AIBU To Think That The Plots Of The Chalet School Books Were Really Improbable

[TheShellBeach]

.................................such as Prince Cosimo, the endless kidnappings, all the train crashes/bus crashes/car crashes/plane crashes/boat sinkings hang on a minute, were there any boat sinkings

Okay, I've just remembered that there were a couple of near misses with boats when the CS was on the island. Joey was nearly flung overboard once (a missed opportunity for EBD to get rid of her IMO) and there were probably others.

Anyway - all aboard and ahoy there.

Does anyone remember one of the later books where there was a crater in the school lawn for some reason & a girl went to have a look & fell in, and Only The Doctors were capable of getting her out - & Reg Entwistle was rude & patronising to one of the Heads about it because she was a mere woman who clearly had no idea what she was talking about?

I think that was Erica who fell in. In Summer Term. Another one of Joey's random nieces!

Erica was the random god daughter that she bumped into in London by amazing co-incidence I think. The one whose mim had died and left her to Joey without mentioning it.

To ask a question which has puzzled many a reader since time immemorial: Why was EBD so obsessed with ML?? I just read Coming of Age, expecting it to be full of returning Old Girls and what did I get? Endless bollox about Mary Bloody Lou! Arggghhh!!

I think ML is the new Joey.

It was this. Bossy Mary Lou was the character to take over from Bossy Jo.

What's frustrating about ML is that she could have been a good character, had EBD not totally over done it.

And Jo was a super character until the age of about 17. After that it went downhill and as an adult she's excruciating.

I read the start of a fanfic once where ML was sent to a comprehensive for a year as part of an exchange scheme.

Very sadly, there were only one or two chapters.

Including up Alps, naturally.

Yes - until she becomes Head of Middles and Leader of the Gang she's quite fun, and definitely fallible.

I agree about ML. She's a lovely character in Three go and even in ones like Barbara (I think that's the ones she's told that she needs to be careful or she'll turn into a bossy old lady no one likes) she's not portrayed as perfect.

For me it's the mixture of "oh she's taken Joey's mantle" when she's nothing like what Joey was like at school, the being put into a situation (like Joey is at times) which really would fit someone else better like in "coming of age" and the favouritism-the one there that really sticks in my throat is the Margot Venable prize (that is taken over by Joey and claimed as her prize) and Joey says she should get it early in the book, then Joey doubles it (after already saying she's sure ML will get it) and then it's claimed that every single person voted for her.

The "it's only ML" when she comes out with things works for me. Very similar to Dimsie. But Dimsie has her share of faults and her friends do squash her, and ML becomes unable to do wrong, which is where the issue lies with her.

I think if ML had grown up in accordance with her slightly cheeky excitable junior personality, and added her as being the person people went to when things went wrong, then the books would have been richer for it.

Yes - you know the way the Tyrol middles get sobered and scattered and out of sync after war breaks out - quite realistically. But I think that without that trauma and disruption, people like Margia Stevens and Cornelia Flower were the type of seniors young Mary Lou should have grown into.

Which prefects age best, I wonder? Not Jo but I think her friends mature convincingly. Likewise Robin and the war generation. Daisy and co, Bride's group ... less said about Peggy, ML and Len the better.

Len doesn't need to mature into anything.
She was born grown up.

Robin ages beautifully. You can see the progression from the pampered adored baby through the slightly frustrated (at being babied and being ill) older primary age through to responsible prefect. The only thing I find is she ends up "parenting" Joey at times, which I cringe at.

Joey has no relation between Joey the middle (full of mischief, but very much into her friends and not really interested in others), Joey the prefect is not too much of a stretch, but Joey the headgirl seems another character, and Joey the adult is much more immature than Joey the middle plus a totally different character.

Frieda ages pretty well, and I think Simone does too. She matures from her "Jo obsession" to a good friend-although I still think it was mean of Jo to tell both Marie and Frieda about Robin's illness and not tell her.

