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.

b Gutten tag meine friends . Ist eine wunderbar tag heir.

My phone really dislikes me typeing dutschelish

Haven't heard of O'Douglas... School
Stories?

Started re reading my (many, mainly charity shop purchased) chalet school books and, as usual, feeling very annoyed by a) the vigorous brushing of curly hair to make it 'shiny' (as anyone with curls can attest, brushing dry hair = the worst frizz/fuzz/troll head imaginable) and b) her invariably incorrect use of French and German. Couldn't they have had this proofread?! Drives me mad!

If you didn't wash your hair very often, in a 1920s-50s manner, would it still frizz like that? Maybe curly hair that was washed once a week if it was lucky, with Anna's special tisane, didn't frizz so much because it was probably pretty greasy.

If you brush curly hair when dry it basically just removes all the curl and turns it into frizz. I only ever comb my hair when wet with a wide tooth comb. Even if curls went greasy brushing them would still remove the curl and just make a greasy frizz I guess! My hair doesn't go greasy. It just goes frizzy if I don't wash it for a few days!! Basically curls + vigorous brushing = nerdy frizz (as in before the makeover of the nerdy girl type frizz). EBD must not have known this! And she was shite at languages

Although who knows what the magical properties of Anna's special tisane could have done!!

A few drops of Anna's tisane, a glug of Matey's special milk, a light dusting of cornflour, 100 strokes with a brush and voila! (or its German equivalent) - shiny curly hair.

Don't they also use brushing to clean their hair? I seem to remember Len telling someone that going to bed without brushing her hair and leaving all the dirt of the day in it was rude to God. Or some such. I suppose maybe that soft continental coal dust would be removed by fierce brushing, but it seems a bit far-fetched to me.

May an absentee Chaletian sneak in?
I did follow some threads on (I think!) AIBU a while ago, but didn't realise you had all fled to here!

And, thanks to my iPhone having a hissy fit, I accidentally deleted my emails containing the ebook versions. I think they were from someone named Fiona? If there is anyone who has them and could forward them, I would be eternally grateful.
Did I imagine it, or was there an email address and password that contained readable/downloadable versions?

And if Anna's tisane was magical, I certainly need some! I was always envious of descriptions of Frieda's hip-length hair. Mine is getting there, but it's not happy about it!

DD1 (14yo) has hip length hair and the amount of time it takes to wash and sort out in the morning, I am sure Frieda had to get up earlier than anyone else tobe ready for the rising bell. I suggested the other day I put it in ear phones for ballet, but she gave me an inimpressed look and did it her usual way.
She does wear it generally in two plaits though.

I'm reading A Fifth Form Martyr by EM Channon at the moment. It's brilliant! I didn't read the blurb properly (or maybe I read it but forgot it before the book arrived) - whatever, I started it expecting an ordinary 1930s school story, but it's not that at all. It's a wonderful, wonderful timeslip story about a 1930s schoolgirl who finds herself in 1890. I have vague recollections of the 1890s being a time of massive social change for upper-middle-class women and girls, so presumably the date is chosen with care to highlight how restrictive things were for an earlier generation. It's absolutely beguiling to read how one period of history is seen by another period of history. Has anyone else read it?

No but sounds a bit like Charlotte Sometimes? Which I loved as a child.

Charlotte Sometimes is such a wonderful book,!

I think I knew Charlotte Sometimes off by heart I read it so often! To be fair, I don't think A Fifth Form Martyr is in the same league - it's nothing like as detailed, and plot-wise it's slight to the point of disappointing which can't be said of Charlotte. But simply fascinating to read about how the 1890s looked from the vantage point of the 1930s.

It sounds a bit like Beswitched as well, which I've recently read thanks to recommendations on Mumsnet.

Just got beswitched... 3/4 way through already. It is excellent!

I loved it. I did think the end could have been a bit more subtle and poignant though. It didn't really match up to Charlotte Sometimes.

Gosh, It's taken six months to fill this thread. We rattled through the first few at several times that pace.

I wonder what's happened to NellWilsonsWhiteHair. Her posts were great.

I assume she has gone on a lengthy educational.tour finding out how different countries teach leaving someone else in charge ....

Ooh can I be in charge, can I? Can I?

Yes that's true Ballet. I also would have loved to find out more about the other Flora who ended up in the future. And I didn't get at the hand how the past seemed to have been changed and she had got on well with her grandmother in the past? Esp seeing as her grandmother had apparently only very recently realised the connection. Also if she'd sort of forgotten about Flora over the years, how come she had kept her half of the ten shilling note?

'At the end' not 'at the hand'!

Typing on my phone sorry!

Been reading 'The Wrong Chalet School' and 'Lavendar' and I'm wondering did they just have a weird sense of humour then or if EBD did, because they're always collapsing in shrieks of mirth for things that are really not hilarious at all or even mildly funny. Anyone else notice this? It happens at least once in every book.

I think I may have said this before but my DM is of that generation - in fact I work her out to be the exact same age as OOAOML. She also went as a day pupil to a boarding school in Wales. And she and her contemporaries do have a habit of shrieking with laughter at things which make me so my guess is that it's generational. They also do that random rudeness - the "dry up, idiot" stuff which CS girls all do.

I think as with rl things that sometimes you have to be there for it to be funny.

If I think of, for example, the time when the donkey runs away with Peggy during one of their shows (I think after Dickie blows the conch shell). The description doesn't particularly even make me smile.
But when I was about 6 or 7 I took part in a Palm Sunday show at our local church where the donkey carrying Jesus took one look at the inside, turned round and fled, being found three streets away with "Jesus" still clinging to his back". I bet you aren't wiping tears of mirth away! But a lot of the really staid old ladies whom I never saw crack even a smile generally really did find it very funny. My dm still laughs when she talks about it too.

But Con's every repeated line of "Daniel bit the lions" didn't ever come across as funny. Much more a "What on earth" moment than a funny one. Why she couldn't have found something one of her pupils had said that was funny I don't know. Most teachers have lots of stories that would fit better there.

I also generally find the descriptions of the shows and sports days very tedious. I read somewhere that sometimes EBD used the same plays she had for the Chalet School in her own school, which feels a bit wierd, although I guess makes sense.
I wonder if she had the same method of casting though? In favour=nice voice=top part; Fair hair curls=made for an angel; the smallest/youngest child in the school gets a big "baby" part. It's actually not that dissimilar from Miss Keith if you think about it!
Also that episode where the oldest Pertwee child breaks her arm trying to incapacitate ML so she can have her part irritating. Because she breaks her own arm and it's said she can't take her part in the play because "you can't have a very modern plaster cast in a historical play". Really? I mean, I'm involved in a local amateur pantomime which takes itself pretty seriously, but if one of the cast broke their arm we'd just get on with it. Leg would be trickier as the backstage would be very awkward with crutches, but if they could get onto the stage then we wouldn't take their part away if they still wanted to do it. I'd be furious as a mum if my dd was told she couldn't take her part because she'd broken her arm and it would "look wrong"
Fine take the part away because she didn't deserve it, would be just.

I find the shows hugely tedious also, particularly the Christmas plays. They are so formulaic. The fetes or summer fairs are a bit more interesting. I also find the fairly intense religious aspect of the books a bit much to take. Presumably in the 50s that would have been much more a normal thing?