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.

Loving the AIBU scenarios @TheShellBeach!

Can you imagine when 80s Chalet girls inevitably discovered Virginia Andrews or Judy Blume's Forever?

Oh yeah, Flowers in the Attic would definitely be getting passed around

Can you imagine the CS girls with their own phones?

(AIBU to keep my phone at night - Matron being a complete cow)

Haven't read the whole thread
did they use the word "sedative"? It could mean a lot of things, depending on what was legal at the time.

Can you imagine the CS girls with their own phones?

Sat-nav would have rendered about 90% of the Tyrolean plot lines untenable - Joey/the Robin (🤮)/random new girl who is Delicate get lost in the woods/on an Alp.

Private schools were famously unlicenced with appalling practices and sadistic teachers. Think Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, some Waugh novels - to the stuff still coming out of late 20C "independent" schools.

I went to a rather nasty example in the Fifties/Sixties. Bullying was rife, bullying and incompetent teachers were common and there was little or no heating and the food was often off. And if there was snow ... we couldn't even ski or skate unlike the blessed chalet school girls. Otherwise I too could have written the series.........

Haha, the Robin is such a pain! (Not really her fault, it's fucking Joey as usual...)

I don't understand "the" Robin. From an adult perspective, is a lot of it meant as surreal Grimm fairytale stuff maybe?

Hmmm it’s in a Swiss book, I will check with the fb book group I’m on, they have encyclopaedic knowledge about these matters!

Robin is indeed the Scrappy-Do or Dawn (from Buffy) of the CS.

Thank you so much - someone else in the thread has commented that it's in Joey & Co In Tirol. I am also in the FB group and I do wonder if they're all entirely sane.

(AIBU to think FB fan page is ridiculously over-the-top with their obsessive fandom)

Yes, the word "sedative" was used. I think myself that Matron used laudanum or nepenthe. Valium (and its sisters) did not appear until the late 1950s.

Unbelievably, in a hospital where I worked in the 1980s, there was a bottle of nepenthe in the Controlled Drugs cupboard.

It was never used.

I never read Chalet School as a kid, but it looks like I missed a trick. There are always discussions of it on MN.

I once taught a module on children's literature: not voluntarily, it's not an interest or specialism, I just happened to have inherited it. In a session on censorship I raised the same point as a topic of discussion. I showed students the two passages where Darrell slaps Gwen and leaves livid red streaks down her legs, as opposed to the sanitized later version where she just shouts at her.

Most students were agreed that poor old Gwen was singled out for horrible bullying at the hands of the author and the popular girls. They thought minimizing and playing down Darrell's actions made the Gwen character come off even more badly, as she just looked self-indulgent, and was seemingly making a big old fuss about nothing very much.

The original text does show that the maligned school scapegoat actually did have something legitimate to complain about.

I think she's meant to be like a little bird?

I can't cope with her still being called the "school baby" when she's nearly ten.

(AIBU to wish I was seen as more grown-up now I'm on the brink of puberty)

".......................was seemingly making a big old fuss about nothing very much"

She would have been spoken to "bracingly" by one of the CS mistresses if she'd tried anything like that on there. Nobody was allowed to be self-indulgent, apart from Joey, of course.

Robin was as hale and hearty as a cart horse.

Absolutely! So wonderful that she decides to become a nun 🙄

That kind of makes sense though given Jem and Jack were set on her not marrying or having children in case she passed on her 'weakness', they didn't really leave her with many options.

They kept taking her out of school so I doubt she was educated enough to be a teacher (didn't she drop her school hours to look after Joey/triplets in the war). She probably hadn't done typing or shorthand to work in an office.

She wasn't supposed to marry so she couldn't rely on a man to support her. So being a nun and therefore being set for life in terms of accomodation and food would be appealing. And if you have grown up from a tiny age in a boarding school with strict hours, diet and activities then it would probably suit her in ways it wouldn't suit everyone. (I realise she isn't real and I'm talking about her like she is)

Unless you mean margot of course, anyone less nun like I can't imagine!

I can imagine Robin as a nun, yes (and I love your deep analysis!). But Margot? Fuck no... At least she'd be away from the general population, not throwing bookends at them.

Robin went to university - Oxford? - and started doing settlement work, at which point some of the old trouble returned and she was packed off to Canada to get better. I think she became a nun after that.

And wasn't the point of Margot becoming a nun, that she had truly struggled, and she had to work at being good, in a way that other more boring characters did not? Actually she was quite interesting, but honestly, other girls would've been expelled for blackmailing Ted - she wouldn't have got as far as flinging bookends at nosy Betty.

I worked in the pharmacy of a children's hospital from 1977, and we made up a dilute solution of nepenthe. It was used frequently.

Out of interest, were there other suitable analgesics used for children then? The hospital where I worked had no children's wards.

Anyone who thinks nuns can't be feisty, or handy with a missile, hasn't been to convent school 😉

Or worked with them LOL.
I used to care for an elderly lady with dementia and most of her carers came from a care agency run by and staffed by nuns.

Their behaviour was a revelation to me.