Is there a current chalet school thread? Anyone fancy it?

[FelicityBeedle]

Was introduced to these on MN a few years ago, having a reread. Forgotten the extent to which I want to shake Mary Lou!

If you think she's insufferable in the originals, don't read the fill in by Merryn Williams!!!

Oh god I don’t think I could take it! At least Joey had the occasional flaw in her schooldays. Mary Lou is even worse than Saint Shelagh of Nonnatus

She is much nastier in the fill in but still manages to justify it in that sanctimonious way.

The darkness of that book scarred me for a long time and it now lives in a different bookcase to the easy going originals 😂

I met a real life Mary-Lou once, even hearing a friend refer to her as "our one and only " safe to say she was as insufferable in real life as she seemed in the books!

I’m a massive Nell Wilson fan, personally, though I have a weird soft spot for Simone Lecoutier, probably because I was a homesick young teen with emotional incontinence myself 😂

I made the mistake of glancing at fan fiction. Lots of Hilda and Nell, connie and Nell, Simone pining cor Jo! Lots of stuff that would have made them sick I’m sure

Well, the only form of sexuality allowed in the CS is a jolly schoolgirl or girlish mistress catching the eye of a doctor, whose proposal always comes as a total shock, and then a marriage with as many children as can possibly be squeezed out, preferably as multiple births, while still protesting about being really just a CS girl..

If it weren’t for their habit of drugging their wives I wouldn’t mind a nice TB doctor husband

@FelicityBeedle

I made the mistake of glancing at fan fiction. Lots of Hilda and Nell, connie and Nell, Simone pining cor Jo! Lots of stuff that would have made them sick I’m sure

So you kind of think the entire Chalet School,staff and girls,were straight? Statistics suggest that that's not terribly likely...😶

I’m bisexual, I’m not straightwashing! I doubt they’re all straight, I have my suspicions about matey for some reason. Just made me laugh that every fanfic seemed to be them getting off with each other

Well given that they don’t actually exist outside the pages of a particularly weird fictional universe (and I love the CS books, but they’re quite odd), I don’t think we can use RL statistic for evidence on girls and staff sexuality.

I think there have been fanfics that have coded canon Grizel as gay and in love with Joey, likewise Eustacia Benson (all that Greek, probably), but in truth EBD disapproves of sexuality in general — poor, precocious Joan Baker, and the two that dress up in headscarves and trousers during one of the WW2 books — unless it’s channelled into an insanely fertile marriage to a San doctor, who’s a bit free with the sedatives...

I’m reading the one with Joan Baker today! Imagine being dismissed as some sort of Harlot for being giggle over boys age 14!

It's weird that Joey became emotionally fragile as an adult when she was tough as nails as a teen.

But if you're 16, blonde and catch the eye of a Prince visiting the school, it's fine for him to talk to your father. . (That's pretty much Marie Von Eschenau story isn't it?)

I gave the School at the Chalet to my DD recently, (9yo) she likes Malory Towers and St Clare's. Chalet School is harder going though. (Strongly suspected Dyslexia)

Oh, poor Joan can’t do anything right. Even when she’s slightly ‘reformed’ by the end of her first term, she’s still very much viewed as inferior goods throughout the rest of her time at the school, with references to her ‘cheap’ prettiness and some unpleasant remarks about how you can’t eradicate ‘bad early training’ (though no one ever uses that excuse for the psychotically-violent Margot).

And I think after she’s left there’s some reference to her writing that she’s getting engaged while she’s at business college, and everyone is a bit ‘Ew, I’d hate that’, while regarding Joey, married with three children at 21, as the ultimate in Chalet Girl Cool.

Working-class girls are only approved of if they’re deferential, picturesque Tyrolean peasants or those who, like Rosamund Lilley and Biddy O’Ryan, have been taught ‘dainty ways’ by their lady’s maid mothers. Whereas Joan eats fish and chips on the street and ‘wolfs’ cheap ‘shop cake’! The idea!

Yes god forbid you eat shop bought cake rather than having a loyal housemaid or perfect mother to make it! Mary Lou is downright rude all the time, but that’s fine because she’s so old for her age! When it’s Joan who acts older she’s a tart in training and too common for words

Yay, a Chalet School thread! I was wondering what happened to them.

I'm re-reading Genius at the moment and it's one of my favourite Swiss books. I love Nina. I also re-read Eustacia, which is my least favourite Tyrolean book because everyone in it is just so awful. I know we're supposed to hate Eustacia but I'm not bloody surprised she ran away. Not only were the girls horrible to her, but so were the teachers. Miss Stewart was vile. And Robin shouldn't have been on the expedition if she was so bloody delicate.

Miss Ferrars and Miss Wilmot are my OTP. Actually, as a teen I thought Miss Annersley and Miss Wilson were a couple, but EBD would NEVER. I actually like Mary-Lou but Jesus, anyone would think Joan was banging Gaudenz in the boiler room the way OOAO talks about her. And I wish she'd shoved Evil Reg off a cliff and run away with Len instead. There's a really good (if long) thread on the CBB archives about class and EBD's portrayal of peasants vs British working-class women: www.the-cbb.co.uk/board/archive/files/FD_Class_080410.htm

Anyone here on the CBB? I know a couple of MN posters used to be in the olden days.

