The Chalet School

[ShellacB]

There seem to be plenty of old Chalet School Threads, but I can't find a current one.

In the middle of a re read. I have just finished the Tyrolean and Herefordshire ones. I loved them!

I do remember the Swiss books not being quite of the same quality, so not sure whether to read them all.

Could anyone recommend the best Swiss books if I was to skim through?

Yes, but EBD appeared to genuinely believe that her child readers would copy stuff from her books if not enjoined not to and thoroughly punished! Hence she can’t mention reading in bed without specifying the only conditions in which it is permitted by the CS, or midnight feasts without giving all involved horrible stomach upsets and awful medicine, or someone running away without being punished by a back injury and months of lying flat in your back etc.

Oh, I remember Nasty Matron from the Elisaveta book! If I remember correctly, she was also Common, and had a "low harsh voice", so Joey and some of her cronies starting copying her and when Madge got horrified at the unladylike bellowing Joey implied they had picked it up from Common Matron, along with slang terms, and she got a bollocking. They formed the Society for the Suppression of Matron and basically hounded her out of the school - Madge eventually fires her for locking the Robin in a room.

The bed jacket part I have only heard mentioned in The Chalet School though.

Well that's just common sense, isn't it. If you sit up in bed (on a chilly morning like this morning) in only your nightie or pjs, you'll be cold. But people like Jo who lack common sense need to be told.

I think the snails on the window trick played on Evil Matron was the only time anyone at the CS ever got away with a prank.

The first Matron was horrible, but I had some sympathy with the second one in New House.

She was expected to be Matron in a house where she was effectively told she was answerable to Joey. Who might have been Head Girl, but was still a student.

Her fatal flaw was not loving Joey!!

One of the disappointments in my life has been the total failure of any snail climbing up a window to make any noise at all.

Sad times.

afaicr both the matrons and Miss Bubb had voices that were not of the Chalet-School approved variety, though I presume Bubb at least managed to be posh. Did face powder Elma in Oberland have a harsh voice too or am I stretching?

Well - I have read lying down all my life, and now I need glasses, @ShellacB, so……😂😂😂

Miss Bubb’s problem was both that she didn’t fall for Joey (she may well have wondered what some neighbouring old girl with a funny hairdo had to do with anything, or was Joey helping out with teaching?) and that she thought academic results were important.

Can anyone remember when the post-lunch siesta in deckchairs is introduced, and when it seems to stop? It was one of the things I found very strange as a child reader, and I’m not sure I find it much less odd as an adult! Imagine the clatter and time of every girl taking out a deckchair from some storage space to sit indoors in them to rest? It would make more sense if they sat outdoors in summer, but why not just get them to lie on their beds for half an hour if they need a rest?

Yes, but then they’d have to have another round of all that mattress-humping and plumeau-flinging that Matey insisted they went in for.

Another thing I remember from Problem was Joey having someone called a (the?) Coadjutor, and being very confused about this. Ten-year-old me read it as "coad" to rhyme with "toad", which probably didn't help - I assume it is "co-adjutor" - but is it some sort of tutor, or governess, or nanny? I never even worked out if it was a man or a woman!

It's Rosa, Anna's mate. She's in quite a lot of books but never gets a personality, even to Anna's level of a lost love off stage. Extra nanny type mostly.

In one book shes spoken to by the triplets as though shes some kind of village idiot 😡 I think it actually was Triplets at the Chalet School. EBD often insinuated that the domestic staff were one sandwich short of a picnic and needed to be spoken to like naughty children 🙄

Is that the one where Cecil is kidnapped by a madwoman, and the triplets scold Rösli because she couldn’t manage all the smallies and a giant St Bernard on a walk?

Rosli, sorry! See, I don’t respect her character enough to remember her name.

Yes! Made me furious 😂

Yes, they come off as incredibly arrogant, bossy teenagers and blame Rösli for not taking a badly-trained big dog with her, along with three small children, two of whom are teething. I know EBD seems to think it’s an admirable character trait to say things like ‘Oh, stop howling! You’ll only upset yourself and give us more trouble!”, but whatever about a prefect saying it to a misbehaving Middle, it comes across very badly when it’s from three teenagers to a valued family retainer who more or less brought them up!

(And in this scene, presumably to make the triplets look good, the previously sensible Anna and Rösli are depicted as hapless idiots.)

But it all goes a bit Gothic novel, anyway, with the ‘loonie’, as the triplets call her, leaping at Len’s throat before Jack, Gaudenz and a posse of doctors arrive to save the day.

Bruno being so badly trained is one of the things that annoys me most about later series Jo (I'm generally mostly pro-Joey earlier on). I can imagine him bounding over to knock me flying while she calls "he's just playing" with a golden laugh.

And then I'd be her lifelong enemy for not loving him.

I’m always astonished at how quickly arrangements can be made when once a parent decides to dump send their errant offspring to the school. A quick telegram or letter and off they go! Didn’t Mr Hope send Emerence over by the next plane…from AUSTRALIA?!

Yes, you’d probably have a ‘harsh voice’, like all the villains in the Chalet universe.

Bruno being so badly trained is one of the things that annoys me most about later series Jo

Yes, she expects her small children to show good manners to guests, but not her dog.

If I was Kathie Ferrars, I'd be pretty pissed off at being slobbered over by a dog on my first visit, then not even offered a chance to wash.

No doctor husband for me then!

I am at the part where they are at the Island and thinking about the move to Switzerland for the first time (Carola.)

Bill is talking about how the school will always have a branch in England and the Russells have just bought the house from Mr Howells.

Am I right in my memory that despite there being a branch of the school in England there is never any storyline set in the school in England after this never mind a single book set there?

I wonder what the purpose of even maintaining a school there was.

Re the triplets my memory of the Swiss books years ago were that they were all fairly unlikeable. Maybe this was due to the nepotism shown towards them as in Margot getting away with really bad behaviour that might have had other girls expelled and even Len being considered to be wonderful and automatically Head Girl etc, simply on account of the fact that she was Joey's eldest girl, rather than anything we actually saw of her as a character.

From memory Con irritated me the least, but mainly because she was never a particularly prominent character....

I think the English branch was set up as a way of making sure Miss Slater didn't go to Switzerland!

Wasnt just the older girls that went to Switzerland at first?

4th form upwards? Hence the triplets in the 4th when they were only about 10...

It was, but the England branch continued after they all left.

Wasn't Miss Slater wanting to go somewhere else completely when the move to Switzerland happened? And everyone else thought she was completely mad just because the didn't want to move to Switzerland?

Reading the end of Carola at Grizel's departure and still finding Grizel's entire story arch so odd.
At this 23rd book she is back to the character she was in the first book, having redeemed herself at book 4 to being an excellent Head Girl who put the feeling of others above herself.
Then she is maintained on the staff for over a decade but barely gets more than a passing mention and a nod to the fact that she is quite unpleasant and unhappy because she doesn't like her job.

Even the move to New Zealand is strange. She is not exactly going to follow her dreams but to fund Deira's school. Deira who we have not heard of since she left school.