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.

Morning all
Have just finished the two Sams (not one of the better ones imo) and moved on to Althea. We suddenly seem to have acquired Marie-Claire in the nursery. When and how did that happen?
EBD really couldn't capture the speech of young children could she? All the random lisping and letter substitution.

you can't afford to neglect even the first weeks of a babies life

Yep that's the time to install discipline so it's ingrained and of course that's what I did. Ha ha bloody ha.

I agree Nell I don't think Madge would have insisted Josette give up St Mildred's either. More likely she would have enjoyed just having the grown up Sybil to herself after missing her for all that time in Canada when she was left with Jo.

Marie Claire is adopted by Jo after her parents are killed in a train crash. Jo dies to think the remaining relatives are up to scratch so basically steals her.

Yes to the lisping 4 year olds. Talk properly.

And I want to be a weather prophet like Bill and know that if the moon is tipping or the clouds are ragged whisps it's going to ruin the sale or cause a flood.

I just look on google.

What have we lost here.

Ha! I never entirely understand whether that's supposed to be a Guiding skill or a random talent from God. Jo has it too, doesn't she?

I also find the 'toddler' speech (and also the way Flora and Fauna Fiona talk) really grating. I have a suspicion it's actually edited from the Armadas and is about the only thing they got right!

Sometimes I wish I'd instilled a bit of instant obedience in my toddler when he was a newborn... Other times I just wish to be sent off to Penny Rest.

Marie Claire appears along with Erica, but then disappears for a couple of books (is definitely not in the Nursery at one point) but then suddenly appears again. It really needs a sentence to explain who they farmed her out to while Phil is recovering from Polio.

I always wondered what the point of Marie Claire is:
Joey expanding her family... she could have always had those quads.
Joey showing her ability to "mother anyone"... to me it actually shows total calousness (if there is such a word) towards both Marie Claire and her family, she decides she's going to try and keep her pretty much from the off.
Give Erica a special bond... well that's quickly forgotten isn't it?

Mind you Erica is totally off the wall too. Of course everyone who came into contact with Joey for 5 minutes automatically leaves their children to Joey as guardian and names their children after her-including middle name. How many of your school friend's middle names do you know?

And my next story is: Joey and the Social Services investigation

Lots of weather sayings:
Red sky at night; shepherds' delight.
Red sky in the morning; shepherds' warning.

Rain at seven; fine before eleven

And if "last night the moon had a golden ring, tonight no moon we see" there's going to be a storm.

Ooh, DeWee the weather-wise!

I'm trying to imagine what it must be about Joey that makes people want to leave their children with her (aware in doing so that this is not something EBD's target audience would ever have wondered). I mean, is it the tendency to be packed off to bed for days on end following any shock? Is it the enormous lovely dog bouncing along behind her? Is it the way she launches immediately into a story from her own schooldays, at length, of no relevance and surely only limited interest to whoever she hopes is listening? Why would any of these make you think 'aha! Perfect guardian'? It must be something about Anna and Rosli instead, surely.

I mean, even when Madge is collecting waifs and strays left right and centre (which makes sense - Madge is always very motherly, trustworthy, interested in what other people have to say, etc) it is only in relatively plausible situations - death of actual parents (Joey, Robin), opportunism of parents who just want to abandon their child anywhere (Juliet, Grizel to some extent - through Madge's role as headmistress), and she is the obvious choice (ie is the Bettanys' actual aunt, is Jo's sister). Even if I stop to consider, quite reasonably, that Jo does have a number of appealing traits even if they're not things I personally value much, I'm still not much persuaded by Jo as this super-mother type. And I think she could be considered a perfectly competent and loving mother of her own enormous brood without needing to also compulsively mother everyone else's children too - lots of mothers are like that, and it's consistent with her adoration of Robin in the earlier books - her maternal nature is discriminating IMO.

If EBD had continued writing after Prefects, do you think Jo would have had any more children of her own? I feel like she'd definitely ended her family at eleven, but she must be only 40, give or take a year.

I suspect that Joey would have had her quads as the last ones if EBD had continued. Just so everyone could shriek about how wholesale Joey was. After all, I think every other time she (or anyone else) says they hope for twins next they get them.

