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!

@KevinTheGoat

Helena, Constance, Margaret, Felicity, Cecily, Philippa...hmmm, yes those are pretty English names. The closest she gets to a 'foreign' name is giving Cecil Marya as a middle name, in honour of Robin's dead mum. I know the triplets are named after established characters (Miss Wilson, Miss Stewart and both Madge and Margot Venables) and they all have Mary as a first name, which apparently is a Catholic thing. Joey's rationale is that she doesn't want to call her daughters names that might date.

Merryn Williams evidently didn't like 'Len' either, as she has Len calling herself Helena in CGGU.

To be honest, I always found it weirdly arbitrary that Joey called two of the triplets after Nell Wilson and Miss Stewart, though Madge/Margot is obvious, and a nice thought — but is there any particular closeness between Joey and those other two I’m missing? I get that wanting to all one after Madge meant she couldn’t call them after Frieda, Marie and Simone or anything that neat, but two former mistresses...?

I can't quite see it either, but in fairness -

1. There's a really key phase of Joey's life immediately ahead of the triplets' birth which is necessarily under-explored in the book, where Joey and the school are living very close and probably very intertwined, in weird unusual times, so maybe something happens 'off screen' there, which EBD sort of knows about but also forgets she hasn't shared with the reader.

1. Joey's conversion to Catholicism is also under-explored (I guess because sensitive / maybe just too niche), but it's a reasonable guess that one/both were quite significant in what would have been an important transition for her.

1. Joey, even in her vital youth, has no life outside of the school, so limited other people to name them after. And I think Joey is a bit too 'alpha' to name her children after eg Juliet or Gisela. I wonder if EBD was ever tempted to call them Simone/Marie/Frieda?

@KevinTheGoat

EBD definitely had a thing for girls with boys' names. Dickie (Delicia), Tom (Lucinda Muriel), Len (Helena), Jack (Jacynth), Bill (Miss Wilson), Charlie (Miss Stewart, reference to Bonnie Prince Charlie), Ted (Theodora), and Joey is more of a man's name too, although I remember Katie Holmes' character in Dawson's Creek was a Joey.

'Con' is also a swear word in French, but I'm not sure if EBD knew that.

This is really of the time and genre though, isn't it? It's quite normal but also there are (mostly) types of girls/women who get given a boyish name to indicate that they are strong, assertive, no-nonsense sorts (all those wonderfully male attributes...). Len is slightly anomalous here for me, but I wonder if it's supposed to link to her 'leadership' qualities, which I think EBD is keen to mention but I dont think are actually terribly apparent.

I think it's quite interesting that EBD's right-thinking girls are horrified by names like Eustacia and Lucinda, when she herself renamed herself Patricia Maraquita for a bit - all those names definitely seem to be cut from the same cloth IMO!

St Clare's has a girl like that called Bobby. She's a cheerful, no-nonsense tomboyish type. And of course, Malory Towers has Darrell the psycho.

@KevinTheGoat

St Clare's has a girl like that called Bobby. She's a cheerful, no-nonsense tomboyish type. And of course, Malory Towers has Darrell the psycho.

Though at least Darrel recognises that smacking and pushing people so hard they fall are bad behaviour and while she still struggles with her temper, she stops actually being violent, and the school never actually steps in to cover up her actions or tells Sally Hope it was all her fault for pretending not to have a baby sister...

I think I just got thinking about Joey’s ordinary, ‘sensible’ children’s names because it seemed like an obvious place for EBD to express Joey’s mild zaniness, or at least her international friendships, but she refrained, and gave her children these ‘blokeish’ names.

And their Englishness struck me, too, as I’m someone who’s moved around internationally a lot and had my child while living overseas without any plans to return to my home country, so gave him a name which is used in my home country but which is also used across Europe. Nearly everyone I know who had outside their native country has done similar, or chosen names that work in two or three languages because of wanting all relatives to be able to pronounce them, and not knowing where the child will live in adulthood.

It got me wondering whether EBD felt Joey and Jack had always expected to return to live in England longterm and in fact that she felt they were more culturally English than I think of Joey, at least as being — after all, she’d left for the Tiernsee at 12, is completely trilingual, and not that long before she had the triplets she was contemplating a future at the Belsornian court.

Also, I completely get why tomboyish Tom would have wanted to be known as that rather than Lucinda Muriel, or why Dickie might have chosen that over the fussy Delicia, but isn’t that quite different to a parent choosing at birth that her babies will be known as Len and Con?
(Though she says Connie at first, doesn’t she?)

I could imagine Joey suggesting all sorts of Belsornian names and Jack scathingly insisting on 'proper' English names, actually! I'm sure that wasn't EBD's thinking but it works for me.

