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!

Thanks for the they're much appreciated.

And the username is definitely Chalet School inspired!

I have ME/CFS & am autistic, CS books are my thing when my brain is in meltdown & I need something I can read without thinking too much. I collect the fillins as well & am gradually replacing all my abridged Armada copies with GGB copies. For anyone who wants to read the books in Ebook form, there is a thread somewhere on here where you can get the login details to onedrive with the majority of the books.

@margotsdevil I'm sorry I missed your sad news & very sorry for your loss.

At the end of Problem END just casually murders Clem’s parents in one offhand sentence so they can spend more time with Joey, brutal!

@FelicityBeedle

At the end of Problem END just casually murders Clem’s parents in one offhand sentence so they can spend more time with Joey, brutal!

At least she doesn’t send them off into space in a self-made rocket, like Professor ‘Bonkers Stereotype’ Richardson.

EBD absolutely loved doing a bit of parental killing off to swell the population of Freudesheim, didn’t she?

Although the parental death that still shocks me on rereading is the completely heartless way EBD presents poor Eustacia as completely unfazed by the sudden deaths of both parents, because apparently prigs who like their classics simply don’t mourn the death of their entire family, but devote their attention to a confused attraction to Joey.

She’s treated spectacularly badly by everyone in that book, anyway. Robin, if she’s so fragile that a night’s worry will send her into a fatal decline, shouldn’t have been allowed to go on that trip and been left at the hotel with another girl, and that the climbers got stuck in a hut overnight was in no way Eustacia’s fault. I mean, E is hard work, but no more so than lots of other new girls.

She’s treated spectacularly badly by everyone in that book, anyway. Robin, if she’s so fragile that a night’s worry will send her into a fatal decline, shouldn’t have been allowed to go on that trip and been left at the hotel with another girl, and that the climbers got stuck in a hut overnight was in no way Eustacia’s fault. I mean, E is hard work, but no more so than lots of other new girls.

Yes! There's a lot of rather un-chaletian callousness and uselessness in Eustacia IMO. Everyone blames her for getting stuck at the Stubai glacier but actually none of it is her fault (and by the by why does Jo get to go on the trip but poor Anne(?) has to stay behind and look after the Robin?) There's a complete lack of useful leadership from both Mademoiselle and Mary Burnett, and Nell Wilson tells Eustacia that if she was a boy she'd get thumped.

Ironically she strikes me as a rare case who actually would have benefited from a kindly interfering adult Jo nearby, but of course child Jo doesn't butt in at all, despite later insistence to the contrary.

Also in terms of Eustacia (my phone wanted to make that Zeus Tacos? Apt for a classicist?) EBD was incredibly scornful of her ‘doctoress’ mother, and then happily packs daisy off to medical school a few years later

Yes, Dr Benson is — from what I remember — blamed for her own death, because she follows her own course of treatment, rather than listen to a kindly, authoritative, male doctor, as all ‘nice’ women should! (She’s constructed as a nutty obsessive like Professor Richardson or Richenda Fry’s ceramicist dad, not given the breathless deference the series generally gives doctors.) And blamed for Eustacia’s oddities in her first term at the CS, whereas things Sybil’s vanity, Margot’s propensity to violence, and Con’s maladaptive daydreaming are never blamed on their parents...

I don’t think EBD accorded woman doctors remotely comparable status to men, anyway. One minute Daisy Venables is an award-winning paediatric specialist, the next it’s her husband who is pontificating (and being listened to) about the health of some child, though I can’t remember whether it’s theirs or one of the Maynards, as EBD appears to have completely forgotten she’d made Daisy an eminent children’s specialist.

(Or she did remember but thought it was a bit unwifely for Daisy to know more than her husband...)

