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!

It's an interesting and very true point about the completeness of ML acquiring the "interesting delicate heroine" attribute and not just a new hairdo/dramatic storyline.

I think it also connects to her theme of having licence to collapse and be looked after - Joey countless times, Madge at the Mensches, Penny Rest and so on. The boring "sturdy" characters who get to look after collapsed heroines are definitely second-tier for EBD, so I guess ML had to be elevated to 'sometimes delicate' status to really cement her position in the annals of the series.

Perhaps making her heroines a bit delicate was her trying to avoid making Mary Sues out of them. She couldn’t face putting in any character flaws (or so she thought) so gave them physical delicacy with a faultless personality that could bear if

Oh gosh, the narrow path with the handrail is far more precarious than I'd pictured, and far more chancy than I would be happy shepherding a party of obstreperous Middles along -- I think I'd spend the whole time mentally rehearsing my lifesaving techniques! Thank you.

I think my difficulty in picturing why they had to go so far up the mountain to get across a chasm in the lake path is really about why, if the terrain immediately above the path is easy going at first, why they can't just scramble up a few yards above the path, make their way along a bit and then come down on the right side of the chasm, rather than strike right away up the mountain. But as you say, poetic licence.

It's absolutely true that having robust good health for EBD makes you a second-tier looker-after rather than a highly-strung, delicate heroine (though one who somehow still skates to the rescue, nips up the Tiernjoch after an absconder or trails kidnappers armed with only a petticoat and a large dog.)

Though I'm always interested in the distinction she makes between 'good highly-strung/sensitive' (Joey fainting after the Oberammergau Passion Play) and 'bad highly-strung' (the maids encountering Baby Voodoo, the maids screaming at thunderstorms, the maids having any emotion other than smiling deference -- am I answering my own question here? )

That's a very good picture of the path - I particularly asked DP to look at this bit when he walked round the lake to meet me at Scholastika (I cycled in the opposite direction) as I'd been wondering this very point for years. It's like a cliff face with a narrow path along it

The path on the left is giving me the willies, but wow, that scenery is beautiful. The Achensee is on my bucket list (and luckily my German is pretty good, I'm not fluent but I can get around).

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!

The Gasthaus at Gaisalm does particularly good currywurst.

The path round from Gaisalm to Achenkirch is definitely more of a scramble - there are some bits which are very slippy and at least one section of slope covered in scree - I wouldn't want to try it in winter! And I'd probably be nervous of doing it with younger kids in that kind of weather.

I've long decided that the route the girls took was entirely fictional!

I have done the walk down from Maurach to Jenbach/Spartz in winter and it's just lovely, even if people think you're mad.

We were supposed to be going back to Achensee for the first time taking our kids this summer, so gutted to be missing it.

It is, but it's heavily based on a real place, as is St Briavel's, which is thought to be a mixture of islands near the Welsh coast, such as Skokholm and Caldey (which the Manic Street Preachers sang about!) Caldey's got a monastery too.

Someone actually recreated the trip to the castle and lily ponds in Carola and took photos, if you've got GGBP Carola it's in there.

I somehow feel the CS would be a very different place if the girls were continually exclaiming about the excellence of the school's Currywurst, rather than its Kaffee (with featherbeds of whipped cream) und Kuchen.

Do we think EBD simply had a real sweet tooth (or was thinking of a sweet-toothed young readership), hence the focus on cake and pastries, or that it didn't suit her notion of a delicate heroine like Joey horsing into the Blutwurst or Teewurst with gay abandon?

😂😂 Definitely! It was all pflaumekuchen and interesting soups, wasn’t it?

I always wonder how Anna and Marie adapted to not just the food available in the UK, but the food available in the UK under rationing. It must have prompted quite a culinary shift compared to how they’d cooked all their lives….

I wonder what Austrian ingredients are likely to be missing in the U.K.? All I can think of is certain types of sausage but I know naff all about Austrian cooking

Maybe certain plants are less likely to grow here. And Anna had rationing to deal with, no wonder she was livid when Daisy and co wasted a load of ingredients trying to make waffles and fruit cake.

I wonder if the obsession with cake and coffee and whatnot was because of rationing and EBD's readers were used to a fairly plain diet. I mean, my mum was born in 1954 and rationing had only ended a few months earlier (July, I think?) Many of the dishes she mentions are genuine Swiss ones, incidentally, though leckerli (which look fit) are more of a biscuit than a cake.

I love the sound of the crisp potato balls fried in butter she mentioned, never been able to find a recipe that matches them exactlg although I imagine it’s essentially deep fried mash.
The pre war books are quite decadent in their descriptions of food too though so I wonder if it’s just a feature of the time. Some of the late Victorian children’s books seem to do it too

I know when a cousin moved from Austria to Australia in the late 70s, she was frustrated that a lot of what she’d thought of as her staples - the right kind of flour and seeds for the bread she made, smoked meats, cheeses that weren’t cheddar, the right spices and dried herbs etc just weren’t available in the regional city she’d moved to.

