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.

Good point, what was in it for Len?🤔 Can you imagine what a totally boring and irritating couple they became? 😬 Oh god imagine having them over as dinner guests!

Reg first met Len when she was three and he was fourteen.

I have never understood that scene in Rivals where some CS girls and some St. Scholastika girls got stuck on one side of a canyon and had to traipse all day over the hills to get back to school.
I just cannot visualise it.
I wish she'd appended a diagram.

"AIBU to wish we'd never invited this tedious pair to dinner. Trying to send a text cancelling it. Help me word it.
WWYD?"^

😁😁 I got into trouble on another forum for saying that Len was effectively being groomed.

Seeing as Jack did the same with Joey, he probably sees it as perfectly normal for an adult to be chasing his teenage daughter!

I've just finished Exploits where they have the Staff Evening - has that happened before?
There was something else which was described as happening regularly but had never happened before.

Also what about the pets? Someone is appointed as pets prefect but the pets are not mentioned again.

It’s a fair point really.

As Talia99 says, she’s ideal material for a dutiful, submissive wife who had been programmed from childhood to put her family above everything else in her life

It’s not too far fetched to believe that Reg has recognised those qualities in Len, and has resolved to get in there with an engagement before she goes off to university and gets the opportunity to experience a bit more independence and meet lots of boys her own age 🤷‍♀️

Plus Len didn't really know any other boys of her own age.

Sorry Stitches I hadn't read your post!

I asked about the pets on the FB page and was told that "obviously" there were lots of pets just not mentioned.
LOL.
Apart from the two Minettes, and Joey's dog, pets do not form part of any of the plotlines.

What happens to the pets in the holidays? They can't exactly cart their pet hamster accross Europe on the train....

I think for the long walk in Rivals, they had to walk back from the lake and up the mountainside and down again as the path by the lake wasn’t passable. So a long detour basically.

In fairness, someone who’d done some hiking around Pertisau said it wasn’t implausible — that the terrain meant that if the path around one bit of the lake fell in, and you couldn’t walk all the way around the lake to get back to your starting point (which I think is impassible in Rivals, anyway), then you would have to strike off up the mountainside to get high enough to get around a shoulder of mountain and get back down to the lakeside.

What I never got was whether they left the lakeside and climbed up an actual path, as they don’t seem entirely sure of their route — presumably it’s implausible and dangerous to have them schlepping up through deep, untrodden snow!

I’d love to see a timeslip fanfic where 17-year-old Jo met 17-year-old Len, without them knowing who each other was.

Len would tell teenage Jo about this bloke who’d been interested in her for years & wanted to marry her, & teenage Jo would make her see the red flags. Then back in Len’s present, she’d tell her mum she’d changed her mind.

Jo would be angry at first ‘fast and loose, Len!’ but then remember the advice she’d given to someone years ago, realise that it applied now & send Reg packing.

It does make total sense if you’ve seen the topography. The path from Pertisau to Gaisalm hugs the bottom of steep hills and is right above the lake so if it weren’t safe you would need to go some way up and around. I’ll find a picture but there would be no other route.

Yes, this is right - I've attached a very dodgy diagram. I've walked the lakeside path from Achenkirch/Tiernkirch to Pertisau/Briesau and it is very narrow, with steep mountainside on one hand and a drop down to the lake on the other. Absolutely stunning walk though! IIRC there was no road from Buchau up the Eastern shore of the lake back then (there is now, but it's dug through tunnels etc), though there may have been a rough path.

I think the girls were walking back from Geisalm to Briesau, past the dripping rock (DR on map) when the rockslide occurred, making the pass impassable (big scribble on map). For some other reason - ?floods ?no road - they couldn't just walk the whole other way round the lake - which would have been a good 8-10 miles anyway, so had to go over the mountains. The green arrow on there is my very rough guess.

I'm prepared to be corrected!

FFS - making the path impassable

www.rivieratravel.co.uk/european-tours/walk-discover-austrian-tyrol

If you click on the entry for the Achensee day on this itinerary you see the lake looking from Achenkirch/Gaisalm towards Pertisau so you can see how tricky it would have been.

Having also done the walk it would have been really no fun at all to head up, particularly in snow, unless starting off way back in Achenkirch when a path goes up that way. I suspect for a group of teenagers out in winter without any equipment at all it would be far worse than EBD describes.

Sorry, ignore some of that last post, as I wasn’t wearing my glasses! The view is from the Pertisau end so the path they were talking along is on the left of that photo. But you can still see the issue!

I would only add that doing that walk in winter anyway was fairly brave: the path may have changed in the last century but it’s narrow now and has quite a few steps that I wouldn’t really want to take when wet let alone icy. It’s not one of the winter hiking trails the local tourist board publicises, that’s for sure.

Did anyone else’s brothers used to enjoy reading the chalet school books or was it just mine? I mean even as a teenager he was excited for a new one coming out.

Hang on.
If Jack was a "Cradle Catholic" why was his sister, Mollie Maynard, a member of the Church of England?

That has always puzzled me. Yes, I know that siblings do not always follow the same denomination (or even the same religion) but it doesn't make sense.

Unless it's just EBD forgetting, as per usual...........

Not only that, but Grizel is always depicted as "not musical" although she becomes the CS music mistress eventually.

I do know that she would have preferred to be a games mistress, but even so, you'd think that her musical abilities would be demonstrable when she was a pupil.

I love Grizel because she set Len Maynard on fire. Or was it Con?

It was Len who was set on fire by Grizel. IIRC Len was wearing a costume made out of tissue paper (or something equally flammable), and Grizel tossed a lot cigarette / match at a bin next to Len. Missed the bin, hit Len, whoosh, Len’s on fire 🔥