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.

My mum (born in the 1940s) is a Gillian, so it never struck me as particularly unusual tbh.

So what would we call today's Chalet School girls? I'm assuming we wouldn't be featuring many Zzythaigfkslghe (pronounced Amy) among them...

I remember being very puzzled reading Lintons as a child that Gillian was considered unusual, but Joyce wasn't. I'd never met a Joyce! So I concluded that I'd misread and muddled the two. I've met a couple of Rosalyns but never a Rosalie. I think Rosamund is a beautiful name.

Today's Chalet girls? Well, they'd have to feature some variations on Josephine for starters. The odd Josefina, maybe? And I was reading that medieval names are making a comeback, so they could be double-barrelled to fit. Step forward Elvina-Joey, Josephine-Millicent, Mildred-Marguerite and Kendra-Jo.

I wonder if ML's contemporaries would have called their children after her?

I briefly settled on Rosalie as my maybe-one-day future daughter's name last week, but then I realised it wouldn't work well with my surname (begins with L). (I am not actually busy, nor likely to be in the near future, but have had an eye out for likely girls' names since a particular newsworthy caliphate stole the name I had had in mind for years...) Better go for Josephine, then.

I called my daughter Eleanor...I persuaded DH it was not after EBD as the spelling was different!!!

I allowed ex-'D'P to talk me out of calling DD1 Cornelia. The relationship was doomed after that.

I think Chalet school girls would have the old traditional names thathave come back in, mixed with some names that come from different languages.

And of course there would be so many Josephine Marys as the third generation is named after her (including the ones who went to the school round the corner and only met Jo once) that they would either have to be numbered or known by their surname.

Chalet school girls are timeless and exist in some alternative universe where sixteen year old girls still wear velveteen frocks on a Saturday night and are engaged, a year later, to a doctor they've met half a dozen times.

So I think they would be called timeless names like Anne, Helen, Catherine, Sarah and Jane. And yes, there would be lots of Josephines, Josies, Joannes and Jolenes in memory of HRH.

My DH's mother (she died young) was Rosalie, and got her name from someone at a posh house her father visited.
I've known a couple of Staceys, not sure if they were Eustacia for long.
Godfrey sounds 1920/30s ish, I'm pretty sure I knew some of that generation.
I know some little Cecilies and Cecilias.
I went to school with lots of Gillians.

Yes EBD called herself Patricia Marquita for a while. Its in the biography I think, and evidence from one of the schools she taught at I think.

I think if I ever had a daughter, I would have to use the CS books as my baby names books, since I find it really easy to find boys names I like, but not girls.

I've never met a Josephine, but know several Joanna's, and a little girl in my Sunday School class is Josephina, known as Josie.

I love Rosalie - it was on my girls shortlist but DH vetoed, My mother had an friend called Rosalie who would be in her 80s now.

DD1's best friend is a 4 year old Cecily. Actually looking through DD1's reception school list (east London state school) there are a lot of names that I imagine would feature in a modern Chalet School - Freya, Ella, Audrey, Willow, Ivy, Iris, Grace, Clara and so forth.

Hmmmmm. In Lintons, Jo has a free period and is therefore in the library to overhear Thekla, Joyce and co winding up Miss Norman in the remedial French class. The prefects discuss whether they can informally set up a rota amongst themselves to always be in the library during this lesson, but everybody else is in Art at that time - the reason Jo isn't being that she no longer takes Art due to winding up Herr Laubach. I'm sure that's not meant to be ironic, but...

BUT Jo wound up Herr Laubach by just not being any good at Art, as I recall. Joyce and Thekla were being deliberately awful.

Hmm, not quite so innocent:
"At the last lesson, Jo, who had wakened that morning in a bad temper, had lost her patience, never very great, and had done her level best to annoy him. She had dropped her rubber, broken the points of her pencils; dug the lead so deeply into the paper that there were no hope of rubbing out wrong lines – which were plentiful! - and had made such an appalling mess of the freehand design he had given her, that he had lost his head, and picking up pencils, rubber, and paper, had flung them at her. At the same time he had vowed that she was too utterly stupid to continue; where-upon Jo, very much on her dignity, had risen and left the room. What was more, she ad refused to return. And when the infuriated man had stalked off to Mademoiselle with the whole story, that lady informed that, since Jo was such a persecution – it was his won expression – she had better stop the lessons. She could do extra mathematics in the time. Exit Herr Laubach, partially appeased!"

