International Incident at the Chalet School

[RueDeWakening]

Hear ye, hear ye! Gather ye hence, all angels (be-costumed with slightly tacky silver halos and suchlike) with your lark-like notes and prepare to dazzle us all with your charm.

No, not you Joan. Shop bought cake and cheap looks for you, my dear. See Matron for some milk on your way out.

and seriously would Joyce Linton have married a bloody vicar?

Oh and have always wondered. Vanna and nella?

Vanessa and Elizabeth? Or Evadne?

I can never get my head around Joyce marrying a vicar. All the Chalet School girls who would have made perfect vicar's wives and EBD chooses Joyce 'I love me sooo much' Linton.

Vanna and Nella are Giovanna and Petronelle I believe...They have middle names which I can not recall. They arrive in Janie of La Rochelle.

I was thinking of Eustacia as borrowing heavily from one of the CS Lewis books (possibly Voyage of the Dawn Treader? ) - perhaps more just the character than the plot. Have I just made this up and it's not like a recognised Thing? It can't be pure coincidence though, they almost have the same bloody name (Eustacia and Eustace). To me, the half-baked theory that Eustacia is based on the Lewis character/book helps me reconcile Eustacia as a bit of an oddity within the CS canon - I think it is really unusually punitive and unkind, in lots of ways. There is no sympathy at all for Eustacia's bereavement (compare, say, Nina Rutherford, Jacynth Hardy, the Balbini twins) and Eustacia's obligatory near-death reformation experience is more than just near-death - she then lies around being incapacitated for several books on end (compare Grizel after the Tiernjoch, Naomi Elton). This unusually unsympathetic approach makes more sense to me if I think about it in terms of EBD reappropriating a story/character she thought had an appealing moral...

Joyce needs the vicar to "keep her well in hand", or whatever the vile phrase is, remember!

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was published in 1952...

Oops! I am gutted to lose my tentative explanation for the weirdness of Eustacia on such a basic point.

Isn't Eustace's bad character explained in a later book by the fact that he goes to a progressive school which doesn't have enough prefects, cold baths and organised Games?

Eustace also had parents who were atheists, vegetarians and wore a special kind of underclothes. Experiment House didn't help.
He was reformed within a third of the book, after spending a week or so as a dragon.

I think Eustacia was supposed to be treated kindly at first but then all her carers got fed up of her snubbing them, which I guess they didn't recognise as a grieving child acting up, especially when the child claims they aren't. The medicine may be dopey but I did like how Stacie wasn't cured in one book and had relapses. Ditto Miss Wilson's foot.

Does Gottfried count as a doctor who rescues? Isn't he along in Exile, as well as hanging around for various early lake rescues? Bruno von Ahlen is also a doctor but I don't recall any rescuing.

Yeah, why doesn't Bruno ever do any rescuing?

Yes, that was exactly it - Eustace as the unpleasant result of silly (old?) parents and their strange beliefs. Plus the implausibly similar names (does this reference something I don't know of?) and ultimate reformation by unpleasant experience, though I suppose that's v common. I feel less confident accusing CS Lewis of stealing ideas, though, whereas with EBD it's so much par for the course I didn't hesitate...

Re Bruno, I'd forgotten all about him - do you think Bruno the dog is named after him? Isn't he one of the people who rescues Rufus, it might not be tooooo far fetched, at least not for the CS

And Bruno the dog does some rescuing, doesn't Len use her scarf as a lead so he could lead them to safety through a blizzard?

at a special kind of underclothes. I had forgotten that. I always imagined some sort of weird all-in-one thermal item, although that's probably based on vague descriptions of combinations in various books and wouldn't have seemed that weird to CS Lewis!

Maybe this is why Bruno von Ahlen changes job mysteriously in later books to be in business. Lack of lake-side rescuing means he is failing to hit his medical targets and has been demoted. (Put back again, then. Must we talk beautiful English at all times?)

I get the impression with Eustacia that EBD doesn't see her as having loved her parents at all, because her professor father was so elderly and remote. Didn't her mother die some time before and Eustacia had spent at least a few years running the household, in much the same way as Cressida Shakespeare in Heather Leaves School? So she's not grieving for her mother any more, and her relationship with her father is never seen as close, so therefore she can't be too upset by it, by EBD logic. They do discuss a lot that she's been pitchforked into an entirely new environment and they do make some allowances for her on that basis.

