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?

Oh, I doubt anyone pressured the change, just that EBD or her editor decided when a subsequent edition was being published that Forever Amber was a more up to date ‘naughty book’. The book came out in 1944 and the film was a few years later and meant the book was widely known, whereas GWTW would have been regarded as less scandalous by the early 50s.

Nonetheless, EBD did a great sales job for both of them.

They’re certainly both a lot classier (and more demanding) novels than Flowers in the Attic, which was the naughty book doing the rounds when I was in early secondary school. And Judy Blume’s Forever! Imagine Matey flicking through a copy of Forever after she’d confiscated it!

Yes, I love that trunk-unpacking scene too —I’m always amused that EBD gives the ‘other’ Mary Katharine Gordon a yellow dress embroidered with green leaves because she gives the exact same dress to Adrienne when she starts at the CS, many years later, only Adrienne has done the embroidery herself.

At the risk of sounding ignorant, how do I find the uncut versions of the Chsllet school books please?

I love Aunt Luce. Especially her not thinking much of the pubs in Andorra.

Of all the non-parental guardians, she's my favourite.

https://www.ggbp.co.uk/ publish the uncut versions , although I think they only do small runs of an edition at the time

Or looking second hand

It's the armada ones that were cut

Some of the ones on Faded Page are uncut. Just look at the publication information at the beginning and see if it’s an Armada or an earlier edition they’ve digitised.

Yes, she’s brilliant. And not wrong about the pubs of Andorra either!

Plus I love when Katharine has to skip the bit when she’s reading the letter aloud and Aunt Luce says to say something to the Head, ‘whatever the good woman calls herself, I’m afraid I don’t remember’.

🙈 I'll post once I've read it lol

I think EBD must have been under pressure from her publishers to produce her next book when she wrote Peggy. The middles' prank - talking like characters from a Georgette Hayer novel - had been done before. There was no drama, no peril, and just a bit of bitchy behaviour from Elinuedd.

I've always put that down to Aunt Luce's unreliability 😆

There was no drama, no peril, and just a bit of bitchy behaviour from Elinuedd.

Peggy was thoroughly wet as Head Girl. She didn't even sort out the Eiluned problem herself; Joan and Dickie did that.

But that's the period EBD begins to churn them out rapidly, with two a year, three in some years (having given up her own school and become a full time writer). And she must have been marking time a bit, hoping to be able to return to Tyrol.

Howyoualldoworkme ...
Well here I am nearing the end of the completely uncut Highland Twins and ye gods you weren't kidding 🙈 the p's and the ss's and the shushts and the.....Also the incredible amount that was cut for the Armada paperback..! Noticed Armada changed endings to some awkward sentences to make their cut version make sense, e.g when Jo comes to the school at the twins request and takes them away, in the short version its Matron who says take them away, in this version its Elisaveta who of course has her whole storyline cut ✂️

Yes it's all very Brigadoon isn't it! 😁

just popped in to say how much I like your name @Howyoualldoworkme Now before it get's any later, I must take my shopping basket and pop down to Twistevant's to see if dear Susan has left any peaches. (I wonder if EBD was an EF Benson fan too?)

From what I remember (very hazily - it’s been decades since I read it last!) Aunt Luce is basing this off the written descriptions of the uniforms - one of the schools describes their uniform as being ‘brown and flame’, and she dismisses this because it ‘could mean anything’, and plumps for the other school instead. We, of course, know that the brown and flame school is ‘our’ CS, and that the tunics are highly tasteful

I had to share this illustration from Wrong, courtesy of Faded Page. Katharine looks like she's being hypnotised by the evil teddy, and Matron, terrifyingly, appears to have morphed into the Joker from Batman!

Surely we aren't to imagine Matey regularly hunting girls out of class to tidy their drawers wearing mad clown makeup? (Is it that someone scribbled on the hardcopy book Faded Page scanned???)

The more you look at it, the more sinister it gets...

I know exactly the image you describe so accurately!

It is off written descriptions of the uniform, but the whole 'wrong school' thing is totally mad and is full of contradictions. Aunt Luce fixed on one at last because she thought the uniform sounded good—brown and orange. The other one was brown and flame. ‘And that,’ Aunt Luce said wisely, ‘may mean anything from crimson to lemon yellow. It’s too vague.’

So she chooses the Tanswick CS on the grounds of the uniform, and that's reiterated when they realise, in Brittany, that there is less than a week left before the girl had to be at Paddington to join the train for Tanswick.

So there's no confusion about which CS Katharine is supposed to attend. It's Tanswick. (Which is also, it turns out, where Mrs Gordon's old friend used to teach.)

But then they seem to buy 'our' Chalet School uniform in London, not the Tanswick one, because, although they've lost the last letter from the Head, Miss Wilson, though they somehow remember the date, time and station from which the school train departs, and Aunt Luce feels that between that and the uniform it would be quite easy to park Katharine with the right school.

So they wander around Paddington looking for the 'brown and orange' uniform, except, when they see the Tanswick girls in their orange tunics, they both recoil and Aunt Luce says it must be the 'brown and flame' school, and also says that she remembers the Head telling her the tunics were brown in the lost letter -- which suggests she was in touch with 'our' CS (though there's no record of this at all), rather than Tanswick.

So Katharine arriving at the wrong CS depends not just on the mad coincidence of a new pupil with an almost identical name being registered at 'our' CS, but also a confusion between 'orange' and 'flame', and Aunt Luce forgetting to send the letter registering her at Tanswick, but on also Aunt Luce misremembering the tunic colour of the Tanswick CS and accidentally buying 'our' CS uniform!

It's like something out of Kafka!

So what do you think? Matey is the Joker in disguise? The original illustrator thought it was normal for a school matron to go a bit heavy on the 'outside the actual lip line' lipliner to the point where she looks like a scary clown in a nurse's headdress, or some child scribbled on the hard copy?

One of my schoolday friends went to the convent school in our town. Her uniform was brown and yellow and I was green with envy. I felt in those colours I could pretend to be a chalet girl. My friend, who also loved the books, assured me that her school was nothing like the Chalet School but, immured in my navy serge gymfrock, I remained unconvinced.

I've just read the Wrong Chalet School. I saw the illustration on my Kindle and thought it was most bizarre.

Isn't it wonderful the way that they can keep Katherine without any guarantee of their fees being paid.

Mind you, given that (one assumes?) none of the vast numbers of Maynard, Russell or Bettany girls ever pay fees, I suppose it's hardly new!

I thought it was bizarre that this storyline was cut out of the Armada version.

Did they not want to ruin the mystique of Princess Elisaveta by having her no longer be a Princess? Or was it just that the book was too long for Armada?

It is almost as odd as Armada cutting out the entire chapter in Exile after they have made it out of Austria, when there is already an extremely long gap in the story at that point, even without that cut. I did wonder if it was because (from memory) it was called 'Yay for England' when they weren't actually going to England, rather they were going to Guernsey and they worried that might cause offense. If that was the case, though, surely you would just change the chapter title...

I certainly don't blame them for amending the twins' dialogue in Highland Twins, though...