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?

Miss Slater is offered the role of head of Maths at a day school. She doesn't even want to work in a boarding school. She is such a wrong headed person.

And she was horrified at the mere thought of going to Switzerland with the school, wasn’t she? Or have I remembered that incorrectly?

I suspect she thought ‘fuck that’. And not in German.

I don't remember her being horrified, just that she felt she had a better promotion offer elsewhere. The others were horrified that she didn't want to stay with them!

@ShellacB the only other mention of the English branch I recall is that one of the naughty Dawbarn twins got left behind for a while until she could behave better?

Deira to me suggests EBD knew nothing about Ireland — we’re told that’s she’s going to be presented at Court after she leaves the CS, so she’s almost certainly Anglo-Irish, but her language is pure ‘stage-Oirish’ and not at all what an Anglo-Irish girl of that generation would have sounded like (essentially upper-class English). And as her ancestors are likely to have come over with Cromwell, and been given expropriated Irish land for serving in his army, exclaiming ‘The curse of Cromwell be on you all!’ when she’s angry makes zero sense, even if she’s copying her Irish nurse.

Even if the O’Hagans got burned out of their house in the war of independence/ civil war, sold off their lands and left it is highly unlikely Deira would have ended up an impoverished widow running a shop in NZ.

Not that, as you say, Grizel’s story makes a whole lot more sense. Yes, her evil stepmother controls her inheritance from her father, but I get a bit impatient with the idea that this means she’s doomed to working at the CS forever. She had her salary and an education. She could have done anything. It didn’t need to be investing in Deira’s shop on the other side of the world or trudging along at theCS till she’s 35.

And she sets Len on fire just by being careless with a lighted match when lighting a cigarette. It has nothing to do with the letter from her stepmother. And it’s unbelievably insulting to imply it’s worse that Len was hurt than that Carola was (or any other girl who might have been present). And Joey saying ‘It’s Grizel! Just Grizel!’ is mad. Anyone could have dropped a match around a child wearing flammable fancy dress and a basic full of flammable stuff. A more ordinary response might be teachers not smoking around schoolgirls wearing flammable material!

And doesn’t the man Grizel falls for marry Deira instead, later on?😀

Yes, she was ambitious, and wanted to be a Head of Department at a big high school. Which sounds perfectly reasonable to me, as does preferring not to move abroad to teach at a boarding school where presumably she’d have to fend for herself out of termtime when the school was not in session? Do we assume the CS paid for travel to and from home for staff?

But Biddy is incredulous that she doesn’t want to be ‘in on the fun’!

But Biddy is incredulous that she doesn’t want to be ‘in on the fun’!

Biddy is far too bumptious when she returns to the school, considering she's a very young mistress with very limited experience of teaching. Spouting her opinions on the standard of German in the school (and how fluent was her German, when she can't have spoken it for years) and being quite rude to Miss Slater.

Yes she is incredibly confident for a new mistress when she comes back in Carola.

Although I am finding it painful to read the parts where EBD, Joey and the staff are commenting on her speaking poor English just because she is speaking with an Irish accent and commenting on how that should have been ironed out of her at Oxford. Even Peggy Bettany is at it and her mother is Irish!!

That's not to mention the fact that the idea that Biddy (in her early twenties by now) who has not been in Ireland since she was six or seven) at the very oldest and has not been around any Irish accents since would still have the accent anyway. It's not impossible obviously, but highly unlikely.

Yes, EBD clearly can’t, like many writers of her generation, think of ‘Irish girl’ without also thinking of ‘’wild’ and ‘brogue’, even when it’s completely inappropriate for the girls in question, like Deira or Maureen Whatsit at St Scholastika’s, both of whom are almost certainly Anglo-Irish and would speak RP.

And yes, Biddy has barely been around an Irish person since she was six, has spent her life in Austria, Guernsey, England and Australia, and has had her Hiberno-English corrected as wrong consistently throughout her school days . It’s vanishingly unlikely she would sound Irish at all, far less be begorra-ing all over!

(Also, can imagine the oddity of returning to teach at a school whose Guide Company had ‘adopted’ you after you’d run away from an orphanage, and had initially sent you to the local peasant school because you too were a peasant, and only later let you attend the actual CS because you were apparently too clever to be trained as a maid? I once lectured for a couple of years in a university department in which I’d been a student and that was weird enough at first, having departmental meetings with staff who’d taught me, but imagine having as a colleague someone in whose bedroom you’d had to sleep as a child as a punishment?)

Speaking of Maureen Donovan, I saw on a flick through last week that Joey announces to the triplets that she had actually died before the war due to the weakness that had arisen from her falling into the lake with Joey.

Was that ever mentioned at the time or just added into the Swiss books years after the event?

Not mentioned. But quite a few characters have later lives that are only mentioned in passing or in response to questions.

I wish there was more of it in Reunion. Back before it was republished and I only knew it existed from mentions, I imagined it being a brilliant way to tell all sorts of ‘what happened next’ stories. Imagine my disappointment when it was basically mostly a holiday story with triplets slapping people in cable cars.

