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.)

.....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

In fairness to Jo, she was a published author, her first book was accepted when she was eighteen and she'd written more by the time they left Austria. Which might seem unrealistic, but I believe Georgette Heyer was nineteen when she was first published.

I can never imagine Joey's books as being anything other than the CS books, so essentially naked autobiography with herself as a barely-disguised Mary-Sue! Especially after Matron takes a hand in pruning out the villainy of the bad character in Cecily Holds the Fort.

Though the title Nancy Meets a Nazi sounds brilliantly bogus.

I wouldn't mind reading 'A Royalist Soldier Maid' - I think that's the one Rosamund got as a present.

As this thread is two and a half years long I can’t remember if the missing story of Jo’s post school trip to India has been mentioned here? (My most successful thread ever was a Chalet School one a few years ago - but I don’t recall what we said about it there either.)

Anyway, that trip would have taken up a bit of time before her precipitate marriage. I do long to read it …

Nancy Meets a Nazi sounds fabulously wrong.

@TheOriginalFrench there is a lovely fill in called Two Chalet Girls in India which tackles this. I don't normally like fill ins but I would recommend this one if you can track it down on Abe or Ebay.

Clearly no suitable Solid Lumps of Comfort around in the Raj, then. You’d think Robin could have been menaced by a crocodile or an evil Maharajah or something, and Jo could have found a lovely Home Counties doctor.to swoon onto.

And to play Fast & Loose with? Surely not!!!

Ooh this has popped up again, maybe I should go back to the mumsnet CS ebooks again!
I never read the books as a kid, found them through MN but still find them weirdly fascinating, it’s all the daft detail of another age that I love.

I read somewhere that EBD ran a school of her own for a while called the Margaret Roper School & vaguely wondered who Margaret Roper was. I’ve just found out she was Thomas More‘s eldest daughter and a gifted scholar.

Which made me wonder why Joey never waffled on about Thomas More, especially after converting to Catholicism.

Much too divisive a figure for the CS with its handwavy ecumenism!

Vehemently opposed to the Protestant reformation and Henry VIII’s split with Rome, wrote end,DS’s polemics against Luther, Zwingli and co, executed for treason and not recognising HVIII as head of the C of E, and declared a martyr? I can’t imagine anyone less likely to be referenced in the sunny ‘take your own path’ CS version of Protestantism vs Catholicism.

EBD wrote a biography of More though (not published). I've just re-read Priyadarshini Narendra's Two Chalet School Girls in India, and Helen McClelland mentions the More biog in the introduction to that. So I do think it's slightly surprising EBD doesn't More at us, although I suppose her standard way is to have one of the characters interested (as with Napoleon).

There's a discussion of the Narendra book here.

Genius is now available on Fadedpage.

I was wondering if anybody has transcripts of EBDs non chalet school books such as The Lost Staircase?

And Jo gets even more saintly and unbearable as an adult and mother.

I've ground to a halt in my reading thru the books (for the first time, I never read them as a kid). Ive got to the later books but I've run out of free epubs and now buying secondhand.

Fine when it's less than £5 but some are £15-£20 (eg The Chalet School Reunion)! And I know full well that if I buy, read then try to sell on, it'll just sit there.

So if anyone can help with cheap or free epubs, PDFs or paperbacks, let me know!

The Chalet School Club has a lending library? And there’s a Chalet School Sales and Wants FB page where you can ask for titles you need. People often sell off paperbacks in a chunk.

Thank you @Doubleraspberry, off to investigate now!

Very disappointed in growing up that I’ve never been sent to a sanatorium in the Tyrol to convalesce from any respiratory illness, the Chalet School really made this seem very likely. Also presumed I would be trilingual by now!

I just stumbled on this thread today while looking for links to ebook versions of the books, and I hope it’s ok if I bump the thread to thank you all for all the enjoyment it brought me! It totally made my day reading through it :)

I'm doing a full reread at the moment (only up to Eustacia) and what's striking me is the amount of walking they do in the early books. In Princess, Joey does 20ish miles in pursuit of Elisaveta. In Head Girl, the climb to the Sonnalpe is 4 hours. In Rivals, its not clear how far they go when the lake path collapses but it takes them most of the day and 4 miles away is "nearly there". They regularly go on 1-2 hour walks around the lake.

I feel very unfit and inadequate, and have made my children do a bit more walking over the last few weeks. Not up alpes in the dark though! And we haven't been lost or kidnapped yet, although we have forgotten both snacks and drinks . . .

Yes, it sits quite strangely with the whole 'our girls are incredibly fragile and TB-prone' schtik. In fairness, I think in Rivals, EBD does stress how hard many of the Saint Scholastika girls find that big walk after the path collapses, but rather than saying 'It's not surprising that a school that has just arrived from Worthing might find a serious scramble up mountain paths in bad weather with no mountain walking experience quite challenging, especially when the last part is done in the dark', it's seen as a sign of their inferiority to the CS!

(What blows my mind most about that walk is that two different peasant women, one down by the lakeside and one up on the alp, manage to accommodate seventy schoolgirls in their houses, and feed them all milk, and in one case, bread! I know we're told she'd done a baking the previous day, but surely no ordinary peasant family is going to have made enough bread to give seventy people a slice each and some to take with them??)

I'm not sure EBD really thought distances through -- it seems to me that Spartz and the Sonnalpe and how far the various settlements on the lake are from the CS seem to shift depending on need. And there's no way anyone with any experience of mountains would have depicted an experienced Alpinist leading seventy schoolgirls over a difficult path down the Tiern Pass in the dark! It's like Mountain Rescue's worst nightmare.

I'm not sure EBD really thought distances through

I'm not sure EBD really thought anything through. She set up a school, but it failed within 10y IIRC. EBD was in touch with rollickingly good fantasy, less so with gritty reality.

I know! I always thought that about the food. And - as I have a common mind - I always wondered how/where they all went to the loo on these long expeditions (but then that used to worry me when the Famous Five were imprisoned in a cave etc. too).

The Christianity in CS always worried me too. Prayers for relatives' survival through difficult operations etc. were nearly always successful - but somehow, if they weren’t, that was OK too as it was framed as a merciful release etc. I couldn't understand how you could have it both ways.

I seem to remember something similar when Mary-Lou was talking to Naomi Elton about the serious injury that stopped her becoming a dancer.