New Home for the Chalet School

[Vintagejazz]

Welome everyone. Dormy lists on the board as usual and I know you are all hoping like mad that you are all not in the same dormitory as Mary Lou. But only some of you can be the un lucky ones and the rest of us will have to make do with each other.

Oh, and the good news is that Joey has sabotaged discovered something wrong with the roof on her house and believe it or not, the only property available to rent is right next door to the school.

Shit Hurrah, lucky us.

Got to go. Matey wants me for unpacking.

Maybe it was considered polite to be surprised even if you knew back then. It certainly wasn't polite to mention it.

Mopsy yes agree. Sybil was premature but for gods sake surely the teenage Joey would have seen the big bump.

Madge should have mentioned being busy, having her hands full, other fish to fry etc etc.

Just been reading coming of age and loving the fact that a laughing Miss Annersley declare a holiday from Thursday to the following Tuesday!

Ofsted line 1 Miss Annersley!

thebody I think Madge was probably saying all of those things - doesn't she say something afterwards like "I did try to hint but you were uncommonly thick"? I wonder if Jo remembered that and smiled, every time thereafter when she gave those 'hints' to other people. (My personal favourite is definitely when Madge says 'the family's having an extension').

When I start seriously wondering about 18(?)yo Jo not noticing Madge's 7mth bump, I start to feel quite sad, as I hope Madge managed to have a more useful conversation with Jo before she got married, and then I wonder who had that conversation with Madge? I hope somebody did. what do you mean they're not real people I am really curious about how much choice any of the Chalet women had in their family sizes and timings - which is obviously a totally unanswerable question given these are only characters in a children's book. And a children's book in which it is compulsory for all multiple-birth children to be identical but differently coloured.

I think Joey is supposed to grow better-looking with age, though I'm not sure whether she ends up 'beautiful' or more striking. I think EBD can be a bit ambivalent about beauty - possibly caught between wanting to teach that beauty is only surface-deep and not at all important etc, and just being aesthetically drawn to it and therefore seeing it as a virtue (one among many).
You can't really generalise much about her beautiful girls, can you? Diana is beautiful and mean with an overgrown but fragile ego, Wanda is beautiful and lovely and simplistic (ditto Marie, but less so - I love how totally normal it is in the CS to remark to friends "you're lovely, but your sister is so much lovelier!"), Vi Lucy is just one of OOAOML's gang, Grizel is... Grizel.

It feels like sacrilege to say it but I always feel a bit like Miss Annersley gets a bit silly in the later books. Too much swanning around declaring holidays and playing hairdressers with new girls and being all chummy-chummy with Jo.

Oh! Which reminds me. In Theodora, May Carthew who is Theodora's cousin writes to Joey all about Theodora's background and problems. Afaik, she hasn't seen Joey since she was what, 16? Why on earth does she write to Jo about this new pupil, rather than the school? If she didn't personally know the current headmistress, it would still be odd but slightly less so - but she does know Miss Annersley. Everyone knows that of course the moment Miss Annersley received the letter Jo would come breezing into the staff room (or Rosalie's office) and everyone would immediately tell her because it takes Jo to solve a problem like that etc, but actually writing the letter to Jo in the first place is just ridiculous.

Or Lens mantra from Anna. 'Praise to the face is open disgrace'

I agree, but I don't think it is just her the staff seem incapable of dealing with anyone without Joey's help. I think it it is in prefects that Miss Wilmot and several of the others ask her for help dealing with the middles. If a parent and old student at that kept telling me how to manage my students they would get very short shrift!

Totally agree about the writing to Joey, but they always did-even if they hadn't seen her for 20 years and knew nothing about her marriage etc-though how they found her address is beyond me.
Joey would have worked much better as a sort of house matron sort of there for emotional health. Then it would make sense for her to be the one written to, or told if the letter had gone to another.

I think they must just have to write the CS address (NB this is not necessarily as easy as it seems - see Wrong for possible errors due to multiple Chalet Schools in, er, Wales) and scribble "eccentric lady with earphones next door" above it.

Yes, maybe in fact the gratuitous and infuriating remark about Julie Lucy casually dropping her career at the Bar to be a housemaster's wife was EBD belatedly realising that Jo might have done better to have married a housemaster than a doctor? Though, of course, I can't imagine any housemasters at a girls' school. She could have been a sort of house matron type without marrying, couldn't she - she could have been the spinster aunt she always swore she'd be, and still be v involved in the school, only it would be appropriate! And she'd be working closely with Matey, and wild horses wouldn't have dragged it from her but Jo was Matey's heart's darling, so that would have been fine.