@FelicityBeedle

Reading Jack and it seems the girls only ever had one gym slip, and the only day that wasn’t uniform was Sunday. Do you think they were only washed termly? There’s a few mentions of spoiling it and having to wear Sunday skirts or PE kit, I can’t imagine that going well with the young kids

Sorry - I'm going back a bit as I've only just caught up on the thread.

I was at boarding school in the '80s. The uniform list allowed for 1 weekday skirt, 1weekday jumper, 1 blazer, 1 Sunday suit, 1 Sunday jumper (diff colour to weekdays) 3 shirts, 1 house tie (for weekdays), 1 school tie (Sundays), 3 summer dresses. You spot cleaned and coped. Shirts and dresses went to the laundry - the rest got dry cleaned in the holidays.

The thing that really sticks in my memory was opening the trunk when you got home at the beginning of the holidays. Everything smelt of a mixture of polish and cabbage water. You just didn't notice it at school because that was what school smelt of.

@BlueTriskel

I’m always interested in how, in a fictional universe filled with fanciful and/or international girls’ names (Gisela, Bernhilda, Jacynth, Elfie, Loveday, Ilonka, Blossom, Evadne, Luigia, Bette, Renata, Alixe, Elise, Carlotta, Elisaveta, Charmian, Primrose, Yseult etc) EBD has Joey give hers rather plain English names, even though several of them are born in Guernsey or Switzerland, and Joey is presented as such an easily international figure, linguistically and otherwise, and so given to zaniness.

I'm firmly of the view that Jack had the say so on all the kids' names. He has always struck me as very solidly English!

And finally - I actually knew a He-LEN-a (as opposed to a He-LAY-na) so to me the nickname Len makes sense. And I like 'Con" too (just to be controversial!)

I do remember EBD initially calling her daughter Connie, but then switching to Con. There was a Con Atherton in the La Rochelle books as well.

@alterego2 in the GGBP version of Ruey, there's an interesting essay about school uniforms in the olden days and how mums had to make everything by hand, before mass produced clothes were a thing, and there were huge lists of pants, shoes, Sunday dresses, hats, coats, swimming kit and so on in the school colours. And gymslips started out as PE kit (there's an extract from a school story where a teacher has a big go at some girls for wearing gymslips in public, like they're walking around in their bras or something) but ended up becoming uniform. I've seen a picture of my gran, who was born in the '20s, as a child and she wore a gymslip to school. Btw did you have to sew on all your name tags?

I always loved EBD's fascination with names. I did German at school and in one of the introductory classes we had to come up with German names, and one of the ones I picked was 'Gisela'. (And 'Karl-Heinz', as Liverpool had a German player called Karl-Heinz Riedle at the time. Of course, nowadays 'Jürgen' would probably be the first name people come up with, or 'Adolf' even though he was actually Austrian.)

@alterego2 interesting insight about the uniform thank you! I have a strange fascination for reading posh boarding school websites and the uniform and ‘house rules’ are often the most interesting bit.

I’m up to Redheads and I had forgotten my fury at them insisting on calling Flavia her proper name. Claiming shortening are allowed but nicknames not. What about Tom gay?

There aren’t actually many international marriages in the CS world, are there? Or not as many as one would expect. Biddy O’Ryan Courvoisier is the only major character I can think of. Given that every passing Austrian appears to be utterly devoted to Joey during her schooldays, you might expect a raft of young Austrian San doctors becoming ‘quite sure about what she meant to them’... I would have so enjoyed to see someone who’d decided that getting crisply knocked back, rather than Joey temporarily moving to another continent because ‘Not interested’ wasn’t working...

I've not read Redheads, but I think the logic is that 'Tom' is a legitimate name but 'Copper' isn't.

@KevinTheGoat - yes I did have to hand sew every single name tape. Bear in mind that meant every single sock (grey for winter, white for summer), every pair of pants, bras (obvs never worn by Chalet girls) sports kit, mufti - it was wearisome! As a side note: should any of you contemplate sending your offspring to a similar institution - never sew a name tape around the welt of a sock - it's bloody painful if you have wide calves!!

@FelicityBeedle - where have you found a website that actually gives details of 'house rules'? My old school websites are boringly stingy on particulars.

Juliet married an Irishman, but was her family Irish I can’t quite remember? Yseult goes for an American.

I think it was Queen Ethelburga’s I looked at most recently, I can’t quite remember though

@FelicityBeedle

Juliet married an Irishman, but was her family Irish I can’t quite remember? Yseult goes for an American.

