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.....

Upon re-reading it I did get the impression there were complications... when returning to school, Jo says Madge is alright now. And it would explain Jacks brusqueness when collecting Joey from school, he just says she wants Jo, making it sound urgent.

So 2 posters have been kind enough to forward the onedrive password... but I can't get it to work :( I keep getting a "verify your account" message, which obviously I cannot do. I imagine it's because my IP address shows I'm outside the UK.

Would any poster be able to help by forwarding the books on or possibly suggesting how I can get in? I have hard copies, but they're old and musty now... ebooks would be so much more convenient.

Sorry, I haven't got to grips with the ebooks yet - I either read them in Armada or GGBP real books! I'm sure someone will be along with a more helpful response soon...

I think I've been able to share the files to athelophobic - fingers crossed!

Re: Madge, I also took from those hints that the birth was a difficult one - also there are suggestions later that one of her subsequent deliveries is difficult - probably Sybil (who is also, I think, premature)? I can imagine EBD (quite reasonably) deciding to characterise Madge as having difficult births, although I don't recall anything like this with any of her later babies - which is of course no less reasonable a proposition, although id never underestimate the likelihood of EBD simply forgetting or changing her mind.

There are some other near-death birth experiences in the series - definitely Biddy in Reunion and I'm sure there are others which aren't springing to mind at the moment. I Don't think I noticed any as a child, but they fascinate me now - it's a mark of how things have changed I suppose - it must have been simply a fact of life back then - whereas now it would be written as a kind of 'issue' storyline, similar to eg drugs, teen pregnancy, MH stuff etc which would be almost unmentionable by the standards of EBD's day! Although I am fascinated by all the hints at darker sides of life in the series, especially because it is so carefully safe in many deliberate ways. Like the Venables' marriage (alcohol problem and I always assume DV), or the prostitution in Adrienne.

I always wonder if Simone has Rh disease or something - anti-D wasn't available till the late 60s, and there are so many remarks about her only having Tessa for so long.

I always assume DV with the Venables too, Nell, but I can't think of any specific comment that made me think it. And I think the prostitution in Adrienne is easy to miss as a child - I just assumed she was living in a place like you'd find in Oliver or Annie or any other musical featuring orphans. I do think the whole series though treats disability/illness in a much more matter of fact way than you'd find now, unless it involves Jo, of course, in which case it's all wailing and singing her back to life. Although the way it's used to improve character (Cherry, Naomi, etc) does make my teeth itch.

And Eustacia! Have to admit the DV undertones completely passed me by as a child -now of course it seems glaringly obvious.

I think we have Nell -I have 3/4ths of the series and can't wait to start a read-through :)

Ooh, that's an interesting thought about Simone Rue. I always just assumed that she and Andre(?) were having difficulty conceiving, and therefore it was horribly unkind that Joey kept marching around extolling the virtues of real families. I have a sad suspicion though that Simone often just exists as a bit of a foil to Joey - long families better than small ones, cheerful almost boyish fear of tears better than French angsty drama, many friends better than one beloved best friend, flair for English better than flair for maths etc...

As a child I always thought Simone was just being sensible about family size! I mean, who really wants 11 children?

Prompted by the discussion upthread I'm rereading New and finding it very interesting. I feel very sorry for Jo in places - and also other upper middle class girls of the time. One minute there she is, head girl, at the centre of things, everyone looking up to her and seeking her opinion, busy every hour of the day, and then suddenly she's back at home with very little to do. It's not as if her help with the babies is really needed, what with the string of Pfeifen girls who are simply raised to become Bettany servants. I know she has her book, but Jo's the gregarious sort. So that scene where she turns up at school late at night (to sneak into Bill's room, hmmmm) and ends up being warmly welcomed by the prefects, well, I can see how it would start to establish a habit. That's where Madge should have intervened and had a good talk with her about finding other interests and letting the School stand on its own two feet.

On the threat of the middles not being allowed the Salzburg trip, I had a thought about what would happen nowadays. I can just imagine the AIBU threads after Betty and Elizabeth had texted home to say they were being deprived of a visit their parents had paid for via their fees.

I think (hazy memory here) at some point Joey says something along the lines of she has easy births, unlike Madge who had such a time of it with David (and possibly Sybil)

This may have just been Joey being smug, or it may have been the real reason why Madge gad fewer children than she did.

Looking askance at The Robin being Gretel, whilst aged about thirty five... Still she seems to be enjoying herself and the Prees will faint in piles of anyone suggests it's not the done thing.

Jolly good fete! Who are we setting fire to this year?

Isn't The Robin actually about 95 now???

And doesn't she made a splendid little Gretel? Ah, das engelkind.

Did you say something about a fire, rumble? Maybe that's what Aunty Joey was fretting about - she was very upset, something about a twinset Anna she had spent ages knitting out of finest lime green wool...

