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!

Oops Phill’s even

I thought she had mastoid and then polio?

@KevinTheGoat Maybe she did, the first I read of it was in Challenge, but I wonder if my transcript of summer term is an abridged one. It certainly didn’t mention her getting Polio

I think it's one of those things that happened offscreen. In Two Sams she's recovering from polio and it's why Joey wants Samaris to come over and play the flute to Phil, because Phil is off her food. Two Sams is pretty weak but Joey showing a more vulnerable side is one of the better things about it, as well as Miss Annersley actually putting her foot down and saying "Samaris can only come over in her free time, she's here to get an education and we can't just let her out of class when you want to see her." And Samaris and Samantha are lovely, though I want to smack Jack and friends for having a go at Samantha because she got to see Nina in hospital and they didn't. Joey asked her, how could she say no?

Actually, that's a point. Bitchiness/jealousy is a recurring theme in the Swiss books.

Do we hear much about Phil's polio? Is there an outbreak on the Platz?

I always thought it was a slightly odd decision from EBD to give her polio I'm from somewhere that had several big outbreaks of polio in the 1950s (and which were major public health emergencies, involving school closure, curfews on children, the closure of swimming pools and cinemas, postponements of sport events etc.) and it's a highly infectious disease that thrives on crowded conditions and poor hygiene one of the most common modes of infection was via faeces between children who didn't wash their hands after going to the loo.

So, despite the fact that it was so much in the news worldwide in the 1950s because of the development of the vaccines and the big vaccine trials, it seemed like an unlikely disease for one very protected child in a big family, almost certainly brought up with very strict hygiene rules and with excellent sanitation, living in an isolated Swiss mountain community and not, by the sound of things, mingling with many other children at all...?

@Frogcorset
EBD doesn’t seem to have much understanding of disease transmission, lots of TB patients on long enclosed train journeys. And that random one family smallpox outbreak, was that ever explained? Or was it just god’s way of getting Ted to learn French in the San?

EBD is kind of obsessed with disease to the point whether I wonder if she had a medical fetish. I mean, disease was still fairly rife in the '20s (in one of the non-CS books, there's a diphtheria epidemic and some of the kids in it die) but medicine was making advances by the '50s. And yet you've got tons of TB patients, the obsession with the Robin's health, poor Mary-Lou's mum AND stepdad dying of disease, Janice Chester getting cowpox of all things, loads of epidemics...nowadays she'd be having a field day with COVID. They'd all be looking very trig and dainty in their gentian blue masks. Actually, there's a fanfic idea...(and i didn't know that about polio, but you're right, how the shit would Phil have caught it? Or did EBD just want to make one of Joey's kids ill?)

Her little brother died as a child of meningitis, so I would guess that’s connected with the obsession with illness and doctors. But agree she was very poorly informed about how diseases work. Imagine being worried about a child being vulnerable to TB so you bring them up surrounded by infectious TB cases …

I do wonder how accurate layperson knowledge would have been of any of these issues, though. Much easier in the era of Google to check your facts! I know that obviously if you were writing (or editing) "serious" books you'd still have researched stuff like this to get it right, but I imagine that the standard for this sort of series was not particularly exacting.

I think also that TB advances in the 1950s would have been very inconvenient to a CS world which relied on a steady flow of British traffic to an alpine sanitorium!

As well as her brother, I think there's a bit of a Victoriana interest in illness as a plot device: illness to indicate a charming ethereal vulnerability (eg Robin), illness/injury as a means to improve moral character (Eustacia, maybe also Ted?)...

(There's also something here maybe about the typical scientific education of women of EBD's generation, isn't there? The earlier CS girls get an unusually extensive and professionalised science curriculum, but I assume EBD's involved a mild smattering of botany at best, which doesn't provide much of a framework for understanding diseases or bothering to follow developments in medical thinking, even for someone with an imaginative interest in illness.)

@NellWilsonsWhiteHair

I do wonder how accurate layperson knowledge would have been of any of these issues, though. Much easier in the era of Google to check your facts! I know that obviously if you were writing (or editing) "serious" books you'd still have researched stuff like this to get it right, but I imagine that the standard for this sort of series was not particularly exacting.

I think also that TB advances in the 1950s would have been very inconvenient to a CS world which relied on a steady flow of British traffic to an alpine sanitorium!

As well as her brother, I think there's a bit of a Victoriana interest in illness as a plot device: illness to indicate a charming ethereal vulnerability (eg Robin), illness/injury as a means to improve moral character (Eustacia, maybe also Ted?)...