It improved over time (not least because her nephew opened a deli specialising in central European food) but I’ve often wondered whether Anna and Marie, presented with the offerings of the village shop / nearest market town had a similar reaction to what was on offer, particularly as rationing would have kicked in.

@FelicityBeedle

I love the sound of the crisp potato balls fried in butter she mentioned, never been able to find a recipe that matches them exactlg although I imagine it’s essentially deep fried mash. The pre war books are quite decadent in their descriptions of food too though so I wonder if it’s just a feature of the time. Some of the late Victorian children’s books seem to do it too

One writer, I think it was Ju Gosling, claimed it was a metaphor for sexuality. Like, EBD can't talk about sexuality so she just goes into lavish descriptions of food, because eating it is a kind of pleasure? Or something.

@JassyRadlett exactly! Like, there are certain types of meats and cheeses and breads you can get on the continent but not here unless you're in Lidl or a Polish deli (Anna would have loved Lidl and Aldi!)

One writer, I think it was Ju Gosling, claimed it was a metaphor for sexuality. Like, EBD can't talk about sexuality so she just goes into lavish descriptions of food, because eating it is a kind of pleasure? Or something.

I haven't read her in years, but I thought she was making a general point about 'Girls Own'-type fiction and its stress on delicious food -- it's certainly there in Enid Blyton's school stories, too, but in her case the school food is barely mentioned, it's illicit midnight feast food (and the fun of eating it illicitly and not getting caught) that's part of the enjoyment.

I think the interesting thing about EBD is how much she reiterates that it's the 'official' CS-provided meals that are delicious and exotic, so much so that the girls never feel the need to have midnight feasts. Which is, I think, kind of missing the point of midnight feasts, but it's interesting that EBD sort of institutionalises the fun of food, making it not a naughty after-hours pleasure but a key element of the CS's excellence, like trilingualism and dainty uniforms. Not school stodge, but Kalbsbraten, golden potato balls and fabulous pastries.

I suppose you could see a parallel with how she makes female sexuality 'safe' and official also, but making it largely be about the enthusiastic fecundity of married old girls.

(Though there could definitely be some suppressed teenage sexuality explanation underlying the bizarre explosion of cheering and insanity when Joey gives the school some jam...? )

Joyce Linton has this conversation where one girl says 'but the food we get is really nice' and Joyce says that it's not about the food, it's the fun of getting up late at night and breaking rules. And whenever CS girls have one, they get punished - by stepping on pigs or getting food poisoning. (I had a few midnight feasts with friends as a child. They were fun.) Whereas the St Clare's girls get away with it, even though it's the night when Mam'zelle is on the prowl and locking everyone in cupboards.

The jam scene was so weird. And annoying. Like OOAO and Joey are the only people who've ever done anything nice for the school. And TWO sets of cheers. I guess cabin fever got to them

Thinking about the exhaustion following the path collapse: Breaking trail in deep snow (as you might expect to see in Rivals away from the lake path) is absolutely exhausting, to the extent that the trail breaker (person at front) should be changed very regularly. I can no longer remember the detail of my winter mountaineering training, but have a feeling it was swapping even as often as 10 mins at time in deep snow. You could easily be falling to thigh depth with every step in powder and it saps strength really quickly (you'd also get very cold and wet in non waterproof trousers/skirts). In harder snow on steeper slopes you would use the blunt end of your ice axe to cut steps and then bash them out, before stepping. Thus progress would be slow.

IIRC the St Scholastika girls didn't have nailed boots? Or had they got them by then? If the ground they were covering was icy then progress would have to be very slow because they'd be sliding all over the place and taking frequent falls which would also leave you feeling pretty roughed up by the next day. Given the exposure and risk of serious injury due to steep sides I would imagine they would try to get to some sort of plateau or pass, rather than contouring above the lake path to get back quickly.

I've done that lake path once. I'm not saying that EBD didn't exaggerate the girl's delicacy etc, use artistic licence, or give mixed messages, but as an ex-professional in this area, I'd say what the girls did when they left the path would be pretty hard. People without experience of winter mountaineering often underestimate how much harder and more dangerous routes are under winter conditions - a route on Snowdon or Ben Nevis that is perfectly accessible by a fairly fit person in summer is a completely different proposition in winter, equivalent to an alpine expedition, and requires a lot of additional kit and the skills to use it.

Even the lake path would have been risky in winter in the narrower more exposed parts, unless they had crampons/nailed boots and axes to brake with in case they fell. And I'm not sure I'd want to take a gaggle of boisterous middles along it.

As a mountain leader, with a large, young, inexperienced group, I'd have gone for the long walk round the lake instead once the path collapsed - there are places to stop en route for hot milk or whatever, and it decreases risks of things going horribly wrong as people get tired and lose the concentration and finesse they need to move across dangerous ground. Less exciting though, from a reader's perspective!

Actually, the more people post about this, the more I realise why I could never really visualise what the forced march 'home' involved, because I don't think EBD fully envisaged it either. As you say, @AlbaAlba, presumably they would have been breaking untrodden snow, if they're cutting off the lake path and heading to a shelf no one seems very sure about routes from or to, but then surely EBD can't have envisioned the CS younger girls and the unaccustomed (and possibly still un-nailed) Saints actually mountaineering, unprepared and without equipment or supplies? So we're back to there being a path of some kind that is clear enough for them not to be wading through deep snow, so people must use the route reasonably often. Which makes me think EBD was just being a bit hand-wavy about it all.