As a sidebar - Eustacia's parents are both doctors/professors. Eustacia's mother dies because she catches a cold and insists on treating it herself, with the result that she promptly shuffles off this mortal coil. Nice treatment of female doctors there! (Please someone tell me if Dr Benson Snr was a medical doctor or not, because I can't remember.)

Eustacia's parents were both classicists, weren't they?
I think it's more than an author with knowledge of Greek would look to the eu- prefix for an annoyingly smug character's name - see also cousin Eunice in one of the Blyton Five Find Outers books.

So - we have three full days of rain, wind, gloom and mud here in deepest Normandy. The Château has been polished from top to bottom, the logs are stacked, Christmas is organised and I am boooored.
Your nominations please for your best ever Chalet School book so after I have watched the last episode of The Missing I can lose myself in some comfort reading.

I had exactly the same thought and looked more closely, and I don't think you can say for absolute certain whether Eustacia's mother is supposed to be a medical doctor or an academic. Though if she is supposed to be some kind of medical doctor incapable of treating her own cold, this would help explain that infuriating bit later when Joey gushes to Daisy about how relieved she is that Laurie will be in the house...

Both her parents have died within the last year, when the story opens - though I know that's plenty of time to get over it in CS-land (the era more generally, I guess: not trying to blame EBD for that one). I don't think very much lenience is shown for her being in a new environment, though - I always thought it a huge overreaction when she gets banned (permanently? Or 'just' very long term?) from the library, though I suppose that's necessary to the plot, and again when they call a school meeting to slag her off. I don't think it would have escalated in the same way with Madge or Hilda as Head, or with Gisela or Mary-Lou, for example, as Head Girl. She's quite comparable with Lavender in that sense, and with Lavender there's specific guidance from senior staff (Nell to Slater) and prefects (Biddy to Lavender's class) about showing her more understanding and less punishment. What's the gap in publishing, between those two? Must be about fifteen years...

I have now bestirred my lazy bones to find Eustacia. "Her father had been a learned professor of Greek, who had married a lady doctor, neither of them being very young...In the preceding June, Mrs Benson had developed a cold, which she had insisted on treating herself. The result was that the cold rapidly went to her lungs, and, six days later, Eustacia found herself motherless."

FFS, I could treat a cold without killing myself or someone else, and frequently have. But no, Mrs/Dr Benson had the hubris (do you like my topical use of Greek?) to "insist" on treating herself and was punished accordingly. If she'd just had the humility to call in a nice male TB specialist then she'd have lived to fight another day.

Trapped inside by the weather! How appropriately Chaletian.

My favourites are Gay, Goes To It and Exile. But of those, I think only Goes To It really fills the 'comfort' role. My other top choices for comfort are mainly late Tyrol, often summer ones - New House, Camp, And Jo, Lintons.

See, there is just too much punishment in Eustacia. It's not unheard of in the rest of the series (Sybil and the kettle being a v obvious example) but I think it is the exception and I find it jars. It's not really EBD's usual brand of Christianity, is it? That's why I assumed it was nicked from elsewhere.

What about Jo of, Emily, for Christmassy comfort?

Thank you - can't decide between summer warmth or Christmassy comfort!
Don't know how relevant it is, but my Granny used to describe people as "a bit of a Useless Eustace". I think it was a phrase in general use rather than just one of her sayings.

Or else in non-CS world, I have just discovered a trilogy for adults written by Elizabeth Goudge, author of The Little White Horse, which I adored as a child (it's quite similar in feel to EE Nesbit). I only downloaded it last night but the reviews mention its quintessential Englishness as its defining characteristic so it sounds a bit like the Cazalets. I am ridiculously excited to have found it - it's like when I discovered that Noel Streatfeild also wrote for adults and her first book was the basis for Ballet Shoes, so you get the exact same story but in a grittier, more realistic world where the children are the illegitimate daughters of the GUM character by 3 different women.

Didn't Bruno effectively rescue Frieda? If I remember rightly he certainly managed to get her out of occupied Europe

Is that the Eliot family trilogy Cheddar? Sounds good but expensive on Kindle! What is the Noel Streatfield called?

I agree that Goes To It is a great comfort read as well as being one of the best Chalet School books of the whole series.