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.

Someone remind me why exactly the Robin is sent to board at the CS so young? I get that her mother died, but even by the ‘solo men can’t make homes for their children’ standards of the day, surely it wasn’t outside the bounds of possibility for Ted Humphries to get a job that would allow him to have his motherless six year old living with him, even if he had to hire in childcare?

Wasn't Ted Humphries going to work in Russia and he didn't want to take Robin? What he would have been doing there I have no idea.

He was 100% a spy.

Mollie & Dick's behaviour doesn't strike me as being that unusual as it was still of an age where people went to India but wanted an English education and, often more importantly, English climate for their children. Sometimes the wife would remain in the U.K. with the children but I think it was common for the children to stay by themselves. Nowadays, it seems like such a bizarre idea, especially as they didn't have telephones let alone WhatsApp & FaceTime and things. News of a death could take weeks to travel to relatives in the U.K.
I have spent far too much time over the years speculating what class Madge, Dick & Joey were. Whatever you think about whether the U.K. is class based now, it certainly was when EBD was growing up. Do they own whatever business Dick does in India or is he an employee? I think this has some relevance to Madge's comment about Kevin & Kester being in the army & navy as, amongst the gentry at least, the eldest son (Rix) would inherit the house/land with the other sons having to make their own way in life. I think it was usually the second sons who went into the forces and the third sons who went into the church. This doesn't quite explain why they're both going into the forces but perhaps that's because of the patriotism at the time. Or simply because they're twins. Going into the RAF might not have been suggested as an option as it was seen as a bit nouveau being so much more recently established than the army & navy.

Dick is just an employee in the forestry service in the Deccan in southern India, isn’t he? Molly is the daughter of his boss — he marries into money, clearly (though it’s less clear why Mollie is depicted as Irish, complete with stage ‘brogue’ and mercurial changes of temperament, but her family homes seem to be in England and of long habitation.

I would say the Bettanys are vaguely UMC, but penniless. If it weren’t for Joey, Madge would presumably have gone out to India with Dick to ‘housekeep’ for him and to husband-hunt on her own account in a genteel way.

Madge's eldest son is baby David.
It always makes me think of the Royle Family.

I'd pay good money to see them try to do that in Pompey nowadays 😂

Definitely.
I read a fan fiction once where Robins mother was a Romanov in hiding/exile. Explains why she sung her daughter the red sarafan....

I read this on another thread last night and immediately thought of the CS.

"For me it's like asking an adult who's only done gcse French to answer essay questions in French eg. Tell me about ww1 in French. You'll be able to get something out, but the quality of the answer will always be limited by how much French you know and it will take you six times as long to get a sentence out . Of course you could put effort into learning French but that takes away the effort from learning the subject its self"

The practicalities must have been crazy.
Eg, prep set on a French day to be handed in on a German day. Do they write it in French or German? Do they have separate text books for each language? (eg history textbook in French, German and English?)
And why do none of the new girls seem to know about it before they get there?!

It’s funny how they don’t have a dedicated German teacher. There’re French teachers teaching French but no German teachers teaching German.

what also gets me is if one pupil is helping another pupil with school work they just give hints rather than the answer. Like in one of the books MaryLou is struggling with her German or Latin and another girl says something like you’re muddling up your verbs and adjectives

Today’s observation:
During the tableaux at Die Rosen Freida plays ‘an old harp which had belonged to Jem’s grandmother’. Who in their right mind would bring a great big bloody harp which no one in his household could even play, across Europe and then up a mountain with no easy road access. Utterly insane

Maybe harping is another of Jem’s secret talents, like speaking Afrikaans? 😀

Though the most mysterious Jem talent to me is demonstrated in Exile, when Joey, Bill, Hilary, Evvy, Jeanne le Cadoulec and co have escaped from the Nazi attack on Herr Goldmann up the tunnel to ‘Joey’s cave’, and Jem, meeting them, manages, in the pockets of his shooting jacket! to carry sandwiches for the entire party, flasks of coffee (plural), ‘tins of concentrated beef and chicken juice’, a travelling etna, a Billy can, two torches and three boxes of matches. I know shooting jackets have lots of pockets, but still!

But yet it's Jack who gets described in terms of lumpiness and indeed comfort. Maybe all the San doctors have oddly bulgy silhouettes and clank when they move.

Maybe the new girls didn’t realise how far the trilingual thing went?

I mean, if teenage monolingual me had been told that I was going to a boarding school that spoke 3 languages and had French / German days etc, I’d have been thinking that surely there’ll be arrangements for lessons to be in a language I was fluent in.
Or that there’d be some sort of arrangements made for intensive language tuition before being thrown into subject lessons in a language I didn’t know.

Instead the new girls all seem to be thrown into the deep end, and be expected to just pick up the language as they go, with very little evident concern about them falling behind in other subjects because they’re only understanding a third of the lessons.

The Chalet School seems to manage to get lots of good exam results. They must do, given the number of pupils who go on to top universities. But you’d think the language policy would be a hindrance to that.

There’s at least one book in which a new girl who is surprised by the languages thing is asked if she hadn’t seen the prospectus. Probably by Len, and probably ‘gosh, didn’t you read the prospectus?’. But it means parents were knowingly sending their children into this world of trilingual challenge.

I think that was "Carola Storms..", and she hadn't read it, because she wasn't supposed to be there.

In a problem for it mentions both Joan Baker and Rosalind having intensive tuition by the mlles

When I read that I thought it said "a travelling enema" - and knowing Jem, I wouldn't be surprised if he'd had one.
You know. Just in case.

My dad used to do something similar when he helped me with my maths homework, @RobinHumphries. He was a maths teacher, and instead of working through the problem I was struggling with, with me, he would make up a new problem that demonstrated the method I was supposed to use, then work though that with me, before leaving me to do the actual homework problem on my own.

As an adult, I can see why he did this, but as a teenager, it felt so unfair - there should have been some benefit to having a maths teacher as a dad!

Yes, by Miss Denny.
She starts the books as the timid sister of the music master, and morphs into a "jolly hockey sticks" somewhat bossy older mistress.

My dad used to do something similar when he helped me with my maths homework, @RobinHumphries. He was a maths teacher, and instead of helping me work through the problem I was struggling with (aka do at least some of it for me grin]), he would make up a new problem that demonstrated the method I was supposed to use, then work though that with me, before leaving me to do the actual homework problem on my own.
As an adult, I can see why he did this, but as a teenager, it felt so unfair - there should have been some benefit to having a maths teacher as a dad!

Just read the first book on the Island. When Annie is coming back to the school after running away. She's is pain, dealing with the upset of her shitty guardian and worried about being in trouble and Joey pushes herself in determined to be the first to tell her that her father has been found alive. She doesn't even just tell her but makes her play a stupid guessing game about what the good news could be. She's genuinely awful just then.

Annis not Annie. Stupid autocorrect

It probably was - although the point is that the prospectus obviously did explain the three languages idea. So you wouldn’t expect so many surprised new girls.