A fête worse than the Chalet School

[EmilyAlice]

Roll up, roll up!
Bid for a mortgage on the doll's house! Pin the tail on the St Bernard! Guess the weight of the handsome doctor! (Or pin the tail on the doctor and guess the weight of the St Bernard). Knit a lime green liberty bodice against the clock!
The Chalet School fête is open.....

I have always wondered...thanks!

When we play Trivial Pursuit my husband is often impressed by things I know...but now says straight away...Chalet School I expect!!

Gruss Gott!

I've just read the thread in one go. Please may I have the details for the onedrive?

Thank you!

I've messaged you Empress.

Got it. Thanks Nell, that's me happy for a while now.

(total ignorance here, from a total technophobe...) what is this one drive everyone keeps asking about?? I have a feeling someone told me way back but with school etc it has all gone form my head..

You're very welcome Empress.

hels, onedrive is a hotmail-based document storing website thingy. Thanks to the marvellous Library Pree, we have a lovely shared account which has most (not quite all) the CS books in transcript form. Do say if you'd like the log-in details.

Oh yes please!

NellWilson Could I have the one drive details please? I may have had it before but never mastered the interface to actually open the books. (clearly destined never to rise higher than about seventeenth in technology class).

How much admin must they have had to do to figure out class lists each week! Though I suppose if all homework was marked out of 10 like in my day, they could just record it somewhere and make the form perfect or someone add them all up?

I've PMed you both

I was meaning to remark upon this joyful mention from that link detailing Armada cuts, which maythefleas posted on the previous page:

"a passage about Matron having a "big jorum of senna" for the girls who over-indulged at a party" (cut from the Armada version of Exploits, apparently)

I'm pretty sure there is also some random administering of laxatives in Camp (do some of the girls give them to each other, or something? I forget the details but it's well-intentioned and treated as ultimately amusing by everyone, IIRC). And I have a bizarre but strong childhood memory of one of the Blyton school books - more likely to be Malory Towers but could also be St Clare's - describing the girls' compulsory walk as "getting the bowels going" or similar.

Was all this a thing? Isn't it bloody odd? I feel quite certain that in all my reading of (otherwise far more frank) more recent books, for adults and children, there is never any of this preoccupation with constipation! Was it normal in ye olden days to give out laxatives all over the place and cheerfully discuss them in books? Was it part of EBD's ploy to make midnight feasts (or raw bacon) less appealing to her readers?

Nell - pre-war there was quite the obsession with bowel movements, possibly because people ate so much bread etc and not much fruit or veg (remember Mary-Lou being told not to eat more than two apples or shed get stomach-ache?)

Anyone not pooing daily would be subject to senna or similar - some boarding schools expected all pupils to shit on demand after breakfast and have their name ticked off to confirm they had done so!

Back to my ignorance - what software is needed to read the one drive books?

Gosh. And presumably failing to tell Matey you'd not been would have been met with the same omniscience as Jo failing to tell her she had toothache.

The onedrive books are a mixture (and some titles have a choice of formats). So quite a few can be read in either Word or Adobe. The other ones, I read in something called ebook reader on my iPad - this isn't necessarily the best option (I don't remember doing much research into it!) but it works fine (and has a search function, the only bit that matters to me).

Anyone not pooing daily would be subject to senna or similar - some boarding schools expected all pupils to shit on demand after breakfast and have their name ticked off to confirm they had done so!

I wonder how that was spot-checked.

Interesting that bowel movements get mentions (even if they're oblique), but no character is seen ever to visit a toilet.

Indeed. You have to hope that nobody had ever been given one of Matey's patent doses just before getting stranded in a shepherd's hut for the weekend...

I know the girls in camp do dose each other up with a random cocktail but I cant remember who or what

Then there is also the whole 'giving Joey brandy' thing to get her drunk stop her vomiting after that fishing trip

And finally, what does OOAO stand for?

Our One And Only. Equivalent to HRH for Mary-Lou. ;)

Ha! Yes, I'm sure that semi-harmless medicine cocktail is about three-quarters laxatives, now you remind me. I forget what the other quarter is.

I like that EBD is always at pains to point out how disgusting the brandy tastes. Although I suppose medicinal brandy probably is vile; much like big jorums of senna, and hot milk laced with mild sedatives, it's actually not something I've ever personally experienced...

I loved the chalet school when I was younger! I still do, actually, and have a collection of books (mainly paperback). I initially read the early ones and then got very confused because I was lent a hardback of The Chalet School Goes To It, where Joey is grown up and has triplets. This was before I had the internet, so I couldn't even Google what had happened

I think brandy is vile! Although perhaps I've never had a very nice one, and I'm not a great fan of neat spirit at any time. I have tried with various whiskies, some very good, but it still makes me shudder a bit. I imagine that to your average 12-18 year old brandy tastes horrific, especially as said teenagers were not experimenting with different strengths of vodka and orange at weekends (I much preferred Archers or Martini Rosso). Elisaveta gets dosed, and I think Margia mixes it. I can't remember which other girls have to drink it. Corney and Lonny, maybe?

I picked up Genius yesterday and I have found the answer to the cello questions upthread! According to the essay on music at the Chalet School at the beginning of my GGBP edition, EBD attended a music school called something like the Newcastle Conservatoire in her late teens/early twenties, where she studied singing, piano and 'cello! So there you have it, my lambs. I wonder whether her own 'cello had a name like Cerita or Cherry!

