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.

Were they? Oh well, I got that wrong. I thought they'd been published post-war.

I was going to say this, and also that there were concentration camps that never became death camps, bad thought conditions were (and many died in them).

Concentration camps as a facet of war were not new, and it was widely used as a description of the internment camps for ‘enemy’ civilians that the British ran in the Boer war. Britain of course has its own internment camp for enemy aliens that some Chalet characters were sent off to, on the Isle of Man. So it does make a lot of sense that EBD would have heard of the German ones without any understanding of the true awfulness of them.

The Germans had a concentration camp on Alderney, into which they put political prisoners, who were also used as slave labour on both Guernsey and Jersey. There are memorials now on both islands to those who died during that period. But it wasn’t a death camp. Some Islanders were however sent to the camps in Germany, primarily Jewish people, where some of them died.

The main set of Wartime books were written in the middle of the War. In 1940 it was very dodgy which way it might go, so I'd agree that EBD was brave in addressing the war in the way she did.

The Chalet School in Exile 1940
The Chalet School Goes to It 1941
The Highland Twins at the Chalet School 1942
Lavender Laughs in the Chalet School 1943

I would not be happy if I was expected to wear a brown velveteen dress every evening, in which I would have to perform and enjoy Morris dancing.
No, Sirree. Not me.

I don't think "brat" has always been used pejoratively. I remember reading somewhere that it was often used to refer to a small child without any negative meaning.

One of my favourite annoying abbreviations is "dicker" for dictionary.

One of my favourite annoying abbreviations is "dicker" for dictionary

Aargh. That was on the list of annoying abbreviations which I managed to lose.

"Brekker" annoys me enormously. They manage to say "Fruhstuck" without abbreviating it FFS.

Excitements for the CS

'Fruhstuckers' if said too fast might be open to mishearing!

Oh, it’s clearly not intended pejoratively at all — it’s meant to make Joey look all breezy and modern. Probably roughly equivalent to the way people might say ‘kids’ or ‘offspring’ now, only without the ghastly non-U connotations of ‘kiddies’.😀

I must admit to finding it irritating, though. Though in fairness, I find adult Joey pretty irritating most of the time. I’ve always liked the fact that the alumna wearing her hair in earphones is a total oddball in Dorothy L Sayers Gaudy Night. And her hairdo is seen as evidence of that.

Danke.

Just looking through Coming of Age of the CS and Hilary Graves has had a son who weighed ten pounds.

Cue Joey Maynard boasting that she had a son who weighed ten and a quarter pounds, so she's "beaten" Hilary.

Jo never stops needing to outdo everyone! What is her problem?!

Not loved enough as a child? Except that everyone has adored her since the dawn of time.

A sort of munchausens type thing?

My theory is she is always ill as a child which gives her attention, and she is the daughter of the headmistress and always fairly important at the school, which gives her status.

Then all of a sudden she's a grown up, she's outgrown her health problems and she's not tied to the school any more so she has lost both her attention and her status.

Having triplets suddenly gives her attention again, which is why having such a big family is important because there is always another baby to coo over and to thrust her into the spotlight.

Then she has various melodramatic reactions to things which give her illness type reactions again giving her attention

Finally despite not being a teacher she needs status. She not the wife of a Sir like Madge. The wife of a doctor isn't all engrossing enough, same with author. So she thrusts herself in at the chalet school calling herself the oldest chalet school girl and butting into everything giving her status.

Yes, it always strikes me that a different type of author would treat the sickly baby sister of the Head very differently. Like Antonia Forest’s Tim Keith, the Headmistress’s niece, who is mortified by the connection, rejects the idea that she should be meek, unobtrusive and law-abiding because she’s at a school her aunt runs, and very much takes a conscious position of not playing the game. Or Enid Blyton, whose girls with staff as relatives are either naughty French girls or tell-tale daughters of Matrons. Does Trebizond also have a very clever new girl whose mother is a (hopeless) new teacher?

Trebizon, not Trebizond!

That always annoys me - “oldest chalet school girl” I’d argue that honour would go to Grizel as the first fee paying pupil (stick that in your pipe and smoke it Joey)

Or "put that on your needles and knit it", as Joey would say.

I like to use that one occasionally.

Yes!
I agree wholeheartedly. I have always thought that Grizel should have the dubious honour of being the first pupil at the CS.

There’s a bit in Exile where someone says they don’t like Jews but they don’t think they should be murdered either, which is shocking both for its antisemitism to modern eyes and for its recognition at the time of what was happening. This is actually before Robin tries to save the watchmaker who is later killed by the mob and one of the men tells Joey that they’re attacking him because he’s a Jew and deserves it. She knew they were murdering Jews and she didn’t shy away from saying so.

She knew they were murdering Jews and she didn’t shy away from saying so

This is undeniable. No matter how much we laugh at EBD and her strange books, that particular book (Exile) is very good, for many reasons, including the above.
Exile is the only one of the series which rings true for me.

Also, honourable mention of battiness to the revelation that both Jem and Mr Flower speak Afrikaans, which is explained absolutely nowhere nor ever mentioned again.

I actually think it's the simplicity of the Austrian books and then the really good handling of the war books especially the early ones that pull me back each time, and then when you've started you end up having to finish the series and end up with 30-40 books of increasing batshittery

Really? I must have missed that along with 90% of the rest of the storylines.

Yes, they’re actually weird but weirdly brilliant up to about Island and then they drop off dramatically. After that one I quite like CS Goes to the Oberland for its period detail and Elma smoking, and New Mistress for disliking Mary Lou, and Jane’s amusing luvviness, but then they disintegrate into the triplets and the absolute tripe of the late Swiss books.