It's interesting how she's trying to have Joey be two very different types of heroine: the delicate Victorian heroine and the jolly hockey sticks modern schoolgirl heroine. So she climbs a mountain to rescue Grizel but ends up bedridden after standing too near a door in winter, she can outswim a fit teenage boy in a race but needs to be drugged off her tits when she falls into a packing case, she can climb trees and play active games with the kids but needs plenty of bedrest, etc. (Ted wasn't ill, just quarantined because she, Ros and Len were near a little girl who had smallpox. Dr Graves gave them all jabs at the scene but thought they should go into isolation just in case. Ooh, topical!)

I always headcanon that the San branched out into more of a general hospital - OK, so it's up a mountain that isn't easy to get to, but it would explain why they take on pregnant women, accident victims etc.

Forgot to add, do other GO series have an obsession with health/disease? I've finished a St Clare's book where one girl has flu, another has a mental breakdown due to her dickhead parents pushing her too hard - she's like the St Clare's equivalent of Nina Rutherford, if Nina had had awful pushy parents instead of being very self-motivated - and another girl has a glandular problem (thyroid, probably) which makes her fat and permanently hungry. But it's not at EBD levels.

@Gremlinsateit

Her little brother died as a child of meningitis, so I would guess that’s connected with the obsession with illness and doctors. But agree she was very poorly informed about how diseases work. Imagine being worried about a child being vulnerable to TB so you bring them up surrounded by infectious TB cases …

And trying to get Joyce Linton, who’s just travelled across Europe with a seriously ill TB patient, to kiss her good night the minute she arrives?

I remember when I read the books first thinking that EBD still seemed to have a rather glamorous 19thc view of TB — pale, beautiful young women wasting delicately away — compared to the one that adults held when I was growing up, which was that it was rather shameful, associated with poverty and overcrowding. And TB sans were feared and stigmatised, not regarded as heroic and prestigious. People would often get off the bus at a different stop when visiting someone.

Plus it never seems to have occurred to EBD that many parents would not have wanted their daughters, whether frail or robust, to be in a school with a lot of girls who were considered TB risks or close contacts of cases.

Miss Browne was missing a marketing trick!

There is a brilliant book by Amy Witting called “Isobel on the way to the corner shop” set in a Australian sanatorium which sheds rather a different light on postwar TB treatment.

"Don't come to the Chalet School! Your daughters will get TB and die!"

I'm reading Coming of Age and apparently Joey is utterly unbearable in it, to the point where even OOAO thinks she needs to cool it. A Shakespeare sale sounds fun though -imagine the scenes if they'd had a Titus Andronicus stall-

Also, major EBD-isms about the age of the school: is it 21 or 25? The latest CBB thread on the book has a list of EBD-isms in the book and some of them are pretty glaring.

On the TB subject I’ve taken a break from the last 3 books (read, lost momentum with) and started reading James Herriot again. It’s reminded me that a common transmission cause of TB was in fact milk. All those pints of gloriously creamy unpasteurised milk from mountain huts probably have a lot to answer for. Im wondering if the san encourages the girls to drinks lots of milk to keep business healthy for them!

Also, ho-lee shit the Mary-Lou fan in the CBB thread for Coming of Age is defensive. We can't even have a jokey discussion about OOAO fighting vampires or something. You can't slag Joey off all the time but get super defensive whenever anyone criticises your fave.

@KevinTheGoat
I can’t find the thread on CBB, link?

Do link, @KevinTheGoat. Are the Old Guard screaming about ‘relentless negativity’ and nastiness and fundamentally failing to understand that the Chalet School is wonderful and discussable partly because the stuff EBD thinks is unassailably brilliant and needs reiterating all the time — whether it’s the creamy milk, the dainty new uniform dresses in Switzerland or adult Joey’s competitive fertility (and the fact that her ‘perfect’ triplets include a psychopath and a harried juvenile middle-manager having a semi-forced marriage) — is sometimes kind of gruesome.

Here you go: the-cbb.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=14722&start=20

One of the posters is not happy about someone joking about OOAO voting for herself.

@FelicityBeedle

On the TB subject I’ve taken a break from the last 3 books (read, lost momentum with) and started reading James Herriot again. It’s reminded me that a common transmission cause of TB was in fact milk. All those pints of gloriously creamy unpasteurised milk from mountain huts probably have a lot to answer for. Im wondering if the san encourages the girls to drinks lots of milk to keep business healthy for them!

