AIBU To Think Joey Maynard (Of Chalet School Fame) Was Insufferable

[TheShellBeach]

.............with her eleven children, infuriating husband and bizarre tendency to move house (and country) to live next door to the school her sister inexplicably started when Joey was a child.

She also managed to write (at least) two books a year, have a series of multiple pregnancies and poke her nose into the Chalet School's business on a daily basis.

For all the criticisms - and there are many - these books are still wonderfully girls-and-women centred & they all absolutely thrash the Bechdel test (to pass the test, a book / film must have at least two named female characters who have a conversation that isn’t about a man).

And they have girls committing heroic acts, girls in charge, women as role models. All that must have been utterly extraordinary for girls in the 1920s & 30s especially.

I always felt like this reading the What Katy Did books, especially At School. I was fascinated by the girls and their very intense 1880s friendships.

Is that the one where the manager is depicted as being deeply unreasonable not to realise Len is a nice, UMC Chalet girl, who is not ever going to shoplift, though she actually has goods in her pocket she hasn’t paid for? (So not unreasonable to investigate…?) And the manager is a mad, self-congratulatory comedy foreigner?

Exactement.

AIBU. DD falsely arrested by rude foreign store manager. WWYD

I think this has been raised before, but I don't think EBD really thought through the trilingual thing. I can see having days for each language would really help to improve your language capabilities.

But how on earth would you access the curriculum or do prep in a language you barely knew? And even if you were quite good at school conversational French or German (or English, if a non-native speaker), how would you write an essay about eg geography in a foreign language?

Also on prep I was with the girl who found it difficult to sit there and concentrate for two hours straight. Not much acknowledgement of different learning styles there.

Has anyone ever been asked what water temperature they wanted their hair to be rinsed at? Was this a 1930s thing? Or an Austrian thing?

When I go to the hairdressers it just gets washed. They might ask if the water is too hot, but that's it.

I've been lured to sign up to MN for all of this excellent Chalet School discussion, but then got distracted reading through the dropbox so haven't posted anything yet...

I have always assumed that the French & German days were just for general conversation, mealtimes etc., and that lessons just continued as normal in English.

No the books make it clear that lessons are in the language of the day. How new girls are supposed to follow any lesson is beyond me!

My mother used to talk about having to teach algebra or geometry, that she had studied in Irish, by translating formulas and terms into English before the lesson and hoping she got it right. Trilingual maths would be - challenging. Of course EBD rather disapproved of maths anyway.

Washing hair - used to be regarded as a bit difficult - I remember in the mid 70s many people still claimed it was still 'bad' to do it too often (more than once a week) or while menstruating. A mystique my mother regarded as quite bonkers - she was an early advocate for clean hair.

As I've been rereading (I'm up to Highland Twins), the thing that's struck me as the least plausible is how they always wait until the day before term starts to announce major changes in administration to the prefects and staff. E.g. 'welcome back staff. Hope you're looking forward to the start of teaching tomorrow. You might want to know that we've taken over St Scholastika's, and now have dozens more pupils, loads of new staff, and a new building.' Or 'oh by the way Joey, as of tonight, the head girl and three of the prefects live in a totally different building and have a whole load of other duties that we couldn't possibly have told you about before, even though we've had loads of time to redecorate your new bedrooms. Hope you hadn't done too much work on those duty lists in advance, cos that'll be all different now!'

The thing I've found most realistic is how EBD acknowledges that the school is so expensive to run that Madge & Mademoiselle make very little income from it, even when it is big and successful.

@ZacharinaQuack Feed them less coffee and cake and only one or two courses per meal and it would probably be very profitable all of a sudden!

Judging by EBD’s descriptions of Simone in the first books, I don’t think she ever intended her and Joey to remain lifelong bosom chums. This is just one of them
“Simone, in many ways the most colourless and unoriginal of them all”

I did a French and Spanish degree which involved writing essays about history and literature, which meant it had to be both good content and written correctly in a foreign language. The lectures were sometimes in the target language too. It's not really appreciated by many how difficult that is. However you do obviously need to be taught how to read and write the languages first!

You could avoid this by doing 3 languages so it was all lang/translation and nothing cultural.

EBD tells us frequently that lessons are given in the language of the day.

She is silent on the subject of prep., though. I cannot see how girls who have a poor grasp of German when they arrive (that would the whole lot of them) could do their prep. in German.

Well, unless they were native German speakers.

I'm still harping on about Miss Annersley and Joey getting vair upset when Jack Lambert and Co. decide to fuck off and wander round a wood, getting lost in the process and causing chaos and mayhem for poor old Gaudenz, who has to go and find them.

Miss Annersley is first of all given a stiff brandy by Nurse, then Jack makes Joey put her to bed and injects her with a sedative.

Well of course he does.

Hello, @ZacharinaQuack and welcome to MN.

Have you ventured on to other threads yet? It's a snake-pit of horror and bitchiness.

Why, only yesterday I had a thread deleted (still do not know why) and some woman objected to my telling her she was wasting NHS resources.

Plus ca change. (And whatever that is in German).

My child’s headmistress deals with pupil issues by knocking back the booze during work hours. Am I being unreasonable to think this isn’t an acceptable response to stress in a teacher?

There's definitely one book where a girl arrives speaking no German and the next day has to sit through a entire geography lesson given by Biddy O'Ryan (who naturally speaks fluent and colloquial German having been to the CS herself) in that language, and when asked a question admits she hasn't understood a word of the lesson. And is then told off.

I've always fancied being treated like the middle class women are in EBD when something stressful happens (minus the hidden tranquillisers) nobody ever tells me that I must rest.

There's definitely one book where a girl arrives speaking no German and the next day has to sit through a entire geography lesson given by Biddy O'Ryan (who naturally speaks fluent and colloquial German having been to the CS herself) in that language, and when asked a question admits she hasn't understood a word of the lesson. And is then told off.
Is it Joan Baker?

Google is great! It was Carola.

I always thought this was desperately unfair. How were you expected to understand a whole lesson spoken at speed if you couldn't speak a word of the language?

(Although for years I wanted to be trilingual)

Cue fifty people posting that the headmistress is clearly an alcoholic.

Nobody on MN has ever been known to drink socially.

I think Pat Willimott handled it well in "The Chalet School Librarian". They had a lot of single-language new pupils, and had special classes for them to teach them the basics of the other languages. www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiDyJ36trP8AhWaaMAKHaNrBFwQFnoECBQQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.goodreads.com%2Fen%2Fbook%2Fshow%2F1381933&usg=AOvVaw2F50RhE8aSayUH4gc1WjXB

It must have been really hard employing trilingual teachers, though they seem to get around that with lots of old girls teaching. I've never understood either the fact that someone will be able to 'chatter away like a native' purely based on the fact that they used to go on holiday to a particular country.

There's definitely one book where a girl arrives speaking no German and the next day has to sit through a entire geography lesson given by Biddy O'Ryan (who naturally speaks fluent and colloquial German having been to the CS herself) in that language, and when asked a question admits she hasn't understood a word of the lesson. And is then told off

I was going to say that was Carola. Biddy doesn't understand how anyone could struggle at languages.

I did a German degree and had to write essays in German too. But that was at degree level. Not half a term after joining a school where people taught me how to say a few phrases!

As for chattering away in different languages, Joey's language prowess was rather unbelievable - German, French, Italian, Belsornian, Romany. She was definitely wasted as a mother of 11 and should have been in the SOE and then the Foreign Office.