I had a maths teacher who threw the board rubber and pens at people who were annoying him. This was in the late 90s. I'm always v struck by these things which should feel v outdated but actually probably still aren't extinct!

Actually I recently read a book which showed just how attitudes to child care have changed, it was a junky spy novel published in 1969.
A widow arrives to stay with friends who she hasn't seen for 9 years or so, she is accompanied by her son of 3. Her hosts have 4 children, she tells them they can only meet her son 2 at a time. When the two who are shut out bang on the door, she slap them on the face.
Then when she tells her friend that she slaped her kids, the friend says "Did you? oh good! Tell Nannie Mack to beat the hell out of them if they are any bother to her."

Later on in the book they are all telling a young husband that he needs to "slap" his wife if she becomes argumentative or emotional or talks to much about his work for the secret service.

EBD sounds positively modern compared to that.

There is such a wealth of knowledge on here, cannot someone go on. "Mastermind" with the CS as special subject? It surely would be possible to restrict the scope to the "Tirol novels of EBD" as being more manageable. Plenty of chosen subjects, particularly those about sports or pop groups, strike me as very narrow and often spurious. We could do better.

I think it has been done. Or some other similar author. I remember being a little that I did better in those questions than I'd done in either the general knowledge (dh always does brilliantly on those) or any other specialist subject.

No no no DeWee, you should be proud!

Similar author, DeWee? That does not count. We want the genuine goldplated CS subject, with the contender wearing a lime green outfit.

I'm fairly sure it has been done before - 'the books and life of EBD' or something. But definitely lime green is called for, and earphones too. Actually didn't OOAOVJ have a very fetching lime green makeover from Joey not that long ago? Perfect contender!

Forbidden books in the CS: in Rivals, the St Scholastika's girl who wrote the letter to the King of Belsornia also has an 'inappropriate' book in her desk, which is never named. This is annoying because it means we can't now laugh at GWTW being thought shockingly risqué, but I suppose quite clever of EBD - means the reader fills in her own gaps, plus she's not promoting Temptingly Bad Books, I guess. In (I think) Lintons Thekla also has an unnamed Inappropriate Book. I wonder what Thekla's choice of bad book would be? Struggling to picture her tolerating soppy smut - almost liking to wonder if it would have been something more political? There is a comment about her brother coming under the influence of 'young Germany'...

Mastermind was discussed on CBB here:
www.the-cbb.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=9592

Also I found this quote In 1992, fandom was acknowledged in the mainstream media - and thus became visible for the first time - when university librarian Barbara Inglis took as her specialist subject "The Life and Chalet School Novels of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer" on the BBC television quiz programme Mastermind. in an article about fans of Girls' school stories.

I was about to say "bloody hell, I was only five" but then I clicked on the CBB link and see some people on there who were even younger/not yet born, and I don't feel as special any more. This must be how Joey makes all mothers of twins feel...

I have somehow always imagined that the risqué book was "The Blue Lagoon" by Henry de Vere Stacpoole.
It was published in 1908. My mother told me she got into terrible trouble for reading it under the bedclothes.
It is about young and innocent shipwrecked brother and sister who end up having a baby.

I was 9! Nell, you're just a baby.

Have persuaded my DSis to go halves on Monica Turns Up Trumps, which is £19.99 on Amazon. Just waiting for Friday (payday!) to order it.

Henry de Vere Stacpoole must be a nom de plume, surely! It's too caste of Vere de Vere to be anything else.

In Trials, Naomi is reading Humphrey Clinker, and Mary-Lou doesn't think they're exactly supposed to read that sort of thing at school. I have no idea what's so adult about it - anyone read it? I was stunned to see that the book someone (Jennifer whatsit) has smuggled in during The Wrong CS is Forever Amber! It's cut out of the Armada version.

My specialist subject would have to be the earlier books - up to about Gay From China. After that my knowledge is patchier. The difficulty is that I know some of them as the Armada version and some as the unabridged one. I am having this overwhelming urge to re-read them all from the beginning again now...