Just read a little of that thread, I’m sure some of the English girls come from titled families, aren’t Nina’s cousins honourable? I’m sure there’s a north eastern one who’s a lady and definitely an Irish one who left at 18 to enter societ

Yes, but the Irish girl Deira O’Hagan who is a debutante after she leaves the CS suggests EBD knew nothing about Ireland at all. To be presented at Court, Deira would have had to be the daughter of an Anglo-Irish Big House, hence culturally British with an RP English accent rather than the Stage Oirish one she’s given, and would be highly unlikely to be called O’Hagan. And as we know she’s from Cork and is at the CS in the mid-1920s, her family is likely to have either been burnt out in the war of independence, or at least been strongly at risk, so she’s also deeply unlikely to be bouncing about shouting ‘the curse of Cromwell be on you all!’ unless EBD had never picked up a newspaper!

I was on that class thread, though I must have left the board not long after. This thread had me looking up whether the CBB still existed, and made me remember why I left — there were some nice people and interesting discussions, but by God, there was also a freakishly conservative posse of older posters who got outraged at suggestions that EBD was anything other than a brilliantly talent warrior for social justice, would try to smack down any readings that differed from their own, and used to pontificate about Christianity when anyone said they were surprised no one strangled the insufferable Mary-Lou when she stopped and reverently quoted the Psalms every time she saw a mountain! I mean, I like the CS universe because it’s completely mad and often hilariously bad, but it’s clear some people on the CBB liked it because of its conservatism.

Deira O'Hagan, the Anglo-Irish girl who comes from a posh family, yet rants on about Cromwell and how much she hates the English. Oh, EBD. Mind you, all Irish people in the CS talk like that. I'm surprised the Scots don't all say 'och aye the noo', though we do get the McDonalds and their fery annoying Highlandt accents where they talk like thiss.

There are some cool people on the CBB - Alison H, for instance - but the conservative older crowd are really annoying because they don't like any critical discussion of the books. Yes, we know they're for kids and that EBD wasn't writing for adults. Doesn't mean we can't discuss them and 'but they're for children' is a very irritating way of shutting down discussion. One of them, and you can probably guess who I mean, likes to complain about how awful kids are these days and that it's 'disturbing' how much power kids have, especially British kids, and she got extremely arsey about people criticising Joey Goes to the Oberland. Because how dare people like different things.

I like OOAO BUT I get why people don't, and she can be OTT in the Swiss books - EBD couldn't bear to let her go - and as a non-Christian I do find her incessantly reciting psalms and lecturing Jessica Wayne about Jesus very grating. Though she, like most of the other characters, are products of EBD's conversion to Catholicism and converts can be more hardcore than people born into the faith. I don't think real Catholics get toddlers to confess to them at bedtime and give them theological lectures (like in Jo to the Rescue). The religion in the earlier books is bearable because Tyrol is and was very Catholic, and Tom's religious faith is dealt with in a more subtle and realistic way. But a group of naughty 14 year olds all kneeling in the forest and saying Hail Mary? Come on.

And sorry, but I really hate EBD's use of the n-word, and shit like Josette calling Cecil a n*** even though Cecil is white and has white parents, because she has black hair. I know people in the 50s were throwing that word around left right and centre, and they totally weren't racist or anything, it was just how people talked, and not only black people were called that, but dark-haired white people too. Doesn't mean I have to be OK with it. Same with EBD equating 'Christian' with 'human being' (walking like a Christian, talking like a Christian etc.)

@Apileofballyhoo

It's weird that Joey became emotionally fragile as an adult when she was tough as nails as a teen.

Robin dealt with the escape in Exile far, far better than Joey did, tbh.

She had no bother tearing after numerous people to rescue them as a teen!

Yeah, she climbs up a dangerous mountain in the first book, goes after a man known to be dangerous in the third and after a local nutcase in the fourth, and falls into a freezing lake trying to rescue someone in the fifth...and then suddenly she's an adult and she's fainting all over the place and having to be sedated if she falls into a packing case.

I blame Jack. She was fine before he groomed her (i mean.. early books he was working for her brother in law as a Dr, she was a schoolgirl...then she leaves school and suddenly she's helpless and needs him...)

the conservative older crowd are really annoying because they don't like any critical discussion of the books. Yes, we know they're for kids and that EBD wasn't writing for adults. Doesn't mean we can't discuss them and 'but they're for children' is a very irritating way of shutting down discussion. One of them, and you can probably guess who I mean, likes to complain about how awful kids are these days and that it's 'disturbing' how much power kids have, especially British kids, and she got extremely arsey about people criticising Joey Goes to the Oberland. Because how dare people like different things.

Oh, definitely this. I'm not sure I remember individual names of the Do Not Criticise posse though I do remember Alison H and Tor as nice just from seeing their names again on that class thread but I definitely remember the continual attempts to close down discussion from certain posters because they seemed to think that anything other than saying 'Oh, I love the bit where they choose a new uniform/Christmas in Innsbruck/the sheets and pillowcase party' or talking about how nice it is to see teenagers with the right attitude to God/their parents/their prep or whatever was the equivalent of subjecting EBD and her characters to appalling personal criticism.

(It was Jack Lambert and her lot who drop to their knees when lost and pray fervently, wasn't it? Which is one of the more obvious moments in which the batshit crazy later Swiss books often operate as some kind of Conservative Older Catholic Wish Fulfilment, as when 'breezy' Joey gets all uptight when she sees Beatniks in London and turns into Mary Whitehouse. )

I can't remember much about Joey Goes to the Oberland -- is it the one where the Maynards leave the UK for the Platz, and we get a blow by blow account of exactly what they ate and where everyone sat in the railway carriages the entire way? I think I only read that as an adult, and even then I was 'WTF?' I mean, who was it aimed at? I doubt the most invested child reader would be all that interested in endless discussions about packing, especially in a book that contains absolutely nothing about the school...?

I must go back and see if I can figure out Joey changing. Exile was/is a great read, except for Joey and the triplets and it being hilarious and so Joey and whatever. Did it all go downhill from there?