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.

This is the bit in the first book I am basing the Mensches location on

I’m willing to bet that EBD thought foreigners would swoon with delight at the thought of an English education

I’m willing to bet that EBD thought foreigners would swoon with delight at the thought of an English education

I have never really understood why this would have been so.
We are repeatedly told that the English do not have good discipline and that the Austrian girls are "taught to be obedient from birth" so why do they send their highly obedient daughters to the CS?

To be fair, EBD could not possibly have known that she was writing the first of over sixty books when she wrote The School At....

She might even have thought that Jo Of..... would be the sequel, and no further books would be written about the CS.

After all, despite its complete batshittery, despite its weird medical details, despite its obsession with brushing and cutting hair, despite its endless near-miss disasters where girls have to spend the night in a peasants' kitchen (sharing onion-flavoured milk and having no lavatories), despite most of the girls marrying doctors and having multiple pregnancies, despite the unfunny BS perpetrated by the Middles............................the series is the longest-running set of girls' school stories ever written.

In Jo Returns..... (not that she ever really left) Joey writes her first book.

She manages to make notes about which characters do what, and their ages, etc.

EBD makes it clear that authors ought to do this. It makes me wonder why she didn't actually manage to do this herself. The vast quantity of mistakes over characters' ages, husbands' names, locations, etc., baffles me enormously.

If Joey Bettany could do it, surely EBD should have done it?

I would think EBD was making a joke at her own expense if she'd had Joey muddle up two prefects much further on in her career, or told us Joey had long had the habit of making lists for her books in a much later CS book - but this bit is in one of the early CS books, before the madder errors creep in. If she's so aware of the capacity for muddles in fiction at a point in the series where the dramatic personae is still fairly limited compared to how big it gets once the first generation start having children, why is her own record-keeping so spotty in terms of ages and names etc?

Mind you, that bit in Jo Returns doesn't make much sense to me. It's ONE book, in Joey's case, and she hasn't even written a full first draft at this point, and we're told she discovers she's muddled up two of the prefects and must either rewrite an early chapter or several later ones, and then goes on to make out exhaustive-sounding lists for all characters in the novel. But why? If she's accidentally given Prefect Sally Prefect Maureen's personality/family background/ongoing feud with Prefect Angela in subsequent chapters, why not just go back and change the names?

I’ve been getting annoyed at all the promising careers being thrown away by talented women recently so that may have prejudiced me a bit :D

Daisy Venables was an award winning doctor but no question of carrying that on when she got married. And in the book I just read news came through that Vi Lucy had got engaged and when someone asks what will happen to her lifelong wish to become a barrister, the answer is just ‘oh, she’ll have to give that up, of course’.

i know that that is probably what would have happened back then, but it still annoys me. EBD painted some women as such strong characters but was unable to look forward a bit about that.

The thing that I wonder about is how they manage about periods when they are stuck overnight in huts, buses etc. I know girls started their periods later back then, but even so. Presumably some of them would have needed the loo! Nobody ever whines about needing the loo...

As for the foreigners coming to the school, maybe their parents thought it was a good opportunity for them to learn good English (and French and German if neither of those was their mother tongue either).

I'm not as far as Yugi, as I have just finished the book that introduces Prunella. I guess girls giving up their careers was the done thing, but what was the point of all that training as a doctor if you were just going to give it up to produce kids and look pretty for your husband. Gah.

The thing that I wonder about is how they manage about periods when they are stuck overnight in huts, buses etc. I know girls started their periods later back then, but even so. Presumably some of them would have needed the loo! Nobody ever whines about needing the loo...

Chalet School girls are far too refined for normal bodily functions like needing the toilet or having periods 😉

I have an older (female) relative who trained as a doctor in the 1960’s.

She told me once that she’d applied to medical school at a time when her medical school had been instructed to accept and train more medical students.

She’d been told some years later that the people in charge of the medical school hadn’t been happy about this decree. They didn’t want to be producing more doctors than previously for whatever reason.

So, there’d been a decision made at the top level of this medical school, that if they had to accept more students, then those extra students would be girls. Because they assumed that a large proportion of those girl doctors would marry and - of course - give up medicine in favour of being a housewife when they married.

My relative continued working in medicine after her marriage, incidentally. Until she was old enough to retire.

.......why is her own record-keeping so spotty in terms of ages and names etc?

Why indeed. She knew it could happen and did nothing to avoid it.

In fact in later years she must have realised that she'd got characters and their ages mixed up.

Or did she?

She always seemed to like to bring back very random characters from the past didn't she instead of main characters (e.g. some of the randomers who name Joey as their child's godmother and Irma von Ancokzey (sp) who lives in the original Chalet building). They never seem to visit Marie von Eschenau in the later Tyrol books either despite her being close by. I think she was dimly aware that she had a tendency to mix characters up and liked to bring back minor ones in the hope no one would notice.....

