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.

Yes this is why I can’t read the later Swiss books, they are just so silly and disappointing.

Yes and then I started Summer Term and it opens with Joey randomly running into a girl called Erica while she is temporarily back in the UK, and obviously Erica is an orphan who has been made Joey's ward without her knowing, and Joey just goes 'okay, I'll pick her up on Friday'.

And doesn’t she then pick up a random baby in the same book 😂

Haha, I've only just started that one, will look forward to it!

Yes, Marie Claire de Mabillon. I won't say how, as it's a bit of a spoiler.

And then Marie Claire temporarily ceases to exist in the next book?

I found Joey Bettany (and friends), earphones and everything!

One of the group is a relative of mine (won't say which one but it's not Joey). The photo is actually dated 1931, but we know the EBD universe is a bit flexible about timey-wimey stuff.

I've been musing on who is who. Obviously, Bruno has shrunk a bit...

The earphones look surprisingly better than I was imagining.

Yes, they look quite ordinary, and if anything, mildly frumpy, not the kind of breezy ‘I’m mad, me! Did I mention I had triplets at 21?’ thing you’d associate with adult Joey!

It still amuses me that EBD depicts generations of CS girls of various nationalities as enthralled by Joey’s fertility, rather than pitying the school’s former coolest girl for a life consisting of endless pregnancies, toddler tantrums and trailing around after the school.

Yes, they look quite ordinary, and if anything, mildly frumpy

It’s struck me that the earphones look is slightly dated in 1931, and yet EBD has Joey wearing them still 30 years later. That’s taking stuck in the past to a whole new level, but maybe consistent with someone obsessed by her own childhood where the earphones were the trendy thing to have. The first books were mid 1920s weren’t they?

But she was bobbed until pretty much when she left school, wasn’t she? So she wouldn’t have been wearing them much before the late 30s, which I would have said would have been as inexplicable to her peers as being an early adopter of the return of the mullet, or getting a bouffant poodle perm or a Rachel in 2023…?

Just been googling the earphones hairstyle and found it was also called Cootie Garages!! Pretty sure cooties is American for headlice, so that’s a nice 8mage 🤢

Back to Madge, so as soon as she married Jem she gave up and left all the hard work to Hilda who relied heavily on Jo and to a lesser extent Bill yet Madge was revered all the way through.

If Madame had kept running the school after marrying Jem, what a brilliant example it would have been to the girls. It might have led to a culture where her niece Daisy felt able to stay a doctor, or later where Julie Lucy was able to be both a barrister and a housemaster’s wife.

She did pop back in to give wonderful lectures on literature though!

Women are allowed to keep working after marriage if they do something creative, like writing novels or acting. Jane Carew's mother even gets to be equally famous and successful as her father.

As so often, I think EBD was living slightly in the past. Marriage bars were common when she was growing up, but were ending by the mid-40s onwards. Society still expected women to stay at home with the kids though, so although it would have been great to see some feminist icons breaking through, I don't think the majority of her girls would have expected to carry on working professionally.

I agree that Daisy is very galling, especially when her previous experience appears to be entirely ignored, but I reckon Julie Lucy would struggle to combine being a barrister with a House Mother even now. That's still the sort of unpaid job that people rely on 'wives' to do without any recognition, like FCO trailing spouses. (The lack of which has now caused serious issues for their embassy operating model!) I like to think she'd have gone barrister over House Mother though now.

I think it’s less that EBD is operating according to contemporary gender norms than that, in a fictional world that prioritises female achievement, there’s a lack of any exploration, however minor, of alternative models of combining marriage, motherhood and most types of professional work, or even anyone saying ‘What a pity Juliet’s good mind and training is going to waste’ , things like the amnesia about Daisy’s medical career, or just that Madge, in owning her own school, wasn’t subject to any marriage bar and could easily have gone on running the school and postponed having children for a year or two. Marie Stopes’ Married Love came out in 1918!

Or Joey, who on finishing school is loudly uninterested in marriage, wails about how ‘small’ life on the Sonnalpe is going to be just taking singing lessons and helping with ‘the babies’, but appears to never consider doing anything more with her life.

