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.

I read about the Daniel bit the lions episode many times before reading the incident itself thanks to the bizarre 1970s armada reprint ordering. I remember wondering what on earth had happened, thinking it must be something screamingly funny. Boy was I disappointed when I actually read it for the first time. It's a not very funny or clever mistake by a child who was daydreaming. I don't see what there was to laugh at the first time, let alone repeat endlessly.

As a child I loved the plays, especially the Christmas ones. I would get to the end of a book and read back over the touching Nativity scenes, imagining myself there filled with wonder and awe. I never liked the fetes and fairs though!

I think Nell has stomped off after too many naughty middles were put in her bedroom as a punishment.

Maybe she has been banished to the finishing branch...

The other thing I always wondered was with all the fuss about the "theme" of the fetes-how many people actually really notice without being told. Particularly some of the more unknown ones or the ones not in Britain.
They always sound grand, but I suspect they're actually a bit incomprehensible to the outsiders.
And I agree Mornmington I was exactly the same, I can't remember which book it is in, but it's mentioned in many more and I only recently read the actual incident.

Me too re the Daniel and the lions. When I finally read it was confused.

I thought that too about the themes of the fairs. In many cases it didn't sound obvious at all what the theme would be.

Just finished reading "Jo to the Rescue". THought I'd read it as a child but didn't recognise anything so must have imagined it. Quite enjoyed it - although it is a bit tedious in places with all the mentions of so and so feeding / bathing / dressing a child. Also - where was Anna? Why was she stuck back at base and not with her precious Jo looking after the kids? It was interesting to finally work put how Phoebe and Reg came into it all - and Reg is very much depicted as a local lad with accent to match unlike at the end of the books. He doesn't seem nearly as creepy in this one as he does in "Prefects"

I haven't read that one yet. I find the whole having Len get engaged to Reg while still in school really disappointing. Surely EBD could have done better than that. And him being interested in her for a few years... Defs a bit creepy

I agree, marrying Len off like that was a bit weak. Girls marrying straight from school in the 20s and 30s was plausible, particularly continental girls, but by the time Len was leaving school it would have been the late 50.s Girls of that era expected to go out with, and get to know, their future husbands, and would usually have had a couple of boyfriends before settling down. In real life her parents and teachers would have freaked out at such an impulsive engagement.

Hello! Hope all you girls are ready for half term trips? I want to fall in a lake and be rescued by a dog and doctor. Then my devil will feel ashamed and Miss Annersley will give me a good talking to.

Can someone PM me with the onedrive details please? My last laptop with the passwords set on blew up the other week and I can't get back in now!

Ooh yes a jolly jape for half term. Count me in. Gardening club at the chateau is getting jolly tiring.
Nah I don't think it was very EBD in the fifties, not as I remember anyway. I think she had lost the zeitgeist by then if she ever had it.
So - camping? cultural? coach trip?
We will need a new title soon (and we haven't had a proper international incident yet.) Just saying.
.

Maybe the international incident will happen as we all head off in the motor coaches for half term.....maybe someone has "borrowed" some of mateys special milk.....

Good idea Hels. I think De Wee should also bake some of her delicious cakes. I'm sure some of those hunky customs guys at the border will fall for our schoolgirl loveliness and resolve to make us their future wives even though we're only 14.

I hope no worn-ridden hay falls on the coach and ruins the engine.

Well unless those hunky customs guys qualify as doctors forthwith, they're doomed to disappointment however much they may resolve to marry us.

While you lot cavort around Europe on motor coaches I've decided to spend half term rambling across the mountains rescuing people from precipices that are about to open up, which only I with my all-seeing eye can see. Does this count as an international incident?

I think we need to send Daisy Venables and Miss O Ryan, off to Ireland on a juant.

Happily after this weekend vote they can now get married, as Daisy is Dr and thus eligible to marry an old girl. We can then ship teh whole school over by ferry for teh nuptials. Nothing can possibly go wrong with all our excitable gels and a saint bernard on a ship can it?

The ship might go down off the Welsh coast and then the St Bernard can drag the girls one by one to a rocky outcrop where an ageing eccentric birdman lives with his young wife. And then....
to be continued...

