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.

EBD had the same colonial attitude towards - and ignorance of - the Irish, as most English people of her era, though the number of times I've heard present day presenters on Sky News, the BBC etc claim famous Irish people as 'British' suggests not much has changed...

I wish I looked that elegant when I dithered.

This is totally off piste, but there’s a book that l really loved as a child but have been totally unable to track down. It was another boarding school one. The heroine was Pamela Cheviot, the second of three daughters of a hard-up vicar in a grimy town. The other two were Joan, the youngest and the oldest, Lalage, who was “delicate.” Pamela’s life changed when she won a scholarship to this boarding school. She made a best friend, Chris, and had a great time. There was also a drippy girl called Anne Spenlow who had been allowed to take the scholarship place of her brighter, more popular sister Sophie when the latter broke her back or something. A small, Anglo-Indian child called Winsome Wylde also featured. I remember so much about the ruddy book - except its title and author! I would love to know if this rings even a faint bell with anyone. It was a book l actually owned but alas, the minute l left home for university, my mother cleared everything out of my room and got rid of it all. ( She was genuinely baffled by my distress over the loss of “some chidren’s books and a few old toys”) l would be really grateful if anyone has any ideas.

I recognise all those names but I can't remember the book either.

Is it one of the Doris Pocock books?
There's a few on Amazon.

A Will and A Way https://amzn.eu/d/gDRTari

And loads on Ebay.

Here

Oh my goodness, shellbeach! That is the book! Mine had that dust jacket! Thank you so much! ( Too many apostrophes.) l wish it had occurred to me to post sooner. I’m off to order a copy right now. I wonder how it will be but l came over quite dewy eyed just looking at the photograph. Very many thanks.

Doris Pocock also wrote one of the stories in the collection that @Howyoualldoworkme identified for me - time to blow my budget on more books :)

Also - love the idea of parents calling their daughters Lalage, Pamela, and … poor little Joan.

@Gremlinsateit @Howyoualldoworkme there’s a full book called the Clue in the Castle (Joyce ? Is the author) Not sure how the short story fits in but this is definitely a book.
Robin is a main character in it, doing her work experience in law when she wants to be a nurse. Some of her friends teach her and invite her to stay with them - and there’s a twist when you find out who she really is.

Off to investigate! What a wonderful thread this is!

LittleMousewithcloggson
I do love your username btw 🙂

Joyce Bevins Webb is the author
It is definitely the one with Zeporah aka Robin in

Found it! There's a great synopsis on Goodreads.
The chapter in Stories for Girls was obviously taken from it. And all this time I thought it was a standalone story!

@LittleMousewithcloggson @Gremlinsateit
SPOILERS!
https://clothesinbooks.blogspot.com/2015/04/dress-down-sunday-clue-in-castle-by.html

I always thought it might be from a book or series, which is one of the reasons I wanted to find it. But I am not reading your spoilers @Howyoualldoworkme ! Thanks @LittleMousewithcloggson !

Ah Biddy. Famously ripe of brogue with neither French nor German to her absolute stereotype of a name

But she became fluent in both after repeating random sentences every third day in each language.

Yeah, right.

And there are glaring mistakes in EBD’s French! Not just in girls learning it, which would be understandable, but in native speakers’ French. I think Mademoiselle at one point claims that ‘est-ce que takes the subjunctive’. I mean, just throw in the odd ‘Bon jour!’ or ‘merci’ if your French isn’t good, Elinor!

Not to mention the strange case of Onkel Riese changing into Onkel Reise… (And I know some of that is proof-reading, like Biddy O’Ryan being Biddy O’Hara for one novel, and Con Stewart appearing to have two different married names…)

Con Stewart appearing to have two different married names…

the stories EBD didn't tell us . . .

Bigamy at the Chalet School.😀

Thiugh EBD is very twitchy even about widows and widowers remarrying. Jessica Wayne’s mother marrying her bank manager is described entirely in terms of Mrs Wayne feeling sorry for his invalid daughter (so she married him?) and the marriage of Doris ‘Unbelievably Wet’ Trelawney and Commander ‘Back from the Dead’ Carey is presented as ‘two people trauma-bonding over Mary-Lou’s dead heroic father so that they can make Mary Lou and Verity ‘sisters by marriage’’…

Adults marrying and then neglecting their children is a recurring theme. It's there in the Lorna books, and in poor Grizel Cochrane's backstory. I wonder is it something she'd either experienced or observed?

I love the CS books but my mind boggles at the number of multiple births. There was clearly something in the water.

I think it was the only way she could suggest ‘And they all lived very happily ever after with their doctors, and had blissful sex lives’?

Sorry, I’m talking about family sizes rather than twins and triplets. Unless there’s a theory that sex had tobe particularly acrobatic to produce triplets…

That's a perceptive comment.

Her father had been married before and had a son, Charles Arnold, who was never to live with his father and stepmother. This caused some friction between Elinor’s parents, and her father left home when she was three and her younger brother, Henzell, was two. Her father eventually went to live with another woman by whom he had a third son, Morris. Elinor’s parents lived in a respectable lower-middle-class area, and the family covered up the departure of her father by saying that her mother had ‘lost’ her husband.

In 1912 Henzell died of cerebro-spinal fever, another event which was covered up. Friends of Elinor’s who knew her after his death were unaware that she had had a brother.

Hard to blame her for being fixated on found, mended and reunited families.

https://www.chaletschool.org.uk/elinor-brent-dyer/