I think to me the sad thing about "Joey mothering eveyone" is she doesn't really even mother her own family.
Admittedly, some of it is the era it's set in, but even when the triplets are little I get the impression that she "pats them on the head and sends them off to bed" is her extend of mothering.
We dont' really see her doing much what I would regard as mothering. Sort of picking them up and rubbing their knees when they fall type thing. Even when we see them having what might be called a "heart to heart" it's often quite contrived, and she comes across as bringing them in to tell them something specific rather than just a cuddly chat. I'm thinking of the time I think just after she's had one of the babies, I think Cecilie, and she calls the triplets in one by one to talk, and at the end she regards herself in a self-satisified way and decides she's helped them all by her little talk.

Partly playing Devil's Advocate -

• mightn't EBD have decided that her readership didn't want to see much detail of Joey's parenting, unless it helped the plot along in some way? (So, being tired from a run of difficult nights with teething baby leads to meeting Annis' aunt at Penny Rest, doing the showy "look at my charming offspring and La Maison des Poupees, come and help me bathe my littlest baby" to introduce readers to Problem New Girl and Jo's central role in the Chalet School - these are fine, but actual mention of parenting is a waste of words which could be better spent on Sales and Nativities.)

• there is a big emphasis on Jo as 'a mother who is a friend, almost a sister'. I do find this really problematic and, combined with her general selfishness/ absence of any proper parenting, it just looks neglectful - but that's a hugely modern reading I think? In its actual time, wouldn't this have made her look like a more fun, understanding (!!) and enviable mother?

I always think the quads was, even to EBD, just a joke - a reminder of how very impressive an 'achievement' triplets were. But then I look at space travel and motorboat and remember that sometimes a joke can be taken too far or too seriously. I wonder if Len getting engaged sort of marks Jo's progression to a next stage, even if it's years til any actual wedding or babies.

I thin EBD had a rather innocent childlike view of motherhood. Sort of like children playing 'mummy and daddy'. So we got lots of scenes of her taking the children for a walk, popping into the nursery when they were having their tea etc but very little of the real nitty gritty of motherhood (apart from the odd reference to her being tired because a baby was teething).
We never saw her being ratty with her children, or impatient with them, or feeling guilty because the need to meet a writing deadline was keeping her away from them. And we never saw the practical difficulties of sorting out so many children and balancing their different needs. And the children never really fought with each other or were jealous of a new baby or anything like that. It was all very jolly and happy and hand them over to a nanny/relative whenever she liked.

TBH I really don't think EBD had much of a clue about very small children. She doesn't really bring them to life on the page at all. The way they talk is ridiculous and any 'naughtiness' is contrived and cute so that Joey can 'howl with laughter' later.
Sybil was the only small child she gave any real dimension to.

See, I feel like I have quite a clear sense of the dynamics in the Die Rosen nursery, with Peggy and Rix and Bride and Sybil (agree though that Sybil is the best developed of these - ironic that IMO EBD then loses her thread a bit with her as she grows older).
There is a quite sweet bit at the beginning of Camp where Rix is asking Elisaveta's father where his crown is, and he responds quite seriously in a way that rather feels to me as if EBD was accustomed to seeing (even taking part in?) similar exchanges herself - I didn't think it felt contrived. I may be being biased because I really like the NKB picture of this scene though.

Would any of EBD's contemporaries really have mentioned the challenges of motherhood? Come to think of it, do books for children make much mention of them now? I can't think of any examples really, but then I don't currently have much to do with this age group so why would I... I do think it's interesting that sibling rivalry seems to be rarely addressed, especially since schoolgirl jealousies (Simone, Margot) seem to be good fodder. I suppose you could argue that Margot not wanting Len to have other best friends is a sibling issue, and it is v interesting in the context of her 'long' family (and her time abroad alone), but it's definitely presented as a school issue.

I've been re-reading a lot of older children's books eg. Rebecca of Sunnybrook farm. And what has stood out in them is just how much they talk about things which would concern adults but children wouldn't be much interested in. Eg. in Rebecca of ... they talk about how much of a failure her father had been, and of Mr Simpson's failings. There are also some very telling bits, such as Rebecca doesn't realise you need a Mummy and a Daddy to get a baby (despite living on a farm).