... they can all be dosed with the jorums of special milk that Matey rescued from the sinking boat (slightly smoky-flavoured as milk drunk in a hut always is). Anyone who still looks a bit peely-wally after 24 hours' milk-induced sleep can then be sung back to life...

Suddenly there is a knock on the door "hello, I'm a hunky doctor who just happened to be passing. Can I do anything to help? Well, Hel-oh there pansy eyed schoolgirl in gentian blue gym slip."

What was it with EBD and doctors! Was it purely to fit in with her storylines and keep characters in story by marrying them to doctors who then ended up at the San. Also the doctors seem to be extraordinarily general and specialized at the same time (performing all kinds of non TB related treatments and operations at what was supposed to be a TB san). I'm guessing some kind of desire to have met and married a doctor herself?

Also sort of related but not really, what was with Jack 'slipping' sedatives into Joey's (and occasionally other people's) coffee... ?? I mean I know it was the 30s-50s but really?

Wait for me... I've been baking lots of delicious cakes for us to take. Thanks for getting the special ingredient Chalet Days. Who wants to fall over the cliff this time?

I will stumble whilst close to the edge of the cliff, picking a bunch of gentians for my buttonhole whilst fleeing from a mad and murderous usurper. Then I will be rescued by a combination of a passing doctor armed with a machete, the obligatory new girl being featured in this particular book (she is troubled, but saving my life and then sobbing in the arms of Auntie Joey will sort her) and the inevitable large dog. I will be carried home in a queens chair by a couple of heftier schoolgirls, where I will collapse, pale, white and to all appearances dead, and be drugged by the doctor next door. Such fun!

OK, after a few years, I have finally got to the end of the end (of what I have anyway - will need to go on onedrive at home and see what I can download). WTAF was going on with Len & Reg? She barely knows this guy, then agrees to marry him? Is EBD just making Len into a Mini-Joey or does she actually think this is a good idea?

I wonder if she could manage to make Len into a "Mini-Joey" because they really were nothing alike. Mind you, I see very little in young Joey that corresponds with old Joey; perhaps the only thing is that neither really want to grow up and leave the Chalet School.

I'm quite happy to assume that Len and Reg had known each other from doing lots of things off stage so to speak. However I do struggle with that Joey and Jack clearly are expecting Len to marry him, and Len always does as expected.

I think EBD meant us to wee their whirlwind romance as terribly romantic. Len's not sure then realises how much he means to her when she thinks she's lost him.
However to me it comes across as Len cares he's lost in the same ways she'd care about any of her friends getting lost and finds herself in a position she can't back out of easily without hurt feelings, so she takes the easy way (as she always does) and just accepts it.

I do wonder however whether if it had been earlier in the series then it would have been taken slower, with perhaps that situation happening when she'd come back to teach, which would be much better. There must have been an aspect that EBD (or whoever it was that they suspect wrote Prefects for her) knew this was likely to be her last book and so wanted to get Len settled.

Len should never have been made the main protagonist of the final set of CS books. Joe and Mary Lou, however annoying they may have been at times. were strong original characters. Len was just a dull cardboard cut out and added nothing to the series.

EBD just got it so wrong with the second generation. So many nieces that they all just became diluted and characterless. She should have stuck with one daughter for Madge and Dick and maybe a couple for Joey, and actually given them some personalities.

I mean one daughter each for Madge and Dick

Agree about the far too many neices thing. I wonder what it must have been like for Len, Con and Margot always being told they'd split Joey's qualities between the three of them, as if they were a third of the original instead of people in their own right?

There are some potentially interesting characters in the Armishire and onwards books who might have become lead characters - Gwensie, Carola, Tom, Ruey, Ted and so on, even Nina, but they're never given a chance to develop as the one-new-girl-per-book formula takes over. It's such a pity, because all the effort of creating back stories for them seems to be a bit wasted.

Does anyone know of any Marlow/CS crossover fanfic out there in internetland? I seem to remmeber reading one years ago and it was brilliant - the Marlows and Miranda at the Swiss branch, with a scene where Miranda wears her Changear trousers to Joey's tea party and gets into a lot of trouble for thereby insulting her hostess, but I can't find it any more. I'd love to read it again.