Eustacia is an arsehole but NOBODY comes off well in that book, except Gottfried (who is lovely) and Madge, maybe. The girls play really spiteful pranks on each other and Matey somehow thinks a whole form were just being careless and there's nothing odd about a group of girls with cat hair on their blazers or bits and bobs missing off their clothes. Miss Stewart goes batshit because she assumes some girls are laughing at her and bullies Margia into telling her why they were laughing. Miss Wilson tells Eustacia that if she was at a boys' school, she'd get beaten up and expects her to know the difference between sneaking and reporting, despite the fact she's never been to school before, and then blames Joey when Eustacia runs away because apparently Eustacia wanted to be her BFF. Mlle Lepattre sees Eustacia crying herself to sleep and then asks the other girls if Eustacia was upset about something. Joey is extremely vicious and blames her for Robin getting ill. Mary Burnett is useless and calls a meeting just to bitch about her. The girl's lost both her parents who weren't that great to begin with, and nobody seems to take that into account. Compare with Nina Rutherford, who has a lot more allowances made for her, although she's admittedly nicer than Eustacia (even if she is a monumental bitch to poor old Hilda).

EBD did like killing people's families off, didn't she? George RR Martin's got nothing on her. Also, Daisy is one of my faves and RAARGH. She's an award-winning paediatrician but sure, let's ask her husband about dealing with Charles' appendicitis.

Actually, on the subject of new girls, Emerence Hope is constantly made out to be one of the worst pupils ever but in hindsight, she's not that bad apart from the scarecrow incident, being a bit sweary, the stairs incident (where she gets owned by Miss Dene) and gobbing off at the prefects. Jack Lambert is much worse, IMO. Emerence at least becomes nicer when she's older, and she wasn't a bully like Thekla or a traitor like Betty, and never did anything as horrible as smashing up a Head Girl's study. (Bride is one of my favourites, so I'm biased.)

The Robin is the most irritating character; the irritation is heightened by the way Joey slops over her. Boak.

@Arbadacarba

The Robin is the most irritating character; the irritation is heightened by the way Joey slops over her. Boak.

This exact sentiment crystallises why Mn Chalet School threads are more fun than the CBB -- even if there are people on here who have a poster of the Robin on their bedroom wall and a golden-voiced rendition of 'The Red Sarafan' as their ringtone, they're not going to start throwing their weight about and sighing loudly about victimising characters and how negative SOME POSTERS are all the time, and could the Joey-bashing just stop for one minute, because YOU ARE ALL SO MEAN.

Honestly, though, this thread made me peek at the CBB for the first time in years, and in a thread on Peggy of the CS, where several posters remarked that they found Peggy bland and irritating, like the perfect girl down the road your mother was always comparing you to when you were 14, someone got on her high horse and said they thought Peggy was incredibly nice and it was no wonder that nice, quiet people were always being bullied etc etc.

I think some people on there don't read much apart from CS books, and don't have a sense that a personality that might be quite nice to have as a neighbour or workmate is simply not going to work as the protagonist of a novel -- or that saying you find Peggy a dull little bit of girlish perfection isn't the same as mistreating the new intern!

Frankly, given Robin's hailing by everyone as the uber-fragile 'Engelkind', and Joey's habit of lashing out at anyone she thinks doesn't appreciate her sufficiently, like Joyce Linton or Eustacia or whichever Bad New Matron locks her in a room, it's pretty likely she'd have grown up to be possessed by a demon that would make Margot's devil look like a Car Bear, rather than a Cool Nun who dashes off to rescue potential CS girls from a life of prostitution and then discover they're her long-lost cousin.

CARE BEAR!!

As a child, I loved the Chalet School books, but as an adult, I just want to punch Joey Maynard. She is so unutterable patronizing, with her 'my lamb,' and 'my dear.' Perhaps that's the way they all spoke in Brent Dyer's world, but it's infuriating.
Also irritating is the way she appears to do nothing much for the children when she's a mother, apparently leaving all the cooking, shopping and childcare to the indefatigable Anna.
The book I most love is Chalet School Grows Up. ( That might not be the exact title), as it gives a whole new perspective. Mary Lou runs off with Reg and Jack shoots himself as he can't take any more of Joey's constant hobnobbing with the prefects. Great stuff!

I want an Anna.

I don’t have children and I want an Anna!

@NellWilsonsWhiteHair

I want an Anna.

Wouldn't it make you feel slightly weird if your Faithful Handmaiden actually turned down an offer of marriage because she didn't think you and your bazillion children and wards could get on without her, though?

