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!

All that bloody coffee! How did any of them sleep at night?!

It was so full of 'creamy milk' that the caffeine content was negligible.😃

Honey and some of the others knit, and there's a bit when she takes in yet more girls because Madge says she'll likely be taken for war work otherwise.

I was actually surprised how much incidental war stuff was in the books. I home educate my kids and we fell into using the CS as a way into modern history 😂

Certainly there’s incidental war stuff, like Jack’s ‘death’ and the girls vegetable gardening, and the spy plot, and the air raid and whichever former pupils’ unwilling Luftwaffe brother throws his letter into the CS grounds (a piece of precision flying that makes the Dambusters look like amateurs).

It’s just that Joey is presented as behaving as though the war is very peripheral to her, when in the very recent past she was right in the middle of Nazi persecution and annexation, and has had two fairly hair-raising escapes, and the country she grew up in from the age of 14 is in the Reich, many of her old friends are in labour camps or conscripted, and you might expect her to feel very passionately about the necessity to win the war, while being equally insistent on distinguishing Nazis from Germans. Doesn’t she take in the Highland twins so as not to have evacuees? Because clearly unimpressed cockney children who’ve never seen a cow are not so picturesque as ‘simple’ Tyrolean peasant children, and she’s afraid their accents will rub off on the triplets…😀

Though my favourite wartime plot is Elisaveta, exiled royal princess, who manages to struggle to the UK with her children and a faithful retainer, and, penniless, despite having close English friends now living in England (and, presumably, diplomatic connections with London), goes out charring rather than make a phonecall. I always imagine her staring in puzzlement at a scrubbing brush and trying to recall doing her Housework badge at Guides…

(

The war years are my favourite Chalet School books, when the school is somewhere on the Welsh border. I think Jo and Madge supposedly live near what is usually assumed to be Hereford? I think that was when EBD was at her best. The Swiss books see her writing go downhill in my opinion.

I'm trying to find the Highland Twins at the Chalet School (an affordable copy), which I've never read but have heard such mad things about, that I'm intrigued. I don't know how I'll cope with EBD's 'och, aye' stereotyping of the Scots though. Her version of the Irish are bad enough. Celts, the working class, beatniks, girls with a strand of hair out of place...the list of EBD's obsessions is pretty long! Am I correct in thinking that 'Highland Twins' is the one where (the) Robin tells one of them that she will be happy at the Chalet School - and if she's not, it will be HER OWN FAULT??? Wouldn't you just love, for once, to have read about a character who said that she couldn't give a toss about being a 'real Chalet School girl'? Joan Baker came the closest but even she (sort of) knuckled down in the end. Joan should have said to her parents, 'listen, if you really want to do me a favour, sod the Chalet School - use some of that Pools money to buy me a hairdressing business!'

@imsignedin have you tried the FB group Chalet School sales and wants? It is a good book but you do have tolerate EBD's bonkers stereotyping.

Don't forget to check that he has slender hands!

@MindtheBelleek I see your point. I think I saw it as part of Joey growing up in an EBD way, concerning herself 95% with her household and the school. The attitude to evacuees was pretty awful.

I'm reading the series in order to my kids as modern history lessons starters (we home ed) and when I compare her attitudes to other children's authors of the time she's more humane than any I've found. Absolutely every other book has German=Nazi=evil without exception. I was actually pleasantly surprised by how anti Nazi she was even before the war, when so many others were not.

I think the attitude to evacuees is purely classism. We always contrast her attitude to servant/poor teenage girls with the upper class pupils - she thinks it's fine for a girl to be served by a kid of the same age. Evacuees were largely poor kids. Rich kids were sent to boarding a gol for the duration instead.

In the early books they clamp down on "snobbery" (the high class girls looking down on "trade") but that doesn't go as far as Biddy and the poor evacuees...

if you are in USA or Canada you might find this helpful

https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20221202

It’s not even just the ‘och aye’ version of Scottish speech, maddening though that is, it’s the fact that she depicts the Highland Twins (who aren’t from the Highlands, but from a small island, maybe in the Hebrides, I can’t remember…?) as travelling from their island to the CS wearing full ‘Highland dress’, complete with plaid, sporran and feathered bonnets. On a train. In the blackout. In the middle of a war.

(And one of them turns out to have second sight also, because, just like Biddy O’Ryan and her banshee tales, all Celts are tuned into the supernatural…)

It’s too (unintentionally) funny to be offensive, for me, though. As is adult Biddy retaining a strong stage-Oirish accent, despite leaving Ireland when she was a small child and spending her entire subsequent life on the continent, in the UK and in Australia, and never (as far as we know) returning.

@Aroundtheworldin80moves, I think EBD is very inconsistent on class, or at least betrays herself often as to what her own snobberies are. ‘Simple’, uneducated picturesque Tyrolean peasants are ok. Equally poor and uneducated Cockney evacuees are not. Thekla Von Stift’s Prussian snobbery towards Sophie Hamel’s ‘trade’ background is not ok, but Bill/Hilda consciously conceals nasty, wealthy Diana Skelton’s ‘low’ origins from the school — her father made a fortune in glue, starting off as a knacker, I think? EBD likes the ‘respectable’ working class, like the family that befriend the runaway Gay on the train, but not Joan Baker’s feckless family, who win their money on the pools, eat shop cake, and are ok with Joan eating chips on the street with the ‘unsavoury’ Vic Coles, and getting a perm.

You will always know the ‘good’ working/lower-middle class in the Chalet world, because they will have lovely manners and ‘dainty ways’ taught by someone who was in service as a lady’s maid and picked them up from her genteel employers (Rosamund Lilley’s mother, Biddy O’Ryan’s mother, the comic, sprightly grandmother met on the train in Gay, who has ‘unexpectedly pretty handwriting’ picked up from her days in service to some UC girls).

I’m wondering if anybody has transcripts of EBDs non chalet school books such as The Lost Staircase.

Chalet school Ebooks are illegal. Not the Done Thing at all in Chaletland

Well, they’re circulated very widely. Everyone on the CBB when I used to post there had them. (As well as paper copies.) They seemed very accepted in Chaletland, and now almost all the CS books are freely available on Faded Page, anyway. (Though not The Lost Staircase.)

Faded Page is Canadian and stuff on of is not legal in the UK unless it is out of copyright, which EBD is not. GGB hold the copyright to CS titles and they do not do ebooks.

I know it’s Canadian. The internet means that anyone can read things that are legally uploaded in other jurisdictions, regardless of whether they’re out of copyright in the jurisdiction in which someone is reading. I think GGB are shooting the selves in the for by not doing ebooks, personally, and I heard similar from lots of other people in the days when I was a regular poster on CBB (which I understand is no more?)

Just because you <can> do something doesn't mean you <should>. Yes, there has been a lot of discussion on the New Chalet Club Facebook group about GGB found ebooks but the owners are not up to doing it. Yes I think the CBB has died - not sure if the posts can still be read but new ones can't be made

The Lost Staircase is worth tracking down and has a good Christmas section. And ultimately is a Chalet School tie-in, since the protagonist eventually joins the sixth form early in the war years.