Autumn Term at the Chalet School

[Vintagejazz]

Just starting a new thread here as I can't spot a new one.

So my lambs feel free to keep spreading the hanes, but watch the slang!

I am coming to the conclusion that she was obsessed with the colour green. Everyone's wearing it constantly, irl no one wears that much green!

I've always wondered about humping the mattresses too, it takes two of us to turn ours, no way can it be humped.

www.wisearchive.co.uk/projects/education-and-training/305/
www.wisearchive.co.uk/projects/education-and-training/311/

This lady also tells a fascinating tale of 1940s boarding school , complete with one or two hair raising adventures that might have inspired EBD.

I love the interweb, how would I have learnt so much random stuff with out it. Tho maybe if I had been a chaletian rather than a montpelierite I would have had a cosmopolitan education and thus had my fill of random stuff earlier in life. I'd probably have got stuck in interV for year tho, as I wasn't the smartest cookie in the box at school. Especially at languages.

I was passing M&S yesterday and realised that Joey has been hired as a designer. Here is an example of one of her designs. There was a whole window filled with similar shade items:
www.marksandspencer.com/best-of-british-pure-wool-cocoon-overcoat/p/p22337609

That coat would ( of course) look fantastic with dark hair cut in a very straight heavy fringe and plaited into ear phones .

Just been reading your link UniS and it's so interesting.

It's just like the CS but kids are homesick and the food is crap.

Definatly home sickness is mentioned in the early CS books although not the later ones.

DeWee my lamb we can all aspire to lime green but can you make your dresses and hats match?

No evening boating for you then.!

On and the CS had cubicles. Of course. Poppy and gentian violet anyone?

Ooh, how very timely for lime green to be (back?) in fashion!

Loving your links UniS, thank you.

I think there is a homesick girl among the triplets' peers - weepy French girl? (Plus ca change...)

Just musing on bed covers. So duvet is the French for down, but here in France they are called couettes. The duvet cover is housse de couette. Where did plumeau come from? I would have thought a plumeau has always been a feather duster? Just something else she got wrong? A 1920s Austrian name for the duvet?
Dusters and rags are normally called chiffons here and we always have a laugh at the number of Dacia Dusters you see on the road.

Have just found an obscure article that says that the word plümo survives in Austria for a bed covering, so maybe it was used then.

So quite possibly it was a word she heard spoken and made up the spelling/substituted a completely different French word by accident? And I suppose it's not the kind of thing you'd expect a cursory (English) edit to pick up on necessarily...

I just wonder if the word plumeau was used in some European countries in the way that French words are adopted into a language because they sound posh, even though they are not the word the French would use? I think that was quite common in the nineteenth century.
Now of course it is the other way round with French homes getting un re-looking etc

What a shame I don't have a spare £250 knocking about for a lime green coat. It would go so well with my baby angel costume.

No time to read the links just now, have to leave for work - but looking forward to reading them later, thanks UniS.

I always chuckle at Joeys comments on writing historical novels and having to do her research when I think of the amount of mistakes EDB makes in her books.

If she had just made a school family tree with basic birth dates and names there would be a lot less errors. Mind that's part of the books maddening charm.

Nell yes wasn't she Odette. Her mother had a bad heart and could go at any time so the solution was obviously to send her dd away to boarding school.

I've found a few references to plumeaux as duvets or eiderdowns. This is an interesting page - shows plumo as Dutch I think.

universal_lexikon.deacademic.com/50546/Plumeau

We had no adventures at the Tiernsee at all, which was inexcusable of us. I went with my doctor husband (sadly just of philosophy) who was a solid lump of comfort but didn't drug me at any point.

I'd massively recommend our hotel if you have children. It was the Kinderhotel in Achenkirch (which we find more laid back than Pertisau, although neither is Kavos). But the area is full of lovely hotels. I've stayed at the Hotel Post in Pertisau before, for obvious reasons, and would recommend that too. They take hotels, and food, very seriously round there, and prices are reasonable.

Aibu?

I am a widow with one dd. my mil lives with us and quite frankly is doing my head in. She interferes in my parenting and tells dd off. Dd is getting very strong willed and bossy too and I am getting a bit fed up of it all.