Anna as ideal servant is another classic wish-fulfilment bit of the CS, like whatever the Mensches' servant was called in whichever early book (Jo Of?) Joey, Madge spend Christmas in Innsbruck, who works like a demon and is pathetically grateful for five minutes off to go and see her own family over Christmas, and whom Madge specifically compared to English servants.

Basically, the European Lower Orders are different, all picturesque, devout and deferential -- is it Marie Pfeiffen who is thrilled to get a framed photo of the school for a wedding present?

@Arbadacarba

The Robin is the most irritating character; the irritation is heightened by the way Joey slops over her. Boak.

If Robin makes you want to hurl as a child, I can recommend Exile. She is awesome in it and protects an old Jewish man from Nazi thugs. It is a wonder that she doesn't turn into a horrible little monster, or uses her illness to get out of things and manipulate people.

I always felt sorry for Anna, having to deal with a gajillion children and barely having any time off. In CGGU she quits, and I don't blame her. And I want to smack Len in Triplets for the patronising way she speaks to her when Cecil is missing and Anna is upset and frightened. Anna has been raising you since you were a baby, you smug bint. (Marie Pfeiffen is the servant girl with the gajillion relatives who work at the CS in the early days.)

@BinocularVision I know the exact poster and thread you mean, and I agree. People like Peggy are nice in real life, but they are incredibly boring to read about, and Peggy has a giant stick up her arse, ruining the Middles' AND the prefects' weekend because the Middles committed the heinous crime of speaking Regency English. The horror. Madge just laughed it off when Joey and her friends did the same thing with Shakespeare in the Tyrol.

Wouldn't it make you feel slightly weird if your Faithful Handmaiden actually turned down an offer of marriage because she didn't think you and your bazillion children and wards could get on without her, though?

Nah, that's just standard.

Another bit of CS wish fulfilment that totally went over my head as a child was Penny Rest! I want to be sent away to Penny Rest. I won't even have to square any pesky principles about patronising/exploiting wonderfully simple continental peasants for that one.

There is a real theme about being able to lay down your burden running through the books. I think for me that's actually a part of what makes them v comforting reading. I'm definitely not into the 'collapse and promptly marry a doctor' manifestation of this theme, but Madge at the Mensches for Christmas nearly makes me weep!

Basically, the European Lower Orders are different, all picturesque, devout and deferential -- is it Marie Pfeiffen who is thrilled to get a framed photo of the school for a wedding present?

I mean obviously I was gutted not to get a framed picture of my office from my team when I got married.

So glad this thread is here. You are my people. JUSTICE FOR DAISY.

The Tyrolean Christmas is one of my favourite scenes in the early books. It's pure comfort reading.

I've had several holidays at Stubai Glacier. I was most amazed to see there was a Post Hotel in Fulmpes.

Plus.. seeing the Chalets brought the books to life

The wish fulfilment of someone just looking after you is what makes them comfort reading for me.

Weirdly, I love the journey to Europe one - there’s something about it that just works, possibly the sense of a a slice of women’s social history.

@Aroundtheworldin80moves

I've had several holidays at Stubai Glacier. I was most amazed to see there was a Post Hotel in Fulmpes.

Plus.. seeing the Chalets brought the books to life

Oh, I so want to go! Am putting it off a bit as think it'd probably be a no-kids holiday for me and that feels like a distant prospect just now, due to afore-mentioned lack of faithful Anna

I've been to Achensee Tiernsee a couple of times which was amazing.

I agree the ‘put down your burden and collapse’ thing is deeply appealing (though I’d rather Penny Rest than Jack ‘Trigger Happy with the Wife-Sedation, Not So Keen on Contraception’ Maynard), but I confess I would find the ordinary day to day activities of the CS which EBD evidently finds so appealing, very burdensome!

I’d have been an unwholesome combination of Joan Baker, Stacie Benson and Naomi Elton — foul-mouthed, liking a dash of red lipstick and horrified at paper games, sneaking off to read stuff from the ‘restricted’ part of the library and atheist.

Plus I’d have been expelled within about five minutes for pushing the Robin into the Tiernsee/Channel/ any body of water in the vicinity of Plas Howell. Surely someone has written fan fic in which that was Gertrud Becker’s secret mission?