I’d forgotten that if I ever knew it! Hilarious that robust Maureen, a hunting/shooting/fishing type of outdoor girl (the first thing we hear about her is that she’s dying for a spot of hunting, or to just get up on a horse, neither of which seem at all likely at the Tiernsee) dies as a result of her cold water NDE, while supposedly fragile Joey, who risks death if she so much as stands by an open door, survives to have eleven children in robust good health!😀

And yes, @MalvinaRussell — that was such a wasted opportunity. Couldn’t someone have discovered Thekla Von Stift was tried for war crimes, or Lavender Leigh had become a filmstar or that Julie Lucy had ditched her husband and become a QC?

A bit randomly, I remember first reading someone’s comment that Len, Connie & Margot were ‘pretty names’ & wondering on what planet Len counted as a ‘pretty name’.

Yes, I think it was Nell Wilson, wasn’t it? I used to wonder what he’d been smoking. Helena is a perfectly nice name, and Nell is a nice shortening, but Len is a minor hoodlum who hangs around with Vic Coles, Joan Baker’s unsavoury boyfriend who eats fish and chips on the street.

And I love the name Constance, and like Connie, but ‘Con’ (usually used around here as a shortening of Cornelius) has an unfortunate meaning in French which makes it a deeply unlikely nickname to be used by a mother who speaks fluent French…

I’m wrong, it was Madge!

Yes it's later on in the Swiss books. Joey receives a letter from Maisie Gomme I think. Who hasn't seen her since her schooldays but of course was so taken by the memory of Joey that she names her child after her and had considered her as a potential Godmother!

One of the triplets is playing a guessing game about who it might have been contacting her from Scholastika's days and one of the triplets mentions Maureen the girl from the lake incident and Joey drops in that Maureen had actually died before the war, which she thought she had told them about. Her death occurred some years later, but was caused by the delicacies of her injuries from that incident. Odd that she would have told them the lake accident story at all without ever mentioning that Maureen had died as a result.

This is Maureen who we were told had recovered so much more quickly from the incident than 'delicate' Joey. Or maybe she just wasn't paid any attention because all the focus was on Jo being injured!

Agreed re reunion. That should have been an opportunity for one of the best books of the entire series, with loads of 'what happened next' stories.

I could never understand what Len was short for - the first one I read was Problem so got dropped in the middle of Joey's mega-family. I worked out Con was probably Constance and I assumed Margot was her full name - is it actually Marguerite? - but was baffled as to what Len could be. Len was an old man's name, not a twelve year old girl's!

I was brought up to believe eating in the street was Common so I knew straight away that Vic Coles must be a wrong 'un.

Did Joan's younger sister - Pam Baker - ever end up at the CS?

Did they ever do a reveal about what happened to the various continental girls from the pre war years that were in occupied territory? Like Giovanni?

While EBD's medical knowledge and descriptions are sketchy at the best of times, this was actually one thing that I thought wasn't totally implausible! We get told that she had rheumatic fever after falling in the lake, while Joey is almost dying from pneumonia requiring urgent Red Sarafan therapy. Rheumatic fever is now incredibly rare and easily treated with antibiotics, but in those days, if untreated, could affect the heart valves, causing scarring and eventual heart failure - some of the first cardiac surgery was operating on valves damaged by RF! So Maureen developing heart problems and dying is possible.

RF is also what Phoebe Wychcote/Peters was supposed to have suffered, though in her case it seems to have affected her joints rather than heart.

Helena (after Miss Wilson), Constance (after Miss Stewart) and Margaret (after Jem's sister). All with Mary as a first name, as good Catholic children.

Yes, absolutely. The Bakers hit all the wrong notes — cheap shop cake, eating in the street, doing the pools, mother working in a shop rather than being a servant who learns gentility from her employers, letting Joan wear makeup and sophisticated braided dresses rather than dainty ones etc.

I don’t remember any further mention of Pam. Given that Joan never entirely fitted in, I imagine she advised Pam against the CS.

Margot is Margaret. In honour of Margot Venables.

I also found a bit where Rosamond’s mother writes to her and tells her about the Bakers’ pools win, implying that they’ll just fritter it all away and saying that Mr Lilley is going to speak to the vicar (Tom Gay’s father) about having a word with Mr Baker about responsible spending!!

I can’t decide if this is decent old fashioned neighbourliness or just self righteous interfering. I suppose it might be incumbent on a vicar to provide life advice to his parishioners but I’m sure Canon Gay didn’t need the ever so ‘umble Lilleys to point out his duties to him.

I do wonder what it is that makes the Chalet School so compelling, giving all the perfectly justifiable gripes about it. Is it sheer longevity? Dorita Fairlie Bruce's characters are more rounded and the situations she sets up more credible, but even allowing for someone in each of her schools ultimately knowing Dimsie's set, they don't exist much beyond the late 50s (if then).

I wonder if it was just that Armada picked up the Chalet School rather than the Jane Willard. I picked up a couple of Dimsie books at a fete, purely by luck, but the Chalet books were everywhere when I was a kid.

That makes sense - though one of the publishers brought out cheap hardbacks of the Springdale books in the early 70s, so I ended up reading them before I read Brent-Dyer. I see now that they were firmly pre-war as well, as I should have remembered seeing that Anne and Primula Mary (I wonder did B-D steal that name from F-B?) have a wartime adventure as young adults.