I get that several longterm staff are presented as contentedly single, but then you also have Simone being ‘too sweet to teach forever’.

I don’t think EBD was writing to be that person though. She was unconventional to a point but makes it very clear that marriage and babies are the prize, with a teaching post at the Chalet School a respectable alternative.

One thing that stood out to me was when Madge went off to Canada and Joey was massively relieved that it seemed to revitalise her and make her more like the old Madge rather than just a nice doctor's wife - the suggestion was that she'd basically become insipid and that this was a risk of giving up all your own interests.

Anyway, I've nearly finished (halfway through 2 Sams) so no idea what I'm going to do with my spare time now, but I like to imagine that all the later generations of Chalet School girls who talk about the careers they'd like to have actually do get to go on and have them.

It's nice that Madge is re-vitalised, but she's so off-screen by that point that we don't really see it.
I think if she'd been brought back as an executive head, who Mrs A consulted, and took that part of Joey, leaving Joey to be the fun, more youth worker personality, unofficial advisor to the children, then it would have been better for both of them.

True, but I liked it more for the acknowledgment that being wife-to-an-important-man is not necessarily as fulfilling as having a career!

I see Joey as more of an executive Head Girl than Head - the problems are always with understanding troubled kids from their own perspective.

I’d have loved to see Joey face to face with a difficult new girl she actually had to work at, not just rather disappointing ones who sound interestingly ‘bad’ in theory, like Ted, but who are totally reformed with a new name and hairdo, and magically stop smoking and bareback riding in riding lessons. Someone who said, ‘No, I like my name’ and ‘No, thanks, I don’t fancy going to tea with someone I’ve never met, and who knows stuff about me that she shouldn’t’, or ‘Never heard of her, but then I only read thrillers.’

And I’m always interested in the way Joey describes the ‘revived’ Madge — she says (with approval) that Madge is ‘all crisp and snappy’ or something like that. Which just makes he sound irritable and bossy to me! But clearly EBD meant this as a compliment.

I think it's the middle-aged women's equivalent of a place being either 'too relaxing' or 'bracing'.

crisp and snappy I'd think of being a little like a (good) old-fashioned hospital matron. Knows what she wants and gets it by being firm and not compromising.

So "nice Lady Russell" would have a visitor round who wanted her to donate to the local good cause's garden party and she'd listen, incline her head graciously and tell them that they were doing a fantastic job and she'd definitely come and here is some money towards it.
"Crisp and Snappy Madge Russell" would sit down with the visitor and plan something much more exciting than a garden party and be involved in the running of it.

I’d have loved to see Joey face to face with a difficult new girl she actually had to work at
Thing is she did occasionally have new girls who didn't pander to her, and she didn't deal well with them. They were also at risk of being treated badly by the school on the whole. She only really dealt well with the "what! My favourite author Joey Bettany really went here" pupils (another case of not reading the prospectus, because I'm sure they'd have mentioned that, and if Joey had written it, probably on every page).

Actually she'd have probably written the whole prospectus. Can you imagine?
Page 1:
"Welcome to the Chalet School.
I was the first Pupil of the Chalet School, and I know that if you don't fit in then it's your fault not the school."
Page 2: Art
"I got thrown out of art lessons for annoying the art teacher so much he threw everything at me. Ha ha! You'll find so many of my little exploits are loved by the school. By the way. I must tell you about the time I dyed myself green..."

I've started Adrienne - all this thread's fault. My copy is missing four ages near the beginning so I got to breakfast with the Maynards rather suddenly, but had some sympathy with the landlady being expected to hand over a teenager to two nuns she's never set eyes on before, one of them with a moustache.

So far the only thing I remembered from earlier reading/s was making a dress out of nylon and then embroidering flowers on it.

I am struck that it's turning out to be yet another book with bitterness and jealousy at the core of the narrative - the last ten years or so of the Chalet school seem to seethe with non stop interpersonal resentment. It's one of EBD's much used tropes anyway, but she really doubled down on it in the late books.