And yes Iona my lamb you are quite right, it reflects badly on the staff as much as on her. In her absence Miss Annersley even takes to asking Jack for advice instead! Jack! Jack knows about TB, not problem schoolgirls.

I wonder if EBD would have wanted a Joey lurking around whilst she was teaching? Or indeed if EBD wanted to be able to stop teaching and just be a visiting minor celebrity who helps 'problem girls' and is beloved in the staffroom but doesn't actually have to do any pesky teaching in between?

I was also just flicking through Exile this evening trying to stick the pages back in the right order and noticed that it says that Joey was drafted in to teach 2 days a week, although she protested a lot
Now don't you think that is a strange reaction for someone who has very little other stuff to do, didn't really want to leave school, and when she does have other things like 11 children to look after, spends most of her time interfering in the school?

So it leaves me with two thoughts: EBD thought Joey was above teaching.
Or she thought the best teachers, as the best head girls, would protest about not being good enough/not wanting to do it. In which case I can wonder how the interviews she will have done to get her staff for her school went. Maybe that was the reason why it eventually folded.

Also pisses me off is matron.

Now is she a trained nurse or is that just nurse who is trained?

See matron dispenses medicine and diagnoses illnesses but then they have Margot venables ( she might died before) and barbera henshall whose an old girl and is she trained?

The Joey understands girls is bloody silly. She's consulted by the heD and teachers, old girls, and even some random friend who asks her to take on the McDonald twins, she can't know that much then as she's only 23.

It's as annoying as her knowing so much about helping the bereaved. Why? Who has she lost? Nell loosesl her family and Hilda her mother but it's Joey who councells both Jacynth and Jane. Why why?

Yy to Julie canning her career. Very annoying.

I imagine her school folded because she actually really did not understand girls at all.
At my school if some swot proposed to build a chapel and to use my pocket money to do it with she would have got a toilet swirly.

also any teenager participating willingly in progressive games. Really?

But I love EDB of course.

On the Sybil / bridesmaid point - to be fair to Joey, everyone continued to treat the Robin like an infant when she was about ten, so there is an internal consistency of sorts in a Kindergarten-age Sybil being thought of as little more than an unpredictable toddler.

I'm reading Three Go just now and there is a paragraph describing how Dick, Mollie and Second Twins are in Australia but the twins are about to be dropped off at Madge's before Dick and Mollie go to India because of Dick's job in the Forestry Commission. In Tom Tackles, the book-but-one before Three Go, there is a long subplot about Dick resigning his commission and the Bettanys moving to the Quadrant. I've never read Rosalie which is the book inbetween the two - does anyone know if Dick has to take up his Indian post again, or is this just a particularly bad example of an EBD chronological hiccup?

And another "this makes no sense" point I've always wondered - why, when Joey spent 6-7 years with her Catholic best friends Frieda, Simone and Marie, did the Triplets end up with teachers for godparents?

I can just about understand Bill at a push, for she and Joey had the shared experience of fleeing the Nazis, but overlooking her closest friends who already belong to the religion in which she intends to bring up her daughters has never sat comfortably with me.

On the subject of announcing pregnancy; I remember when my sister was pregnant in the early 1960s going to see friends of my parents. Their dog jumped up at her and they said, "down Rover, this lady is expecting a happy event".
I remember thinking that was bloody absurd even though I was only about 12 at the time.
Re Sybil, I think EBD just doesn't like the character much and the putting down all the time is unconscious. I don't think she is a good enough writer to take Joey's psychological response into account.
BTW, Joey and I share a birthday; this year she will be 96 and I will be 65. I am asking for a lime green twinset. What should we get Joey?

Sign yy I have very often wondered this.

Theory #1 is something simplistic and vague about all members of the quartette being equal but some being more equal than others, and it being a demonstration that Jo is now bigger and more important than in her school days.

The other two are v context-specific wrt the timing of Exile -

Theory #2 is that she had already planned/written much of book #14, including Jo's conversion, proper wedding, and triplet-spawning, before the Anschluss made the book unviable. So this explains, potentially, why her central character marries off-stage, why it's never clear when Joey has converted, and the choice of godmothers could v easily be explained within this context - esp if they were involved in her conversion.

Theory #3 is that it might not have seemed politically advisable, by that time, to have had Austrian godmothers to English children.

I do feel that there must be some sort of explanation - particularly as at this stage all (?) of the European characters are Catholic, so it's unlikely she forgot - and two of the actual godmothers make their swift departures from the school and series at this time, so it's also not a question of EBD wanting characters who would be nearby.