Of newer ones, I think Vi Lucy ages well. Her disappointment at not being made a prefect is very realistic. And Bride too is a realistic growing up.
Lavender Leigh is perhaps a good example of one whose first book shows her changing with experience, and she stays changed. I don't think she ever makes prefect though.

Of the triplets the only one I'd say is Con. Len and Margot don't really change from responsible/nasty, despite what they go through. Con becomes gradually more thoughtful and you could see younger ones going to her because she would think about how to help them.

Were Lavender, etc. written around the time that EBD was actually teaching? The juniors and lower middles are beautifully written and characterised in those books, whereas they are a bit ridiculous in earlier books (Red Indians at Obergammerau!) and totally unrealistic in later books. Bride, etc. seem very human and real. Lavender is also a nice character - not really redeemed by the school but just by being among other girls instead of at the centre of her aunt's universe. I like that she stays a bit batty even when she gets nicer!

Yes, Lavender (and Rosalie and Verity) all stay good and eccentric as they grow.

Joan Baker actually matures very convincingly if a little sadly, out of the limelight. And there is Grizel. I don't think she should have been head-girl. But she storms through life and does grow into a real adult. Wish we'd seen more of whatever went on with her and Deira in New Zealand.

Am I right in remembering that Hilda lends her the money to get away from the school. Funny that she should see that need. Jo is always drawing people back. I think EBD's characters really did take on their own lives sometimes.

Were Lavender, etc. written around the time that EBD was actually teaching?

I think so, @Jourdain11 . Even at the time when she was running her own school. That opening scene in Lavender when poor Bill wants to curl up a book instead of listening to Lavender's aunt talk about her special darling makes me think EBD was writing from life!

I remember, Bill wanting to curl up with a book and eat chocolates!

I actually find Verity's character progression sad; she becomes so docile and incompetent...

I remember reading that, although Elinor was a very good teacher, she was a terrible headmistress and should never have been allowed to run a school!
Her untrained mother did most of it while Elinor was busy with her fictitious schools. The characters in her books did as she wanted and she much preferred them.

I expect Verity might have had an ASD diagnosis these days.

There's her misdirected loyalty to her grandparents to the point where she deliberately won't try at school, then that weird antipathy towards Germans and her stubborn refusal to accept she's wrong.
Also her total inability to cope when stressed by something so mundane as getting ready in the mornings that doesn't improve as she gets older.

I wonder if EDB had a real person in mind when she wrote her character, perhaps even herself. EDB lived with her mother until her mother's death and then appears to have struggled to cope alone in the following years. She was eventually persuaded to move in with her friends and then never seems to have lived alone until she herself died.

Perhaps Jo and Mary-Lou were who EDB wanted to be, while Verity was much nearer the mark.

Re weird antipathy - anti-German sentiment was pretty strong in the post-war years. Verity’s real-life contemporaries would have been bombed and/or lost family and friends, and been exposed to wartime propaganda and then revelations about the Holocaust. To like aspects of German culture was seen as unpatriotic. EBD would not have been in the majority on this issue at the time.

I’m just reading “Chalet School Wins the trick” Mary- Lou’s mum (Verity’s step mum) Doris has died. Everyone keeps going on about how weak and pathetic Verity is being, but her dad had died a couple of years before I think. Then some of the senior girls start discussing V and M-L in general, they are basically bitching about V. I’m reading it like 😡😡

That's true, but her stubbornness at age 10 in refusing to sing a Bach carol, even when under intolerable pressure from every member of the school to capitulate, is unusual.

I think she’d have felt backed up by society as a whole, and potentially everyone else she knew outside the CS, though, so perhaps less unusual if she only felt she was resisting the specific environment of a new school she wasn’t too keen on, and which she still thought weird.

I tend to think that the complete amenability of all CS girls and staff in matters German during and in the aftermath of the war was deeply unrealistic of EBD, given that the vast majority of the girls are British and ‘new’ in the sense that they hadn’t attended the school in its Tyrol incarnation, so wouldn’t have been likely to have had German/Austrian friends, to have a sentimental attachment to a German-speaking part of the world, or to know of German or Austrian people who didn’t support the Nazi regime.