I wonder if EBD had less to do with real small children and families as she got older, so had less source material to use.

I agree Nell that any indepth analysis of a mother's role wouldn't have had a place in a children's book. But EBD gives a kind of idealised version of motherhood which you don't see in a lot of children's books. For instance in the William books you often see that Mrs Brown is totally exasperated by William and at a loss as to how to deal with him. You also see her exhorting his older brother and sister to be nicer to him.
In Malory Towers you see how Sally's mother became so absorbed with her new baby that she made Sally feel totally excluded and miserable.
In Noel Streatfeild books mothers are often tired or struggling or seen to favour one child over another.
It's that kind of thing that's missing from Joey's persona and makes her family feel rather flat and uninteresting.

Yes, that's true. So, yes, the problem in the later CS books stems from the increasingly idealised presentation of Jo in particular, since she accounts for a large part of the representation of motherhood in the series.

By contrast, Sybil's difficulties are (sort of) shown to arise from the family relationships she's born into (her mother's five zillion wards, her prettiness as her distinguishing feature which is too much fawned over, and sometimes - I think - a reluctance on Madge's part to discipline her); someone else pointed out previously an occasion where Maeve Bettany is resistant to Peggy's authority and Bride steps in to make it easier; Jessica Wayne is jealous of her mother's attention to her disabled step-sister, until OOAO helps her see the light; a very sympathetic reading of Grizel's stepmother is possible, though I'm not sure how sanctioned - but she has been tricked into stepmotherhood and though my greatest sympathies are with Grizel, I think this is hard lines too; Jacynth Hardy's aunt works herself into a (very!) early grave providing for her niece; and - I'm sure this isn't how we're supposed to read it, but I can't see any other way - Mollie Bettany is a really odd and self-indulgent mother who randomly keeps Maeve off school for a while to keep her company because she misses Peggy.

So it doesn't hold up - it's not a simple inability/ lack of interest in acknowledging difficult family dynamics, imperfect and overstretched mothers etc - it's just the Joey Must Be Perfect syndrome again, I am now convinced.

This reminds me of something else I've been thinking about lately, actually - girls who have to give up their own dreams to look after their mothers. Repeatedly, EBD nearly explores this but then solves it quickly again - Peggy gets to go back to St Mildred's when a sister of Mollie's steps in, Elfie also gets to go back to school in the end, ML's mother dies so she can go and be an archaeologist after all, Josette and Sybil have to accompany Madge to Australia but both meet their husbands in so doing. However EBD truly felt about her own lot, it must have felt close to the bone to write these, and I can't think of a single occasion where the girl is actually permanently lumbered with the long-term responsibility after all.

Oh and mummytime that reminds me a bit of EBD's repeated references to the details of child-spacing! I can't quite work out what they are there for, but they are very deliberately there, and I find them fascinating now but never noticed them as a child.

I agree that it is more a case that EBD strove to express "Joey must be perfect and a foil for the missing/feckless/unsuitable parents and guardians" rather than it being a complete lack of ability on her part to write less-than-ideal relationships. In addition to the varying degrees of dysfunction listed above in other families, isn't there sibling jealousy amongst the Chester girls - is it Barbara who suffers from this?

Having said that, EBD does make it quite hard for us to see Joey as The Perfect Parent at times, for example in Mary-Lou, when Joey camps out in OOAO's room for days after the accident rather than go to her own daughter who has cried herself sick.

On another tack, one thing I have noticed during my re-reading of the transcripts are the repeated hints that Joey breastfeeds. There's the bit about her having to "cast" the triplets which, while an odd construction, can only mean stopping breastfeeding them from the context, and in one of the slightly later books something is happening outside which Joey can't immediately participate in because she has gone upstairs to feed one of the babies - I can't remember which one, possibly Michael? One of the boys, definitely - and she is impatient to find out what is going on but there is a reference to her being "tied", which again strongly suggests breastfeeding to me; if he was just having a bottle there would be no need for her to sequester herself away and not be able to take him outside to join the conversation.

I imagine that for its time and in a children's book, that was quite a daring / unusual allusion to make.

I'm with Nell in that the Die Rosen nursery has character, and a good one too. You can see Rix trying to rule the roost, Sybil resenting it, David swithering between knowing he should keep the peace (with Peggy) and wanting to team up with David. Really realistic.