I’ve been re-reading some Monica Edwards Romney Marsh books, and in one of them the adults are all decrying pasteurisation and saying they’ll continue to rely on nice clean farms

EWWWWWWW is all I have to say to that.

Bleurgh indeed.

I'm re-reading Rivals and just got past the bit with the crumbling lake path, and I am struggling to place together what seem contradictory ideas about the physical capability of the girls! very possibly I'm just looking for a truth that isn't really there

So, because they can't return the way they came, they need to take a longer, steeper journey home. Yes, it's a long and arduous climb, but it's over and they're carted home by around 4/5pm, and the next day half the Saints are apparently too done in to even get out of bed and their Matron is "worried and irritable", the rest of the staff "looked troubled". These are not very young or otherwise physically vulnerable children. Is it that smaller, more sedate, less well fed young ladies in the interwar period just weren't as fit and strong as today? Does it reflect a now-outdated notion that it paid to be cautious about physical exertion and other stresses?

But... the walk that the Saints were already doing, past the Dripping Rock to Gaisalm and back is already hardly a gentle stroll. (Can personally attest, having done it with 18mo in sling, and with my 7yo and my mother in tow - by the time we'd made it from Briesau Pertisau to Gaisalm, we were glad to sit, eat/drink, and get the boat back!) And I'm minded of the distances the girls often cover around the Tiernsee - I've read the suggestion that EBD 'shrank the lake' and that's how "being back before breakfast" was possible, and also the counter-suggestion that EBD was talking about hale and hearty girls who happily walked much further and faster than middle-aged Chaletians making their pilgrimage decades later!

I suspect the simple answer is that I'm looking for sense where there's none to be found, since it's pretty inconsequential, but either I'm missing some important context in health/fitness expectations of the time, or it's another contradictory EBD desire to do muscular Christianity and delicate heroines at the same time.

I think you're right about 'interesting' delicate heroines and muscular Christianity (and associated ideas about jollity and exercise being healthful for young girls, rather than keeping them still and quiet), @NellWilsonsWhiteHair.

It occurred to me that EBD really does see delicacy as interesting when I realised it's not just that she gives Mary-Lou a total makeover once she is established as the Second Coming of Joey, so that she goes from sturdy, straight-haired and ordinarily pleasant-looking to a slender, leggy, curly-haired stunner with beautifully-shaped lips -- she also turns her from someone in boringly robust health into someone who has an 'interestingly heroic' Joey-style brush with death, and a lingering back issue as well as a magical change of body and hair type. It's all part of giving her proper heroine status for EBD.

I've always been a bit confused by the terrain of that forced walk in Rivals, maybe because I don't understand the geography of the 'real' Tiernsee. Was EBD's fictional lake small enough to feasibly walk round? Is the path around it just a narrow footpath, as suggested when the Saints and the Chaletians have a stand off about going into single file? I seem to remember that the reason they can't circumnavigate the lake home that the path has also broken down at some other point, and they can't skate safely from where they are?

But when they start discussing alternative ways of getting home on foot, no one seems that sure about routes, and it's never clear to me whether there's an actual path up from the lakeside that they take, or whether they're just randomly striking off up the mountainside in roughly the right direction to hit a shelf they can walk along before heading back down further along?

So the real Achensee is about 9km in length, and therefore walking right round is a bloody good stretch but not impossible.

A lot of it has a fairly normal lake path - reasonable flat and fairly wide with a grass verge. The stretch between Pertisau/Briesau (dripping rock territory - and the scene of the collapsing footpath) is much more up/down, narrower, higher, with steep drops in places (hopefully there is an attached photo from Google to demonstrate). So that's the walk the girls are already doing, and intend to go back the same way. It's not super extreme climbing by any measure, but it definitely involves a bit of exertion which makes it hard to understand why going over the mountain instead to get home warrants a day of bedrest and warm milk - I don't think the difference is quite that striking!

Gaisalm is like a small kinda headland? Also pictured. From that picture, the route to/from Briesau is sort of off the top of the picture, and a similarly strenuous (apparently more so - I haven't done this one) walk round to Scholastika/Achenkirch will lead off from the bottom of the picture. The route the girls are directed to take seems to be neither of these, but fairly directly away from the lake. But EBD also describes it as being fairly easy going at first, which doesn't really match with the way the hillside rises quite steeply, so I assume there is some degree of poetic licence here. It's also supposed to be snowy so the whole thing is quite hard to sensibly picture!