I think it was Queen Ethelburga’s I looked at most recently, I can’t quite remember though

I don’t think so — aren’t the Carricks described as Anglo-Indian? Their main seat of operations seems to have been India, anyway. Dick knows of their reputation, and Juliet says her parents had previously tried to dump her at another school in the Hills, doesn’t she, but the Head found them and made them take her back? Presumably a school in one of the hill-stations the British moved up to the summers.

Donal O’Hara is another Irish character EBD gets wrong — his stage-Oirish accent doesn’t match his social position, just as Deira O’Hagan’s doesn’t. But as Donal is such a loathesome drip, I don’t care that much! Though I suppose it’s entirely psychologically plausible that with two such rejecting parents, Juliet falls for someone who rejects her too.

Donal is such an arsehole. "Oh woe is me, my sister is a snob and doesn't like my girlfriend because of something her stupid parents did, so I have to dump her." Juliet, hun, you could do SO much better.

I think the Carricks are English but born in India? I don't think they're mixed-race or anything. (What were Hill schools?)

@alterego2 that sounds like an absolute nightmare!

No, definitely not mixed-race. It is used more of mixed-race people now but also used to be of British people with purely British ancestry who were born and/or lived longterm in India.

Hill schools would have been schools, probably run along British lines, in the hill stations where resident Brits lived in the summers to escape the heat — like Shimla or Dalhousie etc. It would have been a good spot to have a school aimed at British girls as the altitude was considered healthy for Europeans.

Donal is insufferable. It’s not even that he’s a snob on his own behalf, he’s influenced by his snobbish sister, which makes him come across as an unusually easily-swayed 12 year old. Mind you, the way EBD writes the Donal-Juliet ‘romance’ strikes me as very EBD anyway — when Juliet spills to Joey, all the depth of feeling is in the way she describes the sister befriending her, not Donal at all. It’s a bit like the way she implies that Jessica Wayne’s mother marries her bank manager mostly because she feels sorry for his invalid daughter. Nice women didn’t say ‘Pwhoar! I like the look of him!’

Thekla?

@NellWilsonsWhiteHair
I thought the same! I will admit to occasionally having a corner of smoked bacon, only a tiny piece because I know it’s grim. Not much worse than steak tartare though

Gillian Linton and Peter Young had the best relationship. They went on a few dates first and he wasn't a masterful doctor, and it didn't have the creepy aspect that Jack and Joey did (bearing in mind Joey was in school when he met her). Armada cut it out of the paperback, I think, which is a shame because it's a nice little plot.

Some of those midnight feasts sound rank. I mean, gingerbread and fish paste? Minging. No wonder they were ill!

@Frogcorset wasn't there this belief that white kids could not hack it in hot climates? Like poor Margot's sons, who all died out in Australia (and Aussie readers were a bit bemused at EBD making Queensland sound like some kind of heat-ravaged hellhole). EBD also wrote this adventure book called Top Secret and the hero has this conversation with some woman about how Oz is bad for white people or something.

i find all the colonial stuff so fascinating. Mum knew people at school in the '60s who were boarders cos they had family in Kenya and other colonies, and my maternal grandparents lived in Sierra Leone for a bit when Grandad's firm sent him out there - one of my aunties was born there - but Gran hated it and was desperate to go home, partly because of my auntie getting ill and partly because the white people there were so racist. It was like a W Somerset Maugham book, whites were expected to keep to themselves and not mingle with the natives.

Were childhood diseases more common in these places? That and tropical diseases I suppose. Could that be why kids were kept away? (Those poor abandoned bettany’s, dumped on madge!) I suppose a hot dry climate isn’t great for anyone with TB.

Yes, like all the Bettany children being sent to Die Rosen from India one by one. And while I know it was entirely normal to send your children ‘home’ in the Raj, there’s something so strange and unnatural in warm-hearted young parents like Dick and Mollie pumping out babies in quick succession to leave at Die Rosen for years. Is it in Jo Returns when they give Joey the typewriter and say they’re leaving Bride and Jacky (who’s under 12 months) to join Peggy and Rix at the Sonnalpe, and Mollie is already pregnant again with Maeve and Maurice?

www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612020000200242

This essay suggests that sending your children ‘home’ was an important class distinction among the British inhabitants of India, because keeping them with you was a sign of poverty, of being an employee’ of lower standing in the government service, or in trade, and you would have to send them to local schools that took mixed race and ‘poor white’ children. It actually mentions the ‘hill schools’ in this context, which might make sense in terms of the Carricks’ standing.

Felicity’s mastoiditis last term has suddenly become polio! Poor creature. curses EBDs jumping plots