I have no sense on Joey's nursery. Even the bits we see, the only character is that Margot has a temper and likes her own way, which never changes. And then later the younger ones rely on Len more than anyone else.

Not so much with babies, but with older children you do get characters with a less rosy view on parenthood.
Enid Blyton doesn't always have everything in the garden's lovely about motherhood. It's not her main character series, but I can think of a couple of books where the mother is ill and struggling to do everything-Family at Redroofs has dad ill, and mum and grandmother running themselves into the ground to keep the children happy, it's a lovely idealic childhood book in a lot of ways. Six Cousins (long time since I read that) I think had a lot of mother intervention in difficult situations But I think she had her mothers either not there or pretty involved.
Monica Edwards has Tamzin's parents debating whether to spank Diccon when he's having a temper tantrum (Summer of the Great Secret), and Mrs Grey is fairly hands on with the children. You see a few times where she's clearly unsure as to the best thing to do
No boats on Bannermere has the struggles of a single mum with little income.

Yes Nell, it's that idealised portrayal of Joe that becomes a bit annoying. In the earlier books where she's casually carting the triplets around it's not too bad, because she's still not that far removed from her schooldays and also hasn't got into competitive pregnancy mode.
But as the series move on it does become a bit irritating. There should be more rough and tumble among the children, and teasing of each other, and Joey intervening and sometimes just losing her patience and telling them all to get out of her sight.
And the dynamics of a large family are never really explored. The boys are just background material, conveniently 'away at school' once they get a bit older. And the next girl in the family, Felicity, is younger enough than the triplets not to have to be shown engaging with them that much. The family just never comes to life in the books and we never really see Joey as a realistic mother. Just this perfect person opening her arms to all and sundry and running some kind of unofficial orphanage with herself as a heroic, but strangely uninvolved, figure.

I think the jealousy in the Chester family came from Beth on the birth of Barbara who was a delicate baby needing a lot of attention. EBD refers a couple of times to the fact that Beth's character was becoming 'warped', which seems rather an unpleasant description of a little girl's jealousy of a baby sister.

I wonder more and more whether EBD did in fact fall out of love with Joey fairly early on but still believed - perhaps correctly - that she was the necessary glue to hold the series together. She definitely seems to be unable to make her family or her daily life very convincing IMO - I really have no sense of what Freudesheim is like, whereas Die Rosen feels v familiar. (This is perhaps simply my own bias as I am much better versed in the Tyrol books than the Swiss ones, so please correct me!) Perhaps this stems from not wanting to present Joey as flawed in any way, or perhaps the causality is the other way round and she keeps asserting that Jo is loved, loving, motherly, understanding etc in the absence of feeling able to convincingly portray her any way at all. Maybe that's really unfair of me. I'm still mulling it over. The series seems to me to shift from a labour of love in the first, say, twenty books, to something more cynical. Whereas Blyton I think is only ever cynical but works with that - it's the shift (as I perceive it) that interests me.

On breastfeeding, I've been re-reading Goes To It shiny new GGB copy and am interested in the breastfeeding on the journey to England: it first becomes apparent because it is incompatible with her life jacket, which Nigel wants her to wear all the time. She says something like "well, I fed them just before we left, so they'll be alright for a few hours yet at least", which I understand in terms of scheduled feeds as would have been in fashion, but it's a two-day journey so I'm not sure what's supposed to happen next. Most confusingly, though, is that eventually when she collapses from uselessness nervousness, Frieda and Bill give the babies their bottles. Was Jo mixed feeding? Did they have bottles just in case? How much of the kitchen sink exactly were they carting with them? And then when she 'casts' her babies, Frieda comments on how nice they look with their spoons and cups, which confuses me as to what the relationship would have been between stopping milk feeds and introducing solids - at six months, would she not have started them on solids if they were still on the breast? In my v modern mindset, I can see a relationship between breast and bottle, but not how sweet they look with spoons having anything to do with Jo being reluctant to wean. It's an interesting moment, though, and I wondered if EBD knew someone who'd also medically had to stop sooner than they'd have liked, if in less dramatic circumstances.

