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.

Ha! Joey actually somehow avoids partaking of any of the mountain expeditions and sends her children instead, who seem to either choose in advisable routes for the aged and unused to mountaineering, or else suffer very unfortunate luck in the manner befitting Joey's offspring.
Len and Grizel sort of simultaneously save each other's lives on one, which is a major part of Grizel's redemption. Bill sort of takes over the other, with great echoes of days gone by.

Jo is rather in her element as the hostess with the mostess but I didn't dislike her as emphatically as I do in most of the Swiss books I've read. They all tell each other how fat they've gotten - I think someone summed it up v well before by saying that first Corney tells Maynie how fat she's gotten and then Maynie immediately goes around telling everyone else "you're fat - you're fat - you're fat".

Grizel's romance is definitely one of the better ones and though on the whole I'd prefer Chalet happy endings to not so much focus on marrying a doctor, for Grizel it really is perfect - finally someone good to love her best! - and I am really pleased for her.

But none of it reads to me like much of a children's book. I definitely wouldn't have been interested in reading all these 40-year-olds reminiscing, grumbling about their knees, and falling slowly in love.

Slightly creepy moments include Jack and possibly Grizel's future husband pretending to Grizel that she's a bit more incapacitated than she really is, and a touch of the usual competitive child-rearing stuff (Biddy has just had a difficult birth with a big baby). Mary-Lou (who doesn't feature very much) is also unusually likeable in spite of her mother's death somehow being a school event. Bill appears to have morphed into Grumpy Old Wo/man. And it does definitely highlight how weirdly narrow life on the Platz is.

Bend your knees at each step my lamb. That's the ticket.

Yes agree I feel very sorry for Anna throughout the whole book. Pulling lettuces at 5am, makings in biscuits and tisanes for bloody hair wash.

This is why unions were invented.

Not sure if it's worse being called fat or as Joey greets Frieda after a few years my dear you look like a scarecrow and whats with
All the little lines in your face

WTAF.

Imagine though going to one of joeys radio parties! They were famous at the platz.

Agree Nell the telling Grizel she can't walk When she actually can. Keeping her under drugs for Neil.

Tbf, doesn't "famous on the Platz" only mean "known to the School (where Joey keeps gatecrashing staff meetings and lessons in her own inimitable way) and to the San (where Jack works)"? There's not anything else there, is there, apart from the School, the San, Freudesheim and the Courvoisier-Graves chalet which I can't remember the name of?

Bloody radio parties, though.

Maybe they were enlivened by some of Anna's home made fruit drinks which actually were alcoholic???

Oh I don't know. I would have thought wireless parties with a big antenna tuned to the BBC would have been beyond exciting. I can remember 45 people crammed into our front room to watch the Coronation on a 9" screen. Also my mother's rage when unexpected visitors arrived just as Grace Archer was meeting her end.
They knew how to have fun in those days.

I suppose it's the 1950s version of everyone coming round to watch a dvd now....

But the Platz is quite a place my lambs.

Ha ha yes I suppose during the war years the radio was vital for entertainment but the platz years are the 50s and surely Telly's were getting popular then. Still I
Guess everyone preferred charades And joeys golden voice.

Biddys/Hilary's place was Aldernest you runner neck four flushers!

My grandparents were the only people in the area with a radio when my mum was a child so on a big match day they would open the windows and put chairs out in the yard and all the men around the area would come and sit around and listen to the commentary.

Mind you that was the 40s not the 50s.

EmiliyAlice ha ha my mother still bangs on about Grace Archer too.

I remember out first colour telly. Must have been around 1974 and we all sat round and just stated at the colours which my dad had tuned up to be very very bright.

It broke down at least once a month and those days waiting for it to be repaired were sad sad days

Television started in Switzerland in the early fifties (according to Wiki), but only in German at first and only for an hour a day. Did they keep the language of the day rule in Freudesheim?
The poor things wouldn't have had English TV (no Groves, no Appleyards, no Whirligig, not even the interlude).
I remember going to southern Spain in the early nineties and being very excited that we could pick up Radio 4 from Gibraltar.

My mother always used to shake her head at us and say, "you don't ever have what I call fun".
Think this meant party games, musical evenings, dances, whist drives and variety shows.
No, Mum, we don't.

We didn't get coloured telly until 1989.

We had a great 8" black and white, with three volumes: Off, extremely loud (not allowed that generally) and intermittant. It needed thumping on the side from time to time to encourage it to get the nearest approximation to in tune it had, and we had to turn the knob to tune it.

I think we only got colour because we got my grandparents old one. Not sure if they offered it out of pity for us, or whether dgf liked to watch it when they came round for Sunday lunch and so wanted to watch it. My grandparents got their first TV to watch the coronation, and they got colour TV to watch Charles and Diana's wedding.

We used to get frustrated with Blue Peter who were always saying "what a great colour". I doubt many people noticed it, but they said it so often we used it as a catchphrase as much as "here's one I made earlier".
But df heard the commentator say during a snooker match: "For those of you with black and white TVs, the pink one is next to the brown." He was amused anough to come through and tell us. We spent the next 10 minutes playing "guess the colour of the ball".
Actually when we had only black and white we were pretty good at being able to tell the colours. I don't think I'd be able to now, but back then we were able to tell fairly well.
And I never understood how he could watch golf on it. The fuzzing we constantly had on that TV were about the same size (and white) as the ball so I never could tell what was the ball and what was the fuzz. But I think he mainly used it to get us quiet, because he used to tell us that we had to be quiet or we'd distract the golfers. We never quite believed him, but weren't certain enough for many years to dare to make a noise when the golf was on.