I am also slightly disgusted to realise that the reason the panto seems so repetitive and dull is because it is Beauty and the Beast starring Clem as Nettlesting, which is repeated in Triplets and the full description of the panto is given each time, with obligatory gurgling from Joey and low moans from the Abbess. I think I can actually repeat most of Nettlesting's curse from memory - pinch her, hit her, hit her with a slipper! Turn her in reverse! Drive her in a hearse! Let her see what our queen shall stand, when she comes to Green Goblin Land!

I have really hardly ever read the Fete parts of Genius. I note that Nina's Italian opera singer Mammina is later revealed to be Dorothy Embury, sister in law to Winnie Embury, and not at all Italian. Tut tut. Plus I am getting a bit tired of orphaned girls discovering Chalet School relations in very credibility-stretching circumstances. Ruey, Adrienne and now Nina. I think there might be others.

I bet her cello had a gloriously bonkers name - wasn't that about the point in her life when she was demanding people call her something marvellous like Paraquita or something? (Actually, I'm suspicious of the striking similarity between Cherry and Cerita - not that I really know how to pronounce the latter - and I think perhaps both of these are pretty much the same name and that this is also what EBD's cello, real or dreamed-of, was called.)

I can say, with no shame at all, that I have no recollection of Clem as Nettlesting and therefore have clearly never properly read the panto scenes even though I've read both of those books.

I don't think I've ever actually tasted brandy. Or whisky. Indeed, I think I was 27 the first time I tried gin...

Welcome, lola!

I have just reread Rosalie (one of the three copies I seem to have recently received from GGBP - I must check my PayPal to make sure that this really is my error rather than theirs, pretty sure it is though) and although it's not a great favourite I am v fond of it and will defend it against everyone else's apathy. It has virtually no Jo (she doesn't make an appearance, and although she gives birth to Charles in this one there's not too much mention of her either) and almost no men, apart from Jack who turns up for about half a page to announce that Jo has had the baby. Plus it's endearingly slashy, plus I do find Bride's group all very likeable, plus it's summer (with the added perks of no nativity and no Sale). Taken chronologically, it's the absolute last of the 'still quite good' ones for me: there's a real drop between this and Three Go.

The only two later books I really like are by their nature atypical - Oberland and Reunion.

I'm OK with Oberland, but Reunion is the one and only CS book that I can't bear to re-read. The first and last time I read it, I found it utterly smug, and thought that Joey went from annoying to unbearable. The scene where the guests create mayhem at breakfast and Jo effectively tells Anna to pull herself together and clear it up (on top of her 'normal' work of running the household with additional guests and endless picnic-making) is graven on my heart as one of EBD's worst ever mistakes, I think. I didn't read it until I was an adult because it was one of the ones you could never get hold of, so I was massively excited when Armada published it mid-90s. What a let-down - but also, maybe I'd have reacted differently if I'd read it as a child or teenager.

I can remember quite a bit of the panto, but not as much as Cheddar. My claim to fame is that I know all the words to the song that Darrell Rivers wrote for Cinderella when she was in the fifth form at Malory Towers. Irene-like, I set it to a mumbled tune delicious melody and sang it to DDs when they were little.

To be sung by Mary-Lou while gazing pensively into the fire! I remember that one!

Haha! I also remember putting Darrell's Cinderella song to 'music', Irene-like - but only when I was small myself I can't remember a bit of it now.

Weirdly I find unbearable Jo quite bearable in Reunion - I mean, I definitely agree she's unbearable, but it somehow doesn't bother me. I think there's less fawning over her, compared to eg the wartime ones where nobody can ever stop mentioning how marvellous and exceptional she is.
Plus it just has all manner of bizarre and I do enjoy that - the fact that she's sending grown women off on excursions led by her daughters, as if they're schoolgirls and it's half term or something; the bit when the Maynards form a small parade below Grizel's hospital window; the really-not-deep bit when Joey tells Grizel it's her turn to eat white bread now, or something; the breakfast thing where, as you say, Jo is utterly and v unlikeably unsympathetic towards Anna (in a fairly uncharacteristic attempt to be a good host, I presume); the awful proposal; the requisite mountain accidents...

I like the Grizel-ness of Reunion. I have a soft spot for Grizel based on her niceness by the end of Head Girl, which was possibly my first Armada paperback. Between her exploits with the Tiernjoch in School at the Chalet, the bits at the beginning of Jo of where she and Jo are slightly argumentative friends, Head Girl and the bits in Exile and Gay From China and Reunion where she's a somewhat unhappy adult, I think she's one of the more rounded-out characters. I didn't read Carola until I was in my late teens (I had had Reunion as a kid) and then the story of Grizel wanting to go off and set up her business with Deira sort of filled in my knowledge of her.

Later books I rate. Um. New Mistress. Oberland. I rather like Bride, but I really dislike the bit where the best the prefects can come up with is to write to Joey in Canada and ask her advice about what to do with Diana Skelton. Oh, and the glory that is Redheads! And I like Jane.

I assume Cerita is pronounced Cherita to go with 'cello. It wouldn't make sense any other way!