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?

Well, leaving children in the UK for years at a time wasn’t unusual, it wasn’t usual to leave them as babies or toddlers, and it certainly wasn’t usual to go ‘home’ on holiday for a couple of months, fully intending to take your offspring back to India with you for another couple of years, only to be persuaded into leaving them behind. I don’t think EBD understood parenting, even by the standards of her day. Mollie is heartbroken at leaving her very young children at the Sonnalpe, but cheers up totally when she gives Joey a present of a typewriter. She genuinely thinks you can ‘train’ a child out of homesickness or ‘fretting’ and she appears to think that it doesn’t much matter to children where they are.

I remember as a child laughing at Mollie being cheered up after leaving her babies because she was able to gift Jo a typewriter!

Agree with the poster above about Jo to the Rescue. I am glad I didn't read it until I was an adult as it is definitely a story for adults rather than children. It is different in style etc from the other Chalet School books. In reality it is more of a spin off novel.

I love it! It is a great summer read.

It is a great summer read

Yes the Yorkshire in summer descriptions are very good, you can feel the heat when they're all sitting out in the garden. It's nice to see Simone, Frieda and Marie, especially Marie as we hadn't seen so much of her in the war years.

The part where Bob Maynard is killed is a bit odd, though. No-one says they're sorry to hear it, or asks Jo to pass on condolences to Jack. And there's no sense that Jack is grieving, just talk of practicalities and how much they dislike Lydia.

I think it was because of her ‘mercurial Irish temperament’. 🙄 I mean, EBD must have known actual Irish people living on Tyneside, but she never gets them right — the first two Irish characters in the Tyrol books are Anglo-Irish horsey types from Cork, one of whom is going to be presented at Court once she finishes school, and would have sounded 98% English. And Deira certainly wouldn’t have used the expression ‘The curse of Cromwell’, because her ancestors probably got their lands because of fighting under Cromwell! Also, the chances are that both Deira and Maureen’s families would have been burnt out during the war of independence.

And Molly, if she’s Dick Bethany’s boss’s daughter in Raj India, will also be Anglo-Irish and speak RP, not things like ‘Och!’ and ‘sure’ and ‘mavourneen’.

It also really grates on me when Biddy's Irish accent is described as slang which they need to correct her on.

I know it is a century ago, but it is still offensive.

At least she does include a good number of Scottish, Irish, Welsh and Cornish as well as English girls and girls from the US and Commonwealth countries.

Oh yes she certainly does and in many ways she was way ahead of her time in her attitude to different nationalities etc.

I knew a woman who had been sent 'home' to England from India when she was very young, and when I said it must have been hard for her mother was told, no, it was lovely for the mother who swanned around the raj going to parties, but horrid for the child. Still resented, 70 years after.

But if the children stayed in India, they were at risk of infectious diseases for which there were then no vaccinations or treatments. Cholera being the most serious, of course.

And depending on where in India they were, and what their father did, they would probably have to leave home at some point to go to school.

I don't think anyone's suggesting that sending your children 'home' wasn't the norm for the Raj Brits, only that it wasn't usual for babies or toddlers to be left in Europe after a furlough, as Dick and Mollie do, apparently on Jem's infallible advice. Six or so, school age, was more the norm.

Children did die in India, of course, but one can't help laughing at Mollie and Dick agreeing to leave their baby and toddlers at the Sonnalpe because of the health dangers of India, when before they've even left to head back to India, all of their children have gone down with measles and are quite seriously ill, and then get whooping cough.

Also, the Die Rosen nursery sounds like one of those 18thc baby farms foundlings got kept in -- am I right in thinking that in Jo Returns, it's got David and Sybil, Peggy and Rix, Bride and Jackie, Primula, Daisy and the Robin, with Mollie and Dick already expecting another baby (which turns out to be another set of twins)?

Agreed. Though EBD gets herself terribly mixed up there anyway -- Biddy leaves Ireland permanently at the age of six, never lives there again, spending her time between continental Europe, England and a trip to Australia, and there's no indication she's ever had any contact with family in Ireland. There's no way she would retain the slightest Irish accent or idiom after years in a school where she was continually corrected for it.