Well, aren't you all a bunch of foundation stones from the Middle Ages.

I've worked out the optimal triplet godmothers: she should have chosen Robin, Frieda and Marie. Not only is Robin her most darling of darlings, it's also the perfect way to gratuitously snub Simone. Why did she not do this?

I'm also trying to work things out about Grizel. I wonder if EBD always intended to give her a happy ending and make a True Chalet Girl of her eventually, or if she decided to do so much later? In some ways the early Grizel is very deliberately a perfect foil to early Jo, and I can't get a grasp on what EBD really makes of her. None of it feels haphazardly thrown together, or retconned.
But if she really does fully understand Grizel, in all her complexity and often downright unpleasantness, does she really not understand or recognise the considerable downsides of adult Jo?

Also, is it too much to wonder at the projection involved in killing off ML's mother at such a convenient moment? ML is otherwise facing possibly a very similar spinster experience to what (afaik) we know about EBD's. Is EBD deliberately sparing her that?

Did Mary Lou get married after her mother died? I always thought she remained single (although not necessarily a 'spinster' in the stereotypical sense).

Nell

I think Grizel was a good guaranteed second pupil for the Chalet School, because not many people would be happy for their child to swan off into a foreign country with a friend who had just said "I think I'll set up a school".
But I think EBD didn't really know what to do with her after that.

She seems often to be there so Joey can seem better:
Runs away: Joey goes and rescues her
Suggests to Joey they run off to look at the waterfalls: Joey says it isn't honest and won't do it.
Sets Len on fire carelessly: Joey is forgiving...

She's a huge contradiction in a lot of ways. She's always described as "hard" but look at the way she is with Cookie, she's desperate to be loved and included with the Bettanies, and keeping her grandmother's letter plus being so forgiving to Diera, is all quite kind.
Then we have the not really musical but able to get to a high standard enough to teach. Doesn't really sound likely.
Plus the teachers are caught at one point saying that they're sorry for her pupils and she gets "brilliant" result, but only by fear, which also is unlikely. What would happen in reality is that either she wouldn't get many pupils continuing or pupils would do okay but not brilliantly.

And also, why couldn't the Chalet School employ her as a music cum sports teacher? They knew what she wanted, they knew she wasn't happy, so why couldn't they have said to her something along the lines of "look, would you like to do lacrosse in the winter and tennis in the summer, and just do some private piano lessons in the evenings". Couldn't Madge/Miss A who knew she was struggling have offered that? Even as a child I thought that was pretty mean of them.

Oh, no (and I like to hope she never did) - I wasn't very clear. I meant that she's the only child of a widow and it looks, until Mrs Trelawney/Carey conveniently dies, as though ML will have to jack in her own career/travel/life plans and be the spinster daughter living at home and caring and providing for her mother. This is a 'thing', isn't it? I can think of a number of women I know of ML's generation who seemed to face this sort of existence.

That's true. Maybe the thought of ML bossing her around made Doris decide to give up the struggle and go quietly to meet her maker.

By the way, I've never read the Antonia Forest books and have just ordered Autumn Term from Abe Books. Is it as brilliant as the rave reviews on Goodreads say?

Oh, I can imagine pupils doing brilliantly for a teacher they were frightened of. It would lack the passion or 'musicality' of something they enjoyed for someone they admired, but I can imagine learning not only to be note-perfect but also to create at least a sort of veneer of 'musicality' to avoid getting on the wrong side of Grizel. (I suspect much the same is probably true for Herr Anserl.) But she's also contradictory in this way as a teacher, too - in Gay she's v much on Gay and Jacynth's side and gives them the music room to use, when Miss Bubb is trying to stop them. I love her contradictions - I find them very believable. You can see exactly how she became who she is. And I really feel for her on those times where she gets it wrong and then feels all rejected - like when she wants to be Jo's chief bridesmaid, or when she's in love with the man in NZ who is in love with Deira. :(

I don't think she could have informally become a PT mistress without the training - there seems to be a big emphasis on 'remedials' in the books, and one of the PT mistresses takes on a bit of science teaching for a while - presumably in Gay before Nell comes back. But I don't understand why Miss Annersley (?) can lend her the money to set up shop in NZ but not the same money to train for PT.

Oh and another by the way - am I the only poster who feels embarrassed to let people know they still enjoy reading school stories? I've only really got back into them in the last few months but feel exactly the way I did when I was about 10. Dying to get my hands on the next one and the next and kind of wishing the world was a bit like that, really.

Jeeze, as a non sporty kid I would hate to have had Grizel screaming at me as I tried to master tennis or lacrosse

OOAOVJ! That's not a very Chaletian thing to say!

Oh and another by the way - am I the only poster who feels embarrassed to let people know they still enjoy reading school stories? I've only really got back into them in the last few months but feel exactly the way I did when I was about 10. Dying to get my hands on the next one and the next and kind of wishing the world was a bit like that, really.

YY. I know exactly what you mean. I tell v few people! I have a birthday coming up soonish (pls start practising your singing immediately) and am usually useless at wanting for anything, and atm I think I would really really like a couple of dust-jacketed CS books, wouldn't that be a nice present - but it is both too complicated and too embarrassing to ask. And my small collection sort of ought to be out on a shelf but is currently festering in the wardrobe...

On the plus side, there is this thread, which is simply topping.