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?

She does mention sweets being on (or just off?) ration in Island or Carola Storms - one of the Island books anyway

In ‘Lavender,’ didn’t her aunt seek assurances that the school not trouble her niece with news of the war. Only to have Hilda gently explain that they didn’t want their girls to grow up as ‘spineless jellyfish!’

There's a lot about the war in Highland Twins - the air raid on the journey, one of their brothers being killed, Jack Maynard believed killed, and all the business about the Chart of Erisay.

It's more in the background in Gay, but it is the reason it's difficult to find substitutes for the absent mistresses.

Oh yes the war is certainly mentioned several times in Lavender. It is mentioned more often in Highland Twins, so it certainly doesn't disappear from view after Exile.

As I said earlier it is almost as central in Goes to it as Exile. It's just that the girls happen to be in England by then so it is a slightly different experience to Austria in and around the Anschluss.

Yes, there’s not that immediate sense of menace and danger. Exile really is a classic

Yes, but the implication is very much that Verity is a lone weirdo for not wanting to sing German carols because it's not linked to the war in any explicit way, when in fact in a RL school in the immediate aftermath of the war, she probably wouldn't have been alone. There would have been girls who'd been bombed out and who'd lost parents, and were (understandably) very anti-German. It could have been a teaching moment, and an interesting storyline, for the school staff to talk about the CS Peace League and having to escape Austria and then Guernsery etc.

It's a bit weird, in a way, at a school that has so recently had so many narrow escapes at the hands of the Nazi regime that no one says 'Well, X is OK with speaking German and Y happened to her'. Even Joey, who supposedly understands children, is unusually sensitive etc, goes with the 'all genius is non-territorial' angle!

She's clearly much less interested in exploring the more usual UK wartime experiences, maybe feeling it's not the USP of the CS.

She's clearly much less interested in exploring the more usual UK wartime experiences, maybe feeling it's not the USP of the CS.

It may have been her publishers who didn't want stories about the war in the post war period. Many children's authors at the time didn't mention the war. Enid Blyton was writing Famous Five, Adventure and Malory Towers at that time. There's no hint of rationing and I think the nearest she got to any reference to the war was in Valley of Adventure. EJ Oxenham didn't mention it either.

That's an interesting point. Dorita Fairlie Bruce brought back characters from her children's books and gave them war work and adventures (one book per series, though the characters crossed over a bit iirc), after the original series they appeared in had concluded.

Oxford University Press clearly weren't squeamish about the war.

EJ Oxenham didn't mention it either.

When you’d think that Jen & Ros, in particular, would be plunging into war work.

Dimsie Carries On was published in 1942, the same year as Highland Twins. (I don't know which other books by DFB had a wartime theme.)

But did publishers want books about the war or the effects of war after the war?

(EBD's publishers, Chambers, can hardly be said to have been squeamish about the war - they published Exile.)

When you’d think that Jen & Ros, in particular, would be plunging into war work.

Graciously opening canteens in between popping out babies. Ros pre-marriage would have been running the canteen, of course, with her cookery certificate.

Toby at Tibbs Cross was 1943 and Nancy Calls the Tune was 1944. I've read them but can't recall the details. Anne and Primula are in one of them, with Prim riding a motorbike. I think by the end Nancy is all set to marry a Minister with a splendid organ.

Airfields, secret weapons, spies, patriotism. All good stuff.

There was someone skulking in the organ loft, possibly a mildly unsatisfactory younger brother shirking his war responsibilities but it all gets sorted.

They might have opened their huge homes to evacuees and introduced colour, beauty and music into their lives through country dancing.

The whole point of Jo taking the twins was to stop her needing to have evacuees, wasn’t it?

The children in Enid Blyton’s The Adventurous Four find a German submarine base on a remote Scottish island, but I also can’t recall any other books mentioning the war. That was first published in 1941.

Has anyone read the fill in The Chalet School in Peril, which is set in the first half of Exile.

If so, is it worth ordering?

I haven’t bothered with any of the fill in books before, but wondering if I should make an exception for this one, based on how good Exile is…

Oh, I don't mean major plot, though arguably there's the spy one, and the air raid and Karl Linders having unerringly good aim, and Jack's possible death.

I suppose I do always find the attitude towards the evacuees quite unpleasant and othering at a time when people were taking in children right left and centre. Jean Mackenzie says she's sending her the Highland Twins because she knows 'you don't want evacuee children with the precious three'. In the context of hundreds of thousands of people in safe areas taking in total strangers and the CS world having a long tradition of welcoming waifs and strays, and itself having been strongly impacted by the war, it makes everyone involved look rather ungenerous and snobbish.

Not sure if it was Highland Twins or Goes To It there was talk of the school holding a party for the evacuees but nothing came of it.

I think I am in need of help. Wandering round the internet I came across, and downloaded, an Open University Thesis "Liberating images: A feminist analysis of the girls' school-story. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)" focussing on