I read Rosalie recently and don't recall anything about Dick's commission, but it's something I could quite conceivably have skipped over.

Emily, if I am ever busy again, that is the announcement I shall use - 'expecting a happy event'!

I think 'Matron' must be a reasonably well-qualified position, because it's evidently well-regarded enough for an Old Girl to do it. I don't know if that's necessarily evidence that the original, ancient, when-will-she-get-to-retire, back-in-the-Middle-Ages Matron Matey is especially qualified, though: when you think of the teachers dating from the same era, Madge and (I think) Mlle had no formal training to teach, and a lot of the other early teachers I'm not sure it's very clear about the qualifications of. The first definitely-graduate ones I can think of are Bill and Hilda.

DeWee, re Jo not wanting to teach, but later wanting endless involvement: discounting the Head Girl style protests (which I think a perfectly reasonable explanation), maybe it's that EBD would rather Jo didn't have to teach? I sometimes get a sense of an author who had many (v normal!) obligations creating a fantasy character who had none. Or it could also be part of the Peter Pan thing - Jo's ongoing involvement with the School reflects that she never entirely grows up and will forevermore be nothing but a Chalet girl. I think proper mistresses probably have to be proper grownups, however much they might be poppets out of lessons.

A combo of theories 2 and 3 sounds right to me.
I have just read Rosalie (boring book, boring character) and was wondering about how the timing of the Bettanys leaving India fitted with independence and partition? (And wondered how Australia fitted in).
My first thought for Joey's birthday present was to put together an audiotape of all the descriptions of carol services, staff entertainments, school fetes, bring and buy sales in a continuous loop. I am sure she would like that.....

Matron was a fully qualified nurse according to one of the earlier books. Other matrons had some nursing training but weren't fully qualified. Matron Venables had had five kids (although three died) so apparently that qualified her! Apparently it was the terrible climate in Queensland that caused their deaths and Primula's frailness. Makes you wonder how all the kids there now survive! I think it was more in the nature of a punishment for making an unsuitable marriage...

I never got why Dick and Molly had to leave their kids so young. In all other literature/the norm at the time was to send kids home to England when they were eight.

I have read Rosalie . I read it at the fricking weekend. You're not wrong, EmilyAlice, it must be boring if I can forget something I read four days ago. It's the one with the girly-girl forming a crush on the unsentimental gentleman, of course.

Well, that answers my own question - it's just an EBD inconsistency.

Hmm, food for thought on the godmother point Nell. The best theory I could come up with is that Joey wanted older, more life-experienced people as godp's to "guide" her daughters than her exact contemporaries; I don't know what the convention was in the 30s/40s for the type of person best considered to be fit for the role.

Yes, and lots of the other CS expats also keep their children with them much longer, don't they? Juliet, Gay, Jo Scott are all in 'the colonies' long past toddlerhood.

I always felt so sad about Margot Venables' story. Such a disproportionate punishment. :(

Emily the flaw in your plan is that someone will have to create, and check through, this topping audio concoction...

I quite like Rosalie - it's not one of my favourites and the title character doesn't much grab me, but I think it's quite a sweet little book and it ekes out the last few Armishire ones.

mopsy And I further couldn't understand why, when Peggy and Rix were dumped on left with Madge and Jem when they were little more than toddlers, and I can't even remember how old Bride was but I know she was v v young (did Mollie point her in-labour fanjo in the general direction of the Russells and shoot her straight out over the ocean into Madge's arms?) were Second Twins kept with them in India until they were eight? That might be more consistent with real-life conventions at the time but it leads to a situation suggesting that Maeve and Maurice were more loved / precious than the older ones as their parents, you know, looked after them themselves.

Ooh, another minor irritation I've just thought of! In a couple of books it's mentioned how Anna married Andre so they both got to stay in slavery service to Joey and Jack, and then there is a passing mention in either Gay from China, Tom Tackles or the forgettable Rosalie to their (unspecified) children joining the Maynard nursery. Yet in Three Go, when OOAOML starts playing with the Maynard "small fry" in the run-up to starting school, there is an idyllic pastoral scene where Anna sits placidly watching the Trips, Stephen and Charles (and OOAOML) fishing. Where are her kids? Not a mention of them. Are they sweeping the Plas Howells chimneys while their mother looks after the gentry children?

I always assumed they left Peggy and Rix and the others when they did because that was when they had had leave and they did not know when they would be in Europe next. I also assumed that the second twins did not get sent back due to the war. But my assumptions may be wildly off the mark ....

Also it wasn't Anna who married Andre. It was Marie?, Eigen's sister who was the first treasure in the kitchen....