To make matters worse a tall dark woman with a very strange hair style has moved in next door. She has at least a dozen kids, or seems like it, and she is forever telling me that she has a proper family and is really patronising. I am heartily sick of her kids coming into our garden. Especially one of the girls who has massive tantrums and needs a good smack. Huh apparently she's delicate!!
Anyway yesterday I heard her patronising me to my mil and calling me that sweet woman cheeky cow! She's rude to her older sister too whose actually quite nice.

Would I be unreasonable to sell up and move to the sea side with my dd?

YABU. As you say, your DD is already beginning to hint at becoming unbearable. Send her to school immediately, and then sell up and move to the seaside without telling anyone.

Excellent idea nell I will do that and get a perm too ha ha.

YANBU, but YABU to not explain the definition of stepsisters to your DD. Get on with it, woman!

Step sisters that's what I thought but the tall dark woman said I was wrong and told dd to say sisters by marriage.

She's apparently always right.

As far as I can see, she thought half-sisters were step-sisters and step-sisters were sisters-by-marriage. It isn't consistent though. I have just read the second Janie book and got totally confused about the Janie / Anne / Elizabeth parents.

Does anyone know whether that was a thing of the time, or just a particular thing to EBD, the 'stepsisters' thing?

Have just finished Gillian of the CS. It's a mixed one, in all ways. Anyone else read it? The last fill-in I read was the truly brilliant A CS Headmistress which was a difficult act to follow.
Bits of Gillian were hugely EBDish. Other bits jarred, especially language-wise. Not in an awful awful way - if this had been an online piece of fanfic I'd be enthusiastically linking it and singing its praises - but given it's had the GGBP edit I'd have expected a bit better in places.
It's quite a nice period to revisit (between New/United and Exile) and its an especially interesting bunch of prefects, since three of them later return as mistresses (Gillian, Hilary and Nancy). And it's got a lovely lack of Jo, for the most part, as it's set during the India voyage, hurrah. (When a letter arrives from Jo, a special assembly is convened to read it - total sick-bucket moment but entirely plausible!)
BUT. There is a but. Some of the crucial plot points feel kind of flawed. The author clearly wants to show Joyce maturing - which makes sense as she's in Lower Sixth - but as part of this she has a reconciliation of sorts between her and Ivy Norman; unfortunately, because in canon Miss Norman later remarks on Joyce in a way that suggests she hasn't yet made her peace with her, this reconciliation feels somewhat confused and unnecessary. I think Miss Norman ends up portrayed as more fallible than EBD would have allowed, and to no real purpose.
The other storyline I have difficulty buying is that Hilary effortlessly persuades her father to grant her a whole extra year at school, to allow both herself and Gillian to get a full year as Head Girl. In this case I'm more sympathetic as it is basically an attempt to reconcile a possible EBDism, but I couldn't quite believe in it.

Totally totally minor gripe is that she also seems to make a complete moron out of Con Stewart, who admittedly isn't the most perceptive character going, but nonetheless isn't completely stupid, surely. Another is that, partway through the term, it becomes apparent that Mrs Linton is very much more ill than she ought to be, but somehow Gillian is more worried about being Head Girl with Joey in India than she is about her mother, which didn't quite work for me.

But it does have many excellent features and, having bought it thinking I'd read it once and then sell it on, I'm now seriously considering keeping it after all.

EBD also wrote Stepsisters for Lorna - anyone read it who cares to comment on the stepsisteryness or otherwise of it? I've read Lorna at Wynyards, during which her father dies and her mum is probably at least 50, so fairly sure it can't feature half-sisters.

Oooh, I want to read A Chalet School Headmistress now! Also Gillian.

Afaik, Elizabeth and Anne had the same mother but Janie was the daughter of Michael Temple's second wife. All three sisters had the same father (Michael Temple). Think that's right!

I am reading Highland Twins atm (am jumping about timewise as thanks to the transcripts I am reading some for the first time and some re reads of ones I only read once or twice, so am doing all those before going back to old faithful). Biddy O'Ryan has mysteriously been renamed Biddy O'Hara.

Did no one edit in those days?

Lorna's mother goes out to Madeira after her husband dies with her daughter in law. Out there she meets a man whose name totally escapes me and marries him. He has two daughters and they are the step sisters mentioned in the title. So, in fact, exactly the same relationship as Mary-Lou and Verity.