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.

DD is on the short side @FelicityBeedle maybe all that remedial massage and exercise would help and she loves games I could just skim over the speaking French and German part and it would be a lovely surprise for her.

She just needs to get ill and stay in bed for a few weeks.
All CS girls grow a great deal in these circumstances.

Another hidden talent for the doctors of the san. Jack Maynard drives the ambulance for Mrs Linton. And it’s been established two orderlies loaded her into the van, surely one of those could have driven while he was with the sick patient in the back? But no he had to be masterfully tackling the snowy incline

Not dignified enough for a doctor.

I have the Armada version though, and that has Jack driving Jo and the children to Die Rosen, while Mrs Linton is taken off in the ambulance seperately.

I was always staggered by Madge's brass neck wrt the school fees (inspired my the Cochranes' eagerness to get rid of Grizel?) and juxtapose it with that book about the respectable poor in London a decade earlier managing (or not) on Just about a pound a week. A reminder that the Bettanys are firmly upper middle class.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_About_a_Pound_a_Week

Some numbers for the slang fines! According to ‘and the lintons’ each word of slang begets a 1 groschen fine, and pocket money for a middle is 2 schillings a week. Makes the fines seem a bit less harsh, although a few ‘rubber necked four flushers’ and I suppose it would start to sting

They do, and in the case of Mary-Lou, they transform utterly from being a shortish, sturdy, average-looking girl with long, straight pigtails, to a five feet eight leggy stunner with a curly crop and ‘beautifully-shaped’ lips. And an irksome habit of Lifting Her Eyes Up To the Hills.

I have an image of Gwendoline Christie in my head when it comes to Marylou

Especially when you consider she had no teaching experiences/qualifications or other staff but her and Mademoiselle!
I wonder what Ofsted would make of Herr Whatshisname the art master these days 😂

I was just thinking about Madge and her lack of qualifications. Essentially, she is starting a 'dame school' - one owned and run by reasonably well educated and fairly cultured woman who offers to 'educate' young girls to the best of her ability. It's a fairly common thing in the late 1800s but surely by the 1920s it's a bit old fashioned? Yet in School at the Chalet we have one of the fathers (Herr Mensch? Marani? - can't remember which) talking about 'how much you [Madge] have done for our girls'. These same girls had been to High School in their own cities! Admittedly the Highs would not have been run on 'English lines' but surely better than a dame school?

And if you read other school stories from the same period, there is a snobbishness about these small schools - they are looked down on, girls want to go to a major public school or the established High School. How on earth did EBD create a majorly successful series from such an old fashioned concept? She's a genius I tell you ...

I can't understand why Bette, Wanda and Gisela, who were 16 or 17, were removed from whatever school they were at to come to the experimental / new Chalet with limited staff and subjects for a year. Just why?

IIRC the Chalet was closer to home and therefore easier. Also it was hot in the city (lower in the valley) in the summer - but they had survived that before the Bettanys arrived so that may not be a thing. More sensibly - at that age perhaps the parents thought concentrating on their spoken and written English would be valuable? Bet EBD thought it would!

God knows why, though, given Gisela, Bette and co all went straight from school to heavily-chaperoned courtship and marriage.

@alterego2, you’re right, but I think that’s partly why there’s such stress on (and glee about) how fast the CS grows from its initial three pupils, and disappointment among the girls when the numbers are smaller when the school reopens in Guernsey. Someone (Robin?) says something about it being a ‘comedown’. I think that’s partly about taking it out of ‘dame school’ territory, and Madge’s lack of qualifications getting swallowed up in Oxbridge-educated staff and modern methods, and the prestigious universities CS girls go on to.

Omg!!!! How did I miss this thread

I have almost all the series and am now reading In fills!! flight of a chalet school girl Katherine Bruce! Very good about veta escaping from Belsornia

Bette Wanda and Gisela had governesses if I remember none had been to school

Illness makes you grow especially if it's a head injury snd your head is shaved!

I re-read the first book recently. The local girls said that although their previous schools were better academically, their parents wanted a closer school, more English, and an English-style education which would focus more on health and physical education rather than academics. So they were deliberately accepting lower academic standards.

And the absolutely insane plotline about Barbara Chester luckily getting the measles and thus recovering from all her childhood ill-health. What was she thinking?

What I mostly remember about Barbara is that she arrives at school aged 14 or so, unable to brush her own hair!

Really, the opposite scenario would have made more sense!

There have been studies done around measles that have shown that measles can cause immune amnesia - essentially, measles can make your immune system forget about any acquired immunity you’ve got to other diseases and infections, so the immune system has to relearn how to fight things again.

So Barbara being more prone to ill health for a few years after having had measles would have been more likely!

Yes well Robin gets pneumonia and has to find up settlement work only to be then pronounced fit enough to be a nun.

Naomi's Elton has a car crash and has the bug operation that completely cures her (you wonder if it would have been easier to have just scheduled if in)

The most bonkers books though are red heads and Adrienne!!! Crazy plots

But love EDB huge fan on the quiet

Oh the whole thing with the Robin drives me insane with rage. They are worried she might have TB so they bring her up in a sanatorium with active TB cases? Then the infallible Jem pronounces that she is not to have children, so she doesn’t. Meanwhile Jo, who gets life-threatening pneumonia from going outside for 3 seconds, grows up to have eleventy billion children.

I don’t know why I adore these books so much! 😂

One thing I always wondered about with Naomi’s operation was what a group of TB specialists were carrying it out. I suppose it comes down to omnipotence.

Speaking of Robin, she was born in Cologne to an English father and Polish mother, then they moved to Munich until her father went to Russia and left her with Madge, so why did she speak French? and a 'ver leetle' English rather than German. Oh!!! google tells Cologne used to be part of France up until WW2, I never knew that, I thought EBD'S Geography was at fault 😂

Oh!!! google tells Cologne used to be part of France up until WW2, I never knew that, I thought EBD'S Geography was at fault

😯 Well, that explains a lot about Robin’s speech! You learn something new every day!