I do love Rivals, though, and I love that whole episode, with the Saints and the CS girls unwillingly thrown together. (Though having seen people's photos of the 'real' lakeside path, the idea of shepherding a lot of misbehaving Middles along it does make me wonder whether there was really absolutely nowhere the girls could have sheltered, even overnight, while the path was repaired, anywhere on the 'wrong' side of the chasm?)

The other climbing/walking bit in the CS that I find difficult to visualise is the hike they seem to do all the time in the Swiss books, where they head up to the shelf above (am thinking of the beginning of Theodora, but it comes up in several others). I think we're told it's a path between the railway line and a rockface, which makes it sound utterly joyless and suburban (or like one of those dullish 'former railway line' walks where you can't see anything because you're down in a cutting) considering its location in the Swiss Alps, yet it also seems like a strenuous scramble, judging by Ted's exhaustion? Though they do it, from what I remember, in school uniform and blazer, rather than the 'unmaidenly' climbing breeches Eustacia objects to, back in the Tyrol days, though I know that was in winter...

(I don't have any of the books to hand, so could be misremembering.)

The girls at St Scholastika's didn't have boots and that was why they struggled, plus the CS girls were more used to the mountainous terrain. No wonder they were all feeling battered the next day.

I'm reading Reunion and Joey is IMMENSELY annoying in it and trying to be Down With The Kids when they go to Tyrol, although she takes OOAO out on a boat to tell her not to tell the rest of the school that she and her peers were allowed to call the Quartette by their first names, and OOAO's response is, "Oh please, like we would." And then Joey drops an oar in the water and she and OOAO have to climb Dripping Rock and Joey doesn't seem to realise that OOAO doesn't know the climb and it's not going to be easy for her, and that she is not, in fact, 14 anymore. I don't blame OOAO for wanting to punt her off a cliff or thinking that Joey needs to calm down a bit.

The EBD-isms are off the charts in this one and, as a German speaker, it always makes me laugh when EBD gets 'Reise' and 'Riese' mixed up and calls Frieda's dad Uncle Journey instead of Uncle Giant.

Forgot to add - I also love Rivals. Yes, even THAT scene with the Robin. Lintons, New House and Head Girl are my favourite Tyrol books (I'm not sure if Exile counts as a Tyrol book as only half of it is set there).

I’m up to Two Sams and for some reason these last 3 books are such a slog! I’m determined to finish the series but it’s a lot of effort

I don't think I've ever got through the last 5 - flicked through for highlights and The Proposal. The latest one in the series that gripped me must have been The Chalet School Wins Through. It must be partly Jack Lambert . Partly the never-ending trail of bland new girls as heroine. But partly when I read them too - some parts of the Tyrol books are just seared in my mind, more like childhood memories than like memories of reading.

Have you just worked through the whole series @FelicityBeedle? What's your "last good book" or is it too soon to ask?

@KevinTheGoat

Forgot to add - I also love Rivals. Yes, even THAT scene with the Robin. Lintons, New House and Head Girl are my favourite Tyrol books (I'm not sure if Exile counts as a Tyrol book as only half of it is set there).

Yes, me too.

I like the way the Rival school does nothing particularly awful, and a lot of it is just the dynamics of the CS feeling undermined and the schoolgirls being a bit prickly, with fairly weak leadership from two headmistresses and poor Mary Burnett ...

And yes THAT scene. EBD has a sort of (and very convincing) random intensity in the early books. Another author might have worked the Red Sarafan and Robin singing to Jo in earlier, done something with the lyrics - but she just slams it into that scene and strides on.

That made me wonder if the Red Sarafan had some known romantic healing qualities, in literature at least. Seems not to have been that common a reference, but look at John Galsworthy (Freeland's, 1915)

I began to love him then; and I believe he saw it, because I couldn't take my eyes away. But it was when Sheila sang 'The Red Sarafan,' after dinner, that I knew for certain. 'The Red Sarafan'—it's a wonderful song, all space and yearning, and yet such calm—it's the song of the soul; and he was looking at me while she sang.

EBD surely read that. And the song is starting to grow on me after a foray into YouTube - prefer it instrumental or male voice to soprano though ..

I found an old piano book that has The Red Sarafan in it. It's not the most amazing thing ever but it's pleasant enough.

One thing I like about Rivals is that the CS aren't ALL in the right and while they're clearly the superior school, and Madge is the superior headmistress compared to useless xenophobic Miss Browne, Madge makes a point of telling Joey and friends that they weren't innocent either and that they made the situation worse. St Scholastika's also has some likeable characters, like Gipsy Carson.

Two Sams is one of the weakest books in the series, and there's so much bitchiness and unpleasant behaviour. And ANOTHER long lost relatives plot. The Sams themselves are lovely though.

(Btw to people who've seen me in previous CS threads, I didn't make the cut for Mastermind. Booo. I'd like to try again though.)