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.

Gwensi, Daisy and Beth were a lovely trio.

I always thought it was a shame that whereas Daisy and Beth remained a part of the series ,Gwensi was just referred to casually now and then as 'keeping house for her brother'. Was that all she did with her life? It was strongly inferred, when she was a schoolgirl, that she would be a writer some day.

I've been reading all the CS books that are set in the war recently (currently up to Gay), does anyone know how they would have handled the food situation and rationing, would each child have to have handed in their ration books for the periods they were at school, this must have caused a huge administrative nightmare. I know rationing is mentioned on several occasions for clothing and food wise when they are making Simone's wedding cake, but in Gay for example they are just sitting down to scrambled eggs, would this have been reconstituted powdered eggs or because they lived in the country would it have been easier to get eggs. So many questions.

With the scrambled eggs in Gay, Jo tells Anna to "get two packets out of the store cupboard", so those must've been reconstituted or powdered. And yes, the ration books must've been a nightmare.

I think it was mentioned at some stage that the school had their own hens.

They also have their own honey - is that in Lavender?

I think there's a similar - perhaps even worse! - logistical problem once they move to Switzerland. Couldn't you only carry approx 50p across the border in those days? I suppose you could probably have dealt with school fees via the "English" branch but the CS must have looked like a money-laundering operation...

I wonder if sorting the rationing might have been quite straightforward - after all it would have applied to significant numbers of people living in various institutions? Can't imagine EBD thinking too closely about it - it's the kind of strategic detail she'd definitely want left in Karen's highly capable hands, whilst everyone senior frets about the fact that some new pupil is good at languages but hopeless at maths, or something.

I think you just handed over your ration book and whoever did the catering did the rest. There are lots of stories of landladies taking ration books and not serving the ration to lodgers. I think where you had larger groups some would register as vegetarian so you could get more cheese too.
Currency controls were tight. I remember when we took our DCs to France for the first time in the seventies that we were only allowed something like £80 for two weeks. We took lots of dried mince with us.

Wouldn't the school would have just taken everybody's ration book for the term duration, reported x-numbers of pupils and staff to the relevant authority and have been issued a bulk-ration order for the appropriate amount of everything. I can't imagine they did anything with each individual book other than stamp it as held by the school and returned at the end of each term.

Dried mince?

Interesting theory about Madge. I think one of the early books was dedicated to "My friend Madge Russell", and a fall out sounds as good an idea as any for the sidelining of the CS Madge.

Joey really is the epitomy of a spineless jellyfish whenever something happens to her. I think that's why her "empathy" when others have issues wears very thin to me.
The one that really got me was when she lectures Doris (I think) over keeping going for ML after her husband has been killed. She says something along the lines of "I knew I had to keep going for the triplets." No she did not! She collapsed, left the triplets to the teenage girls in her charge and didn't emerge from her room until after whichever twin had done her woo, and I'm not totally sure she didn't emerge until Jack returns.

I think boarding schools growing their own veg etc. must have been pretty usual. In my secondary (in the 80s) there was a patch of the school field known as the cabbage patch which apparently had been the veg area during the war.

I had assumed that Madge was sidelined as EBD had allowed Joey to take over so much of Madge's role that poor Madge just became superfluous.

It would have made more sense to keep Joey as a single, rather jolly schoolgirlish character cum popular children's writer; while Madge provided the family home and the looking after of waifs and strays from the school whose parents had forgotten all about them.

Would that have been quite subversive for the inter-war years, though? To have made her central heroine a happy and successful woman with no man in sight?

And YY DeWee on the hypocrisy of 'how one is supposed to behave upon the death of a husband'. Grr!

It would have been unusual, but would also have made Joey a much more stand outish character. I also think EBD might have been able to write about her more convincingly as a single woman than as a married and permanently pregnant mother.

I've been reading a load of old chalet school books whilst getting the DC to bed, and am glad to see I'm not the only one reading them still!

Does anyone know where I might find some e-copies of them? I have a few from a thread a while back, but have read them so many times now that if they were paper copies, they'd be falling apart!

Nell Joey wasn't interwar though really. She was really post war. EBD could have chosen to have occasional comments of "the man I loved was killed" which would actually have added to the depth of Joey, and given her more empathy.
I know EBD started the marrying off before the war was a reality, but I think it was fairly obvious how it was going, and even if she planned for Joey to marry she didn't have to marry her off so early.

Some should have registered as diabetic too - no sugar ration, but twice as much meat! Although perhaps that would have caused problems later on if the authorities wanted to know why you'd suddenly been cured from a disease that killed 100% of people with it until the 1920s

I remember reading Charlotte Sometimes as a kid, and being very struck at having to choose between having sugar or milk (or was it cream?) on it, but certainly not both!

Umm my great Aunt was diabetic (born about 1895) and lived until she was 90 ish, she did move to Canada when she was 20 (to get married).

I love Charlotte Sometimes! (sorry slightly off CS topic!)

mummytime should have specified - I meant type 1, and survival was limited to a few years at best until insulin was discovered and refined in the 20s.

Oh I loved charlotte sometimes too.

We are back to joeys famous empathy and understanding of death and grief when she hasn't and didn't suffer any bereavements herself at any point. Still a bloody expert.

I think Madge was the grown up sensible adult who got a bit gentle and sweet while Jo was always the eternal school girl.

Right cross now.

Just reading jane and Janice Chester has a mysterious rash they fear is small pox.

Now all the senior doctors are too busy to come so a young one just out if training comes.

All this when the highly qualified paediatrician Daisy Venables is visiting Jo next door.

Obviously she's no longer capable of diagnosing since her hymen went for a burton.

Grtrrrr.

On the Len/Reg front, though, there are lots of hints in the last few books that Len is thinking about marrying Reg. Think in Adrienne she has a conversation with Miss Annersley about marriage where Miss Annersley says to marry you need to remember that you'll be seeing the man at breakfast every morning, darning his socks etc. Not sure where she thought he would be spending the night if he only appeared at breakfast! Then it says something along the lines of "Len left the room with her future decided. It would need careful thinking over, but somehow she thought all her thinking would end in one way". The weird thing is that she barely encounters him to get to know him, as far as I can see!

In Chalet Girls Grow Up, they very much marry in haste and repent at leisure. Reg basically goes off Len, rapes her and then shacks up with Mary-Lou leaving Len pregnant with 4 kids already.

Btw, I promised a review of CGGU - will do it when I can get on laptop without constant interruptions from baby/toddler, neither of whom has learned to obey on the word from the cradle.

Maybe Daisy was not asked to see Janice in case it was small pox and she carried it back to her children and Joey's? (Sometimes I wonder if we overthink these things!!!!)

Maybe she thought Len was already sold on the night-time company and just hadn't thought through the rest of the deal?

The thing is though - and do correct me because I've barely done more than skim the last books - we get these repeated lines that Len is making up her mind to marry Reg, but no evidence as to how or why she might be doing so. Those same lines might as well have said that Len was making up her mind to elope with Emerence Hope, for all the sense or context they had.

Oh dear, I seem to be stitched into my cubicle. Better stay in bed all day I suppose...

On the bereavement of Doris Carey - surely in post-war Britsin she could find someone with actual experience of losing their husband to give advice? As opposed to someone living in Switzerland who she had barely seen in about 7 years?