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.

Don’t get me started on Mary Lou, the original Queen Bee! Her and her bloody “gang”!

@CrackedLookingGlass one of the more surprisingly probable bits for me is just before they move to Switzerland and Miss Slater is given plenty of space to explain why she doesn't want to go, and would rather move to a school where she can be a head of department and develop her career with a view to becoming a headmistress eventually. She also wants to try out some methods that wouldn't fit the Chalet School. Obvs she is evil because she dislikes Margot Maynard for not being good at maths, but I thought it was uncharacteristically balanced,

The boat Joey (and the triplets) escape from Guernsey on is attacked and in danger of sinking.

Naturally Joey behaves as a spineless jellyfish faints because she is so emotional and leaves Freda and others to look after the babies.

Great! A new thread! Am here for the sedatives - where's Matey? 😃

Didn't the boat Gertrud/e was on when she ran away get torpedoed?

Careful if you are going to sneer at Mary Lou. You are likely to come to a sticky end.

It was, but do you remember one of the other staff being really snide and uncomprehending about her decision to ‘miss out on all the fun’? Can you imagine if Kathie Ferrars had joined the CS with the avowed intention of becoming Head, and bubbling over with novel ideas.

For several weeks, if I remember correctly.
Typical Joey.

The madman who kidnaps Corney (or was it Evvy?) and takes her to the salt caves, then just happens to kill himeelf off by falling over so there’s a nice neat ending but none of the gallant doctors need actually get their hands or consciences dirty. Also the salt caves themselves being undiscovered, but spotted by a bunch of schoolgirls not the locals.

It was Corney who was kidnapped by the madman.

I really like Princess - no matter how improbable the plots of the Tyrol books might be, they engage me in a way that the later books never manage. The ultimate comfort read. Evil Uncle Cosimo and all....

I think I'm on my own in preferring the Swiss books.

I like Princess too. That and Exile are my favourites. Princess is a girl’s own adventure without a bloody Julian type coming in to tell them they are all irrational females and not as good as a real boy, and at the end Belsornia gets over itself and decides a girl can take the throne.

Princess was with the first of the second one I read (other was Problem) and I love it. Implausible, yes, but Elisavita is a lovely character.

@TheShellBeach I prefer the later books too. Not necessarily Switzerland but most after they move to Wales really

My favourite era is the Armishire / Herefordshire books.
Of the Swiss books there are literally only three that I like
Barbara
New Mistress
Kenya

@CrackedLookingGlass
It was, but do you remember one of the other staff being really snide and uncomprehending about her decision to ‘miss out on all the fun’?

Absolutely - I was impressed though that EBD gave more space to Miss Slater's point of view there and didn't present her as a totally unsympathetic character. Even in the earlier bits where she's presented as being not-quite Chaletian enough it's quite balanced, e.g. she knows she tends to favour girls who like maths and dislike others, and she had made an effort to be fair, at least in the earlier days. It's a lot more nuanced than e.g. 'Grizel had a hard character'.

While I do generally really like the Armishire/St Briavel's books, I feel that Highland Twins deserves an honourable mention for the dual plot madness of a secret map with a magical stone to press to get to a secret passage, and a psychic teenager "spotting" Jack out at sea...

I can cope with the nutty plot more easily than I can with a pair of Scottish girls travelling to school on a hot summer night by train clad in full Highlander costume, including kilts in their family tartan, sporrans, plaids pinned on the shoulder with a brooch, and bonnets with eagle feathers. And are terrified of trains!

I suspect EBD never met anyone from the Highlands... somehow never bothered me as a child though. I think I used to filter the books through my view of what was possible (e.g. I used to imagine the McDonalds wearing kilts and ignored the plaids and bonnets.)

Got this one in the post yesterday (from the sales and wants Chalet group on FB). I remember the original version was called Gay from China at the Chalet School.

I find it hard to believe that anyone ever thought the plot of any work of children’s school-based fiction was remotely probable.

Some school stories are fairly humdrum and realistic. The Trebizon books are mostly about playing tennis, getting put in a different form or boarding house to your friends, getting a poem in the school mag, cycling to a coffee shop to meet boys etc. I think the only out of the ordinary plot element is a rich girl being sent back to school with a bodyguard after a kidnap threat, but she isn’t actually ever kidnapped.

I’ve obviously only seen the bonkers ones then.

The only Trebizon book I remember was a bit bonkers. It was about girls competing to get a special merit-based scholarship to use at one of a group of private schools, including Trebizon. But this one girl's highly competitive mum was pretending to be diabetic so that the most competitive candidate would feel sorry for her daughter and not try very hard. However, the second girl's friend secretly knew that girl 2's father had lost all his money and she would really need the scholarship in order to use it to stay at Trebizon with all her pals. She also found out that girl 1's mum was not really diabetic because she saw her eating cakes (not actually conclusive evidence, in my view) and she knew what diabetes was because a major part of this scholarship exam seemed to revolve around remembering pub-quiz style trivia so they'd all been cramming that to help girl 2 and one of the facts was about that.

Anyway, from this book I learnt that a young hare is called a leveret, and I've never forgotten that.

Then they must have changed quite radically after the early 80s books (I’ve only read the ones that were available when I was a child), because those were very staid. I mean, exotic compared to the Chalet School because the girls had boyfriends and went to social stuff at their school (but holding hands in the local coffee shop was about as far as things went), lived pretty independently in small boarding houses in the big grounds of the school, there was a hunky surfer substitute maths teacher (and the Head was depicted as an attractive woman implicitly with her own social and romantic life), but it was very much getting onto teams and worrying about not understanding trigonometry.