have written about it.

It would have been a splendid storyline in the later books though, but I am not sure when the country was told of its existence. Does anyone on here know? I've tried googling it and am none the wiser.

Because most of the time it sounds as if the school could be inhabiting chalets in Tunbridge Wells

Yes, those interminable walks to the Auberge. Didn't the mistresses ever get sick of taking the girls up there?

Which one fell over the ravine at the Auberge? Was it Emerence? Or did Emerence rescue whoever it was?

<<<<<realises that all CS rescues morph into one eventually>>>>>

Did Emerence rescue Jo Scott? Someone did but I’m not sure who, actually maybe Jo Scott rescued Emerence 🤔

Something I read about EBD was that after that trip to Austria that inspired the series, she never actually left the Uk again. So all the dull descriptions of cathedrals etc were because she got all the info from guide books.

I’ve loved reading the thread - though I haven’t read the books for years ( I have a full set of armada editions - painstakingly collected over about 10 years when I was little) and about half the reprints and add-ons from the ggbp editions, so could do with re reading them!) I was very uncritical of Joey, Mary Lou etc when I read them growing up and just wished I was at boarding school and friends with them. It’s very funny reading how other people view them. 🤣

I do think some of the extra fill in books by Katherine Bruce etc are better written and more interesting than the originals. 🙈

IIRC Emerence fell over in her enthusiasm to collect armfuls of flowers, and was caught by Jo Scott (another of Joey’s goddaughters), who bravely held on until the mistresses got there.

All that flower collecting does bother me. There’s numerous books where they seem to harvest wild flowers in quantities that verge upon ecological vandalism on their walks. It’s a wonder that there were any flowers left after a few years of that.

I think most of it was covered under the Official Secrets Act and so would generally have been secret for 30 years.