That's a really good point about Joey/young women like her, mornington. It always seems a bit like failing Jo to not push her into university, really - I know she's not exactly 'born scholar' material, but she could have more than coped with languages, say, or history, and she would have got plenty out of it socially, or in terms of broadening her horizons. That last is a funny point - so much of School At is about contrasting the well-travelled, knowledgeable Jo with Grizel and her ignorant/insular/English life; but actually, Jo never really leaves the safety of her sister's home until she marries, and even then she stays very closely attached to the school (more so than to Madge). She lives in many disparate places, but she never really has that experience of properly leaving home and making her own way, and university would have given her a flavour of that, I think. There's something so much more adult, in an appealing way and actually not in a way I think EBD was ever opposed to, about Simone as a young adult - has to make important choices, has to work hard, goes off to Paris, meets a suitor on equal ish terms rather than marrying the immediate colleague of her brother in law, has to earn money for a bit...

DeeWe that sounds familiar. Also, where else but the CS would we be discussing a woman with SIX children and suggesting a reason she had so few of them?!

Venables and DV I got, but I've just re-read Eustacia and still can't see it.

I've also wondered about the births and assumed that Sybil was early because of something going wrong. But I've always wondered, back in 1939 would women really not have had any clue about a multiple pregnancy? Surely an experienced GP would have had a least an inkling... But maybe they wouldn't have told the woman!?

Apparently not, NoParking. My DS1 is a surviving triplet, and I read up about it a few years ago. It was common not to know you were expecting more than one baby until delivery, right up until the 1980s when women started being scanned during pregnancy.

If you think about how common it is for an experienced doctor or midwife to say that a baby is head down, only for them to be breech looking at you again, DS1, it must be pretty difficult to tell by touch.

Even with scan it can sometimes happen. One of dsis' patients was sent for an extra scan at 34 weeks because she was measuring large for dates and during the scan a third leg was seen, and upon closer examination was found to have a twin which had been directly behind the known baby for all the scans.

The doctor thought my mum (born 1961) was twins - presumably by palpating head and bottom.

Isn't Biddy's pregnancy somehow known to be twins? I know that's a few years after the triplets but the juxtaposition amuses me!

NoParking I think Eustacia was an example of problematic 'healing through disability', rather than DV, but I may have read that wrong.

On births, I always imagine Jem has a word with Dick when Molly is pregnant with Bride/Jacky (forget which is younger) and points out that they can't go on at this rate. Because they have those first four in very quick succession, then they have bigger gaps after they've visited Austria...

Can you imagine the conversation?
Jem: Have you worked out where babies come from yet?

I can quite picture Jem explaining the rhythm method in great detail, probably accompanied with the drawing of diagrams, during a Manly Stroll around the Tiernsee.

Loving the idea of Jem's little chat with Dick and Mollie, and also a 95-year-old bubchen engelkind playing Gretel. I bet when those angelic locks went a shining silver she'd have looked more like an angel than ever.

Yes, I was always puzzled by the way Guides got dropped. Did EBD have a bad guide experience, a bit like EJO and folk dancing, or did she just forget or run out of steam on them? It does seem odd when they're so highly spoken of in the first part of the series. I didn't know about Our Chalet being so close to the CS though I think I knew it was in Switzerland. What a missed opportunity to add a much-needed extra dimension to the Swiss books.

How are things back at the Sound of Music-themed fete? Has Joan Baker managed to infiltrate the clock golf yet to bag her very own Georg, have the curtain clothes kits sold well, and who has won Tom Gay's model von Trapp house? I'm enjoying my part as the strict nun before whom Maria must kiss the floor every time she apologises for her latest infraction. If Joey can prostrate herself before Bill, why not me?

Ooh, tell me more about EJO's bad experience in folk dancing??

I think it's perfectly possible that EBD just got suddenly bored with Guiding - her biographer definitely suggests this was a general pattern she had with both people and things - but I also wonder whether she felt herself too removed from the changed nature of it, and was afraid she couldn't discuss it with authenticity enough to fool her young readers? I don't know how much Guiding changed between the 1930s when she's clearly very keen on it (and very detailed), the 1940s-50s when she's still definitely including it but not with such a heavy focus, and the later 1950s-60s when it drops off the agenda altogether.

She must have been tickled by 'Our Chalet', and I wonder if that was part of her original inspiration when she eventually decided to move the school to the Oberland? I know the evidence strongly suggests she'd never visited Switzerland.

Loving mornington's strict nun. Naturally Con Maynard has won the dolls house once again, but before she had a chance to speak her mother announced she would be donating it to some random good cause. After all, the hoards of babies in the nursery at Freudesheim still have bloody Les Poupees to play with although they'd probably all prefer a nice bit of flashing plastic tat, the same as DS always does whenever confronted with expensive tasteful toys.

(All local good causes are joining the queue to explain in advance that no, they really can't accommodate yet another bloody dolls house)

We'll just have to establish a museum, then, for future dolls houses and anything else we can't sell.

I can't remember what the story was with EJO and guiding - I'll have to look it up in Island to Abbey next time I remember. Incidentally, if any of you are EJO fans and you're close to or visiting the London area, there's a fantastic photographic display of May Queens from the 1890s until today (with even a few May Kings in recent years) at Whitelands College which is now part of the University of Roehampton. I was there earlier in the summer and I spent ages looking at them. There are also a fair few folk dance pictures as well!

I went to a folk festival today (by mistake) and thought of the Chalet school and Abbey girls. There were quite a lot of younger people doing Morris, as well as singing.

How did you manage to go to a folk festival by mistake, princess? Were you on a healthy country walk when you just happened upon it? Or did you think you were going to something else entirely? Did a wicked uncle trick you into attending?