I'm always sorry she didn't do a book from Biddy's POV, after she'd stopped being treated like the school's peasant pet, 'adopted' by the Guide company, sent to the Tiernsee village school despite being actually an inhabitant of a school, with the idea that she'll be trained as a servant later on. Then, after she turns out to be clever, someone (who?) thinks she's too bright to be a servant and lets her actually attend the CS where she grows up to go to Oxford, be a CS mistress and (ultimate accolade) marry a San doctor.

I mean, you'd get whiplash with the sudden change at being included as a classmate and equal with the people you'd expected all along to grow up to be the people you cleaned up after.

I actually think Biddy was an example of a fairly egalitarian way of thinking. Many authors at that time had some poor girl enter a school on a scholarship or similar - only to be discovered to be Lord Somebodyoranother’s long lost grand-daughter. Biddy, in contrast, remains the daughter of an Irish NCO and maid - a fact which doesn’t prevent her from being as bright and deserving as any other CS girl.

Am I right in thinking that EBD got Biddy's name mixed up in one of the wartime books and called her a different name for a whole book before reverting to her original name again in the next book?

Yes, possibly O'Hara? Or am I getting confused with Juliet? Or did EBD get confused with Juliet?

Is it firmly established that Biddy spent even her first six years in Ireland rather than in India or some other imperial outpost with her father?

Is it firmly established that Biddy spent even her first six years in Ireland rather than in India or some other imperial outpost with her father?

Even if she didn't live in Ireland, the English she heard around her might have been mostly spoken with an Irish accent. From her parents, and maybe it was an Irish regiment.

Patrick Bronte retained a strong Irish accent even though he left Ireland for good in his early twenties, and Charlotte also spoke with an Irish accent.

And my own father had a bit of an Essex accent, even though he never lived in Essex. He picked it up from his mother, who was an Essex girl.

I think it's more odd that the Robin spoke English with a French accent. The person she'd have heard speaking English was her father, and he'd have spoken it with a native English accent, even if he spoke French to his wife. Robin's French accent was probably a mishmash of British and Polish, or whatever Marya's first language was.

Yes, she’s Biddy O’Hara for one book but I don’t know which one.

But Patrick Bronte was 25 when he left Down for Cambridge! Biddy would have been six or seven at most, assuming Miss Honora didn't die the moment they arrived in Europe, two years before Biddy shows up at the CS.

Biddy's story doesn't make a huge amount of sense. She was born in Kerry, she tells the Middles, and clearly spent some time living there, as her mother went back to her pre-marriage job being maid to 'Miss Honora at the Castle' after her British army soldier husband, presumably a local man, died. If Biddy and her mother travelled with the regiment (which is extremely unlikely -- most families stayed near the home barracks), they clearly went home again. It wouldn't have been the greatest time to be the widow and child of such a man in Kerry, assuming Jo of the CS is set roughly when it was published in 1930, when Biddy is 10. You'd also wonder whether her father was killed by rebels. All the Irish regiments were disbanded in 1922 after independence, so the dating is a bit fuzzy.

It's not clear when Miss Honora leaves Ireland for Europe (was she burned out, assuming the Castle was an Anglo-Irish Big House?) , and whether she's touring around or based somewhere or is ill and seeking a cure at spas (possible as she dies two years before Biddy shows up at the Tiernsee). After Miss Honora dies somewhere in Europe, Biddy's mother marries her employer's Italian chauffeur, and dies in childbirth, after which Biddy, the baby and her stepfather settle in Hall, near Innsbruck. Then Luigi dies, his sister comes (from Italy?) and takes the baby home and Bridget is sent to an orphanage from which she runs away to the Tiernsee. No one in Hall seems to think of trying to contact any family she may have in Ireland -- Biddy says she's the last of the O'Ryans, though.