I'm not sure whether it would have been a daring allusion, though, if bf was the norm at the time? She is remarkably discreet about it - I think it's also the point in Gay when Stephen is crying for her and 'only Jo would do', but I first read that as simply being that only his mother's comfort was good enough, rather than him being due a feed which is what I now assume it means. She also mentions a number of difficult births, which I suppose must similarly have been part of the fabric of life back then - Madge has I think at least two difficult births (I want to say David and Josette but I may be wrong), and also Biddy, in Reunion. Jo, of course, seems to bounce back immediately, as all delicate souls do. (What is meant by these 'difficult' births, btw? PPH? Forceps?)

I wonder if EBD actually came to regret marrying Jo off so dramatically in Exile. It worked for the next few books, but then I felt EBD would rather have had her as someone who could devote her time to the school and its pupils and become a kind of big sister/counsellor to unhappy or troublesome pupils. By landing her with triplets and then with a couple more babies by the time the war had ended and the school moved again, she had backed herself into a corner and had to keep going with Jo as a schoolgirlish mother of a 'long family'.
But I agree with you Nell, she didn't really seem to be convinced of Joey in that role or to be able to show, rather than tell, us that she was this warm maternal figure. Maybe that's why the Maynards never really ring true as a family, in the way the Lucys or the Chesters, and even the Bettanys and Russells, do.

Incidentally, and this is a question about the times rather than these books in particular, I wonder about these breastfeeding babies Jo is able to carry around quietly between feeds, when those feeds are so spaced out. When mine was six months, he would cry and forcibly position himself for nursing if I was trying to avoid feeding immediately, and would not stop until fed. I can theoretically understand babies adjusting to a schedule, especially when they're not actually in their mothers' arms at the time, but I can't really imagine it overriding the biological imperative to nurse as often as possible when they are being held by their mother, can smell her milk etc.

But then my 2yo, who I failed to teach discipline as a newborn, will still stick an opportunistic hand down my top if the fancy strikes him... Maybe not all nurslings are as bloody insistent.

I wonder if that's the role she would eventually have had ML fulfil? I know ML supposedly has other plans but she seems to lurk around the Platz far more than is necessary, as if she is definitely destined for something more than being the 'charmingly irrepressible' one to keep the HG throne warm til Len got there...
In some of the earlier books it sounds as if EBD - or at least Jo - expected that to happen, rather than marriage: I think it's in New House that Jo rather dismally prophesies that she will be helping out in the Die Rosen nursery as a sort of writer / maiden aunt type, and you can see her trying this on for size in Jo Returns. But then, there are also early hints that Jack is being set up as love interest (esp that creepy bit in Camp where Jem tells her to 'say something pretty' to Jack)...

I guess she (inevitably?) backed herself into a lot of corners as time went on - all those Maynard-Bettany-Russell girls destined for prefectdom, all those Old Girls returning to teach, the mad isolation of the Platz where there is nothing to do but marry doctors and reminisc about the Dark Ages... Could she have done otherwise? As I understand it EJO's stories move away from the school setting quite rapidly, and nobody else seems to cover the same length of time - EB's school series both running to 6 (?) books, Dimsie to 9(?) etc.

Yes, it's easy to look across the entire series and see the weaknesses and the points at which she might have taken a better direction. But at the time she probably didn't foresee how difficult it would be to give all those Maynard-Bettany-Russell daughters strong personalities and storylines of their own, or to write convincingly about Joey in her multiple roles as earth mother/great writer/school counsellor/eternal schoolgirl, or to recreate the right atmosphere in the rather sterile Swiss location she relocated the school to.
I think though that less would definitely have been more where the books were concerned, both in number of books written and number of characters and locations introduced.

My mother had my sister in the thirties and was hugely influenced by the guru of the day who was Truby King. Very strict routines of feeding every four hours and not a minute before, leave them to cry it out, put them out in the fresh air in all weathers except fog, hold them over the potty every day at regular times from birth and teach them who is boss from day 1. My sister was apparently out of nappies at nine months. She had eased off a bit by the time I was born, but still used to say, "put that baby down, you'll make a rod for your own back" to me in the seventies. I can see this method of childrearing in a lot of what Joey does and says.
I think it was quite common to go from breastfeeding to a cup without ever using bottles.