I need a Chalet School fix

[Dilbertian]

Please help:

Where can I download a Chalet School book? I'm astonished that I cannot find any as ebook.

(When you're under the weather, nothing quite hits the spot like a bit of EBD escapism.)

the bettany kids were toddlers. And didn't see their parents again until they were teenagers or near about?

That was because of the War. They missed two furloughs, by my reckoning.

(Dick seems to have been home every three years, before the War.)

I dd get a bit tired of the repetitive descriptions of cubicles in the Swiss books, but each one could have been the first CS book for somebody, for whom it was all new.

Well, the situation in the Russell nursery was a bit fucked up — no wonder poor Sybil turned out to be a bit of a brat, continually saying ‘You’re only cousins, David and me belong!’ and that getting turned into Sybil’s beauty being the root problem, rather than just the ill effects of being packed en masse in with a random collection of cousins and desperate for attention. I mean, I get ideas of adequate parenting differed from ours, but I sometimes wonder whether EBD ever actually met a child. The bit where someone (a mistress?) remarks approvingly on David, who must be well under one at this point, already being ‘well disciplined’ by Madge, struck me as mad even as a child reader!

Then the war ends and the Russell go to Canada taking a strange assortment of the children with them.

No wonder joey keeps having more. Probably scared the rest are going to be sent to darkest Peru

And then she forgets some of them (Marie-Claire?), or they get shipped off somewhere, anyway (especially the boys, in whom EBD has zero interest).

Even poor Mike, too young to get sent to England to board, gets packed off down to the Emburys, and only comes up to the Gornetz Platz periodically in good weather, so Joey can get on with her new novel and popping in to the school through the hedge every five minutes, or donating jam.

And all the 'holiday' books involve the boys either staying elsewhere with friends, or sloping off offstage, so we can focus on the triplets reforming yet another recalcitrant/reluctant/ungroomed new girl (Melanie Lucas, Ruey Richardson etc).

I think one of the bits that cracks me up as an adult is when Len criticises Ruey (who is keeping house for her caveman brothers and absent father in a remote chalet) for not keeping things 'daintier' and having nice tablecloths and ornaments.

Like a PP, I absolutely adored the books when I was a child, but as an adult I find them unreadable. So longwinded and badly written, and that’s before you start questioning the entire set-up!

Like the languages! No girl is ever prepared for the three days, even though it must be in the prospectus, and the exam students especially must be at a major disadvantage compared to girls who do everything in one language.

I suppose they’d also have to get textbooks to match the language of whatever day the lesson was.

The whole thing is completely
mad! But this didn’t occur to me when I was a child.

There's clearly some kind of 'The first rule of Fight Club is that you never talk about Fight Club' thing going in about trilingualism, which forbids the parents of prospective pupils from disclosing anything at all about substantive about the school.

Or that prevents anyone from pointing out that it's probably not a great idea to take a bunch of delicate girls considered at risk of TB because of contact with immediate family members who have TB, and shut them all up together in a building!

I mean, everyone behaves as though Robin is going to die at any moment, yet Joey gets all riled because Joyce Linton (who has literally just accompanied her TB-stricken mother across Europe to the San) doesn't kiss her goodnight!

Maybe the parents are worried that if they told their daughters about the languages they'd refuse to go. And the freezing cold baths, come to think of it.

Yes, I totally sympathise with Joan Baker's horror at the baths. Actually, I sympathise with Joan Baker on lots of things, like preferring to stick forks in my eyes than to spend Saturday night playing paper games involving picking up peas with knitting needles and thinking up river names with beginning with D or whatever. I have a feeling the CS would have made me quite sweary, too.

I've just been rereading some of the earlier ones as we went to Tirol at Easter.

I'd forgotten about all the children dumped on Madge from an early age. In one Dick & Mollie are over with their 1-year old Jackie, and decide to leave him too because Mollie is up the duff again. That kid is destined to end up with huge therapy bills!

Also Margot Venables whose poor boys died on the harsh climate of Queensland! She, like Robin's Dad, just casually dies too in between 2 books. EBD was quite happy to kill off some of her characters.

And I've just read Exile - which is the best of the bunch- but that had wondering whether EBD had ever held a baby. As Joey casually scoops up her triplets in her arms, and later has a basket to carry them round in.

Did they put "don't worry if you die unexpectedly, we adopt all the orphans" in the prospectus?

Maybe we never hear about the boysike David and Rix as they are actually assassins.

I do like the the Tirol and War books. But they are rather implausible.

Then in one book there’s a mention of a six year old who’s at the a school because her parents both died in an accident and who’s apparently perfectly happy.

And Joey tells one girl, who was raised by her aunt, that she should be glad her aunt’s died because after having such a terribly hard life where she had to sacrifice everything to be able to afford to look after her niece, she’s finally able to get some rest. How‘s that for setting up a future guilt complex?

Glad it isn't just me!

And this was Joey's experience too, wasn't it? Both parents die and oh dear never mind let's go start a school in Austria!

I think most of us are Joan Baker deep down. Or even not that deeply.

Interested in boys, neglecting our prayers, and disliking cold baths?

Surely not.

Don’t forget not making our beds properly.

And eating fish and chips on the street with Viic Coles and his ‘unsavoury reputation’. And shop cake. And with a perm.

Plus I’ve always vaguely assumed that she’s called ‘big Joan Baker’ not because she was tall or plump, but because she was bosomy, and wore a red dress ‘far too old for her’, presumably cut to enhance said bosom…

Joan Baker needs her own spin-off series.

Fantastic idea for a fanfic @FortunataTagnips :)

To be fair, I’ve never been keen on the black fringes on that dress.

I always picture BJB as the woman on the cover of a pulp fiction novel. The hussy.

I do rather like the fact the EBD didn't attempt to reform Joan or turn her into a real Chalet school girl. Joan very sensibly decided to improve her business skills and languages, and I hope those and her tennis meant she was able to get a good job, marry a promising manager, and take over the business.

The younger girl (also the product of an appalling mother) in one of the Lorna books is also obviously never going to 'reform' despite being gifted with a horrible injury and having to spend months in hospital (she also likes boys). It's interesting when the author basically knows there are people she can't understand.

FI'd have loved Joan to end up a fabulously ballbreaking entrepreneuse, but from what I remember, in one of the last books, Con or someone gets a letter from her where she says she's engaged to a 'boy' she met at business college, and one of the triplets pulls a face about early marriage being 'horrid'.

Which would read far less oddly if their own mother hadn't prided herself on being married with triplets by her 21st birthday, having done precisely zero since leaving school other than a bit of temp teaching, helping out at Die Rosen and running away from the Nazis dressed up as a peasant, and then promptly strongarms Len into getting engaged to Ghastly Reg while still at school....

(Incidentally, I have always wondered whether Joey having a few phrases of a gypsy language readily enough to fool a pursuing Nazi suggested she was hanging around the Tzigane bands that played the Kron Prinz Karl in an unladylike manner... )