In fairness to EBD, it was a huge world to keep track of. Nowadays you'd use an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of your characters' details but she must have had to rely on notes or trawling through previous books. I'm not surprised she made some errors.

Oh, it was a huge fictional world, and I'm far from surprised she made errors. What does surprise me a bit is that in only the twelfth book of what would eventually become a huge series, she already has enough knowledge of the pitfalls of not keeping track of characters to make her teenage debut novelist mess up and start to keep lists (while writing a single, short school story), but then doesn't seem to have taken her own advice as her own series kept getting bigger and bigger and more elaborate.

I'm always interested in the fact that EBD is the one who insisted on keeping going with the CS, when her publishers wanted to pull the plug on numerous occasions (the first, I think, when Joey finally leaves school, which would have been a natural ending) -- the more familiar narrative with many girls' authors of the period/slightly earlier is more like LM Montgomery, who grew to loathe Anne Shirley, but was compelled to keep writing Anne books by her publishers because they were so popular.

(No idea about sales of the CS during the early period -- presumably they were modest enough if the publishers wanted to end it after Jo Returns?)

Wasn't that Vi talking about her sister Julie, who was thrilled to be marrying a housemaster in a boarding school instead & would presumably 'mother' all the boys?

I vaguely remember the young Jo ranting about how after marriage Madge lost all her brisk snappiness and became 'That sweet woman, Lady Russell.' That seems to be another thing in all these series, young girls talk about how awful marriage must be until they Fall In Love and learn better.

My great aunt trained as a doctor in the 1930s/40s and didn't stop, despite getting married and having children, until she retired in her 60s.
Although her partner for the GP practice was her husband, I think, which may have made a difference.

It’s not an issue for me that EBD depicts a world which is misogynistic, or reflects current ideas about women’s ‘real destiny’ being marriage and children, it’s when she apparently unthinkingly replicates such ideas herself, as when she appears to forget, after Daisy Venables’ marriage, that she was an award-winning paediatrician, and has her medic husband pontificating at her about their child’s routine illness. 😫

There's a section in one of the early Oberland books where they're on a trip to Zurich and comment that everything is so clean for a manufacturing city. And as part of the conversation they discuss how Swiss people are rich(er), among other things, because girls are well trained in housecrafts and won't waste their husband's money on fripperies.

So all those poorer people in the north of England only had themselves to blame, they wasted their husband's money.

Yes I know it was the early 1950s. But still!

The other thing that surprises me about the books is that having moved away from Guernsey due to the worry that if one German aeroplane could make it through, they all could, the invasion in 1940 is never mentioned. Or indeed the liberation. And the end of the war generally isn't mentioned. And how Miss Stewart get away from Singapore to Australia safely. Or have I just not read the books properly?

The other thing that surprises me about the books is that having moved away from Guernsey due to the worry that if one German aeroplane could make it through, they all could, the invasion in 1940 is never mentioned. Or indeed the liberation. And the end of the war generally isn't mentioned. And how Miss Stewart get away from Singapore to Australia safely. Or have I just not read the books properly?

It’s not you.
The tendency in the books published during the war years is for the war to be a backdrop for the most part. It’s not generally mentioned unless it’s directly relevant for plot reasons.

I don’t think EBD was the only children’s author to gloss over bits of the war.
I had an Enid Blyton book when I was a child - The Adventurous Four, I think? It’s set during WW2, the plot involves 4 shipwrecked children stumbling across a secret enemy submarine base, but the war references are so very, very vague that I was mystified about what it was all about as a child.

Oh yes the one where she refers to the crooked cross on the planes "the foe of half the world" - funny how things stick in your mind! It was the Adventurous Four.

In the Chalet School when they say Miss Stewart is going to Singapore you think "oh no, is she going to end up in a Japanese camp" - fortunately she doesn't but a couple of lines in one of the books saying they'd moved on to Australia before the Japanese invaded would have been useful!

"..............but a couple of lines in one of the books saying they'd moved on to Australia before the Japanese invaded would have been useful!"

EBD was so busy moving the CS from A to B to C to D (how unlucky was it that every place the school went was where the Germans next invaded) that I am surprised she even remembered that Miss Stewart had abandoned the CS for marriage, sex and childbearing.

I’m thoroughly enjoying my re-read and am amazed at how much was edited from the armada editions, which was mostly what I had access to as a kid.

something that has never occurred to me before now is to wonder how to pronounce Bride’s name. It’s always been bride as in bride and groom in my head, but it suddenly struck me it might have been supposed to be something else. Google indicates the name can be pronounced like ‘breed’ or ‘breej’. How do others imagine it to be pronounced?

I remember someone saying Bride’s name was pronounced in the same way as St Bride’s Bay