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.

Here's a brilliant radio programme where Val McDermid talks about her love of the Chalet School www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b014pzzs

Just reading Exile. Marie has written to Jo asking her to find a house for them. Doesn’t need to be large, just three sitting rooms and six bedrooms 😂

Well she was used to living in a castle

One of the things that annoys me about Jo is how often EBD writes 'quoth Jo'. Irrational, I know, but just another thing to add to the list.

I've just finished Three Go... and everyone suddenly seems to have started calling everyone else a 'moke'.

Yes drove me nuts that did! “She’s being a little moke”

Well, she was married to a Baron, wasn't she?
Joey's Swiss home was a former hotel, wasn't it? I wonder how many rooms it had? I assume at least 15 bedrooms- the family, a few guest rooms (Grizel and Eustasia live there for a bit), a few staff. (Anna can't have done it all in a house of that size)
Wonder if it still had the checking in desk etc....

Agree.

I think it was meant to show how "young and in the the youth" Joey was.
Clem uses it to Mary Lou. It's natural ML would imitate it because she looks up to Clem. But Joey using it just made me cringe.

AlwaysAReason
Ten bedrooms, I think she said.

I just looked at Joey Goes to the Oberland, and there are fifteen bedrooms at Freudesheim, 22 windows over four floors only counting those looking frontways, plus an entire attic floor of smaller rooms without specified functions, and a giant attic that used to take six overflow beds when it was a pension and which is going to be a playroom, and a drying room. The boys get a separate room to keep their train set in. And even then I think that’s not counting Anna’s bedroom, which seems to be a sort of servant’s room reached by a sort of ladder from the kitchen, which Anna ‘insists’ on having.

I wish a Maynard servant had occasionally wanted less humble things. What if Anna ‘insisted’ on one of the big bedrooms on the ‘family’ floor?

Maybe Anna insisted on the room over the kitchen so she was away from the children at night?

In theory, an excellent idea, but the very first night, Joey wakes her up when Con sleepwalks her way out onto the roof!

She should have locked the trapdoor

Maybe she wanted to be there to pounce on anyone who tried to raid the larder.

In fairness, I'd be furious if someone came in my kitchen and ate the food I was planning to use for one of my meals if I had to meal plan for 13+ plus staff and specifically go on a long journey to get supplies from wherever the nearest shop was.

Yes, who knows where the nearest food shop was? The Platz appears to have nothing but the San, various guesthouses, the railway station and the Auberge. Which book is ‘the famine’ in? Is the issue that bad weather has disrupted deliveries from the valley?

I've always thought it strange that Anna was happy for the laundry room to be so far from the drying room. Like three floors away in a house without a lift.

If you turn down a proposal from your beloved to stay with your employers 24/7 instead, I suppose you don't care about such trifling issues as carrying baskets of wet washing around!

Indeed.

......... but can you imagine how much washing there would have been?

Probably by hand as well for a good portion of the time!

But Joey wasn't. She said they'd have to do something about it, though I don't remember if they ever said what.

For me that is a Classic Joey Virtue-Signalling Moment. ‘I’m a modern, breezy, humane employer of servants, me!’ whereas in fact the authorial voice only recognises two types of servant — the selfless handmaiden who ‘insists on’ subordinating herself to her employers (Anna, Gertlieb), or the bossy, indomitable termagant with a heart of gold (Phoebe Wychcote’s Debby, Karen).

Though I suppose you could add the ‘silly, superstitious, easily-frightened’ type who get frightened by Baby Voodoo, and are threatened with punishments by Marie Pfeiffen/Karen.

The worse Joey virtue signalling is when she uses the time when she thought Jack was dead to preach about how well she coped.

When in reality she read the telegram, left her triplet toddlers to the care of two teens who were also upset and Daisy, who must have been about 12yo, had to run along the blacked out roads after dark to fetch Madge and then stays in her room leaving everyone else to cope until Jack arrives home-even after whichever Highland Twin has given her hope that Jack is alive.

It was really a demonstration how to act like a spineless jellyfish and let everyone else cope.

Maybe Robin should have pointed it out.

That whole sequence of encouraging special sight twin is so wrong, both in the context of the books, where fortunetelling had been firmly presented as Wrong, and in the context of wartime England when many readers would know people 'missing, presumed dead' who no amount of heiland woo could bring back. A serious mis-step.