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 think she is bound to socialise with the doctors wives, especially as most of the are ex school teachers

I think she is a very bored housewive (despite being an author) who is stuck in an isolated place with a limited social circle and she really struggles with that.

She has the opportunity to be this fantastic modern woman as well so I find the Swiss books so frustrating. She's the only one (I think) to keep working after marriage. There's one book where they are travelling and she pays half because she's been paid which for a doctors wife in those days to be paying her own way with her husband would be unheard of unless it was a trust fund allowance sort of situation.

She could have been this amazing role model for a moder woman and instead she is turned into an incredibly annoying busybody

I think you mean prime ‘butter in’ rather than incredibly annoying busybody 😂

Mystery at the chalet school made much less of a mystery by the fact that it was fairly obvious what the mystery was by about the end of chapter 2. EBD doesn’t really do subtle foreshadowing.

According to the description I just read the san was at one end of the plate and the school was at the other end, three miles away. It must have been a pretty close community.

I’ve just finished that one. The bit that made me think was Madge wrote to Joey saying she’d had a letter from Robin and she was enjoying her work but it wasn’t the job that Madge had envisioned for Robin. Which made me think, what job had Madge envisioned?

Something very gentle involving small, well behaved children?

Probably teaching of some sort at the Chalet School?

Probably as unpaid nursemaid to Joeys kids

Running some kind of nursery attached to the school? Le Petit Petit Chalet.

Was that the bit where the Robin was doing social care work in a poor area? I imagine the area was the issue as much as, or rather than, the work

She was doing settlement work, presumably as a member of the one of the university settlement houses like Toynbee Hall, which was established by Oxford University graduates in the late 19thc in in the east end of London -- the idea being that graduates with a university education would 'settle' in deprived areas and use their skills and knowledge to alleviate the causes of poverty by living and working alongside the people whose lives they were hoping to improve.

There was a specifically female settlement house set up by graduates of Girton and Newnham (Cambridge) and LMH and Somerville (Oxford), so I've always vaguely thought Robin was probably a member of that. It was a deeply upper-middle-class thing to do (as well as idealistic, and many of the settlements originated out of religious groupings, even if they were non-sectarian in practice), so I'm always interested in the fact that there's disapproval expressed towards Robin's choice of career.

(Especially as it sounds as if Tom Gay does something similar after she leaves the CS, with her boys' club in an impoverished area initiative -- the ones who send dolls' houses to various CS Sales.)

That's really interesting. I think I asked someone what settlement work was as a child and got told they were social workers (probably by an adult who had no idea and didn't realise I would still be reading these books 25 years later)

I still wonder if there is an element that fragile little Robin shouldn't be working with/living near the poor with a higher risk of diseases, where as strong (manly) Tom was okay to do so?

But yes otherwise I am perplexed by the comment on her career. Unless as others have said there was an assumption she should come and be an unpaid mothers help for Joey

(I really need to stop talking about them as if they are real people!)

Sue Barton, nurse, goes to work at the Henry Street settlement in one of her books, which I would imagine is something quite similar in New York.

Incidentally one of my favourite facts in children’s literature is that Helen Dore Boylston, the writer of the Sue Barton books, was at the very least close friends with Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the two of them moved to Albania together for a time between the wars.

............................ would you see more of Joey married to a doctor at the San, or as a Chalet School teacher?

Joey would make damned sure that everyone saw her, day in and out, whether she was a mistress at the CS or an author living next door to the CS and married to a doctor who believes in obedient children.

Joey was like that. A complete pest, forever preggers, calling children "brats" and somehow being able to teach A-Level history, despite never having got a degree or a teaching certificate.

Bloody irritating woman.

Sue Barton, nurse, goes to work at the Henry Street settlement in one of her books

And she manages it perfectly well, whereas "the" Robin collapses in a heap after being caught in the rain for five minutes.

Unless as others have said there was an assumption she should come and be an unpaid mothers help for Joey

Like Beth Chester and Maria Marani.
I always wondered if they were actually paid, or if they got board and lodging only?

Not to mention the joy of living with Joey, Jack and a bazillion children, adoptees, hangers-on and others

Snigger.

Can anyone remember which book had a scene at the beginning of term, where Miss Annersley tells Joey that one of the new girls (aged six, I think) had been in a plane crash (or maybe a train crash) with her parents, and both parents had died, and Joey expresses concern................but Miss Annersley says it's been a few weeks now, and the child has completely got over it?

Presumably the joy of coming to the Chalet School stops girls from mourning the loss of both parents?

Oh wow. I have just got to the scene in Peggy of the CS where there's a storm and Joey bursts through the door and says "I've been shipwrecked!"

I suppose it was only a matter of time. Three train crashes, several car crashes, endless escapes from madmen in caves............................and now she's been shipwrecked.

FFS.

Don't forget when her boat was bombed in the Channel!

Does anyone remember the later book when they visited a salt mine? (And Margot is in the cage with a woman who has histerics and either slaps the woman or tells her there’s a little boy being braver than the woman)

OMG that made me so angry!! Margot slaps a total stranger! And everyone thinks she’s so cool for doing it! 😡

Oh FFS. So there were two (at least) events where she had a disaster at sea.

Yes, I had forgotten that.

She had to be put to bed and sedated after that Channel crossing IIRC. Not by Jack, but by some random doctor who thought she looked as though she needed sedating.

Margot is quite violent at times. Not only does she hit a complete stranger in the face, she throws a heavy bookend at Betty Landon and knocks her out - but of course, because she's a Maynard, she gets away with it.

And let's not forget her blackmailing Ted Grantley.

I seem to remember she had to be sedated during the crossing - certainly the triplets were weaned because of her inability to care for them.

That’s interesting about the settlement work.
I’d always assumed that it was an old fashioned way of referring to social workers.