I can't remember where Biddy briefly becomes Biddy O'Hara. Is it the book where the school is on St Briavel's and she's on her way back from Australia and stops off at Joey's on the way to taking up her job at the school?

I think it’s in one of the early Swiss books.

I don’t know why but I have a feeling it might have been the unabridged version of Highland Twins where Biddy had a new name.

Not one hundred percent sure about that though.

Maybe it was in more than one book!

But Patrick Bronte was 25 when he left Down for Cambridge!

But the point is, Charlotte picked up the accent, even though she had never lived in Ireland.

If Biddy only ever heard English spoken with an Irish accent, she too would have an Irish accent. While they were travelling with Miss Honora, Biddy's mother and anyone else in Miss Honora's household would be the only people she heard speaking English, and they were likely all Irish.

One person described Charlotte as having an Irish accent, one of her schoolmates at Roe Head. No one else ever mentioned it. I think it’s pretty unlikely, myself, especially as she was ashamed of her Irish roots, not surprisingly given the anti-Irish prejudice in her environment. None of the genteel families she governessed for would have wanted their daughters to pick up an Irish accent. If she had it as a child, it was clearly eradicated during her schooldays.

Biddy is just a Stage Oirish stereotype. No Irish person outside a bad play has ever thrown her arms in the air and cried ‘Oh, Wirra Wirral! Nivver a truer wurrd ye spake!’

My grandmother was a great one for wirra wirra and wirrasthrue, usually as a scornful 'what are you making such a fuss about' observation. She was born in the late nineteenth century in a national schoolmaster farmer's family and didn't use it in its stage Irish ca 1900 mode as a peasant declaration of emotion. I suspect well-travelled upper servants in the 1920s wouldn't have either.

wirra - Mhuire, the Virgin Mary, wirrastrue, Mary's pity, sorrow.

It doesn’t count if she doesn’t throw her arms in the air first and cry ‘Tis in desperate bad sorrow Oi am, and niver a wan to care at all at all!’ 😀

I always wonder what EBD had been reading, or seeing at the theatre. The arm throwing suggests some melodrama, or the (brilliant) end of The Real Charlotte.

But as well as Biddy coming from the Bumper Book of
Irish Stereotypes (she’s the only character I can think of, in a books featuring a range of different nationalities, whose speech is continually written to indicate a way of speaking EBD considers ‘other’ — Simone’s speech isn’t written like Pepe le Pew), she is treated like a stray pet by the Middles and later by the school. Better than an orphanage? Sure, probably, but her ‘peasant’ status means she’s treated entirely differently to any of the other waifs and strays the school comes into contact with. Until her acadEnoch abilities mean she’s treated entirely gets to be treated like a ‘normal’ CS girl, not a maid in waiting, who can’t stay at the Sonnalpe in case she infects the Robin with her ‘wrong’ speech.

She'd certainly enjoyed and admired Mrs George de Horne Vaisey. It's decades since I read them, but the Pixie O'Shaughnessy books may have given her inspiration for the Irish characters.

It's interesting that 'Miss Honora' has a very Catholic name. Wealthy, Catholic, employing ex-British military. A few years on the continent may well have seemed wise in the 1920s.

Reading the books as an (Irish) child, I just accepted EDB's creation of Biddy as something as totally removed from my own world as all the other European characters. However I distinctly remember feeling bad on Biddy's behalf at the prospect of her being kept as a potential maid for the Robin. Even child me found EDB's creation of Robin cloyingly sentimental although she did provide one of the very few times when I was genuinely amused. It was when the baby angel Robin burst into tears when singing her mother's favourite song, The Red Sarafan. Joey comes charging in to Madge for help because Robin broke down singing the "red scavenger or something."
Re-reading the books from an older perspective, I'm struck by what a massive snob EBD was but happily all that was over my head as a ten year old and still doesn't spoil my enjoyment of the books. When asked, I find it impossible to explain my attachment to them, especially to people who are not life-long aficionados. One friend concluded that as she hadn't started reading the books at a tender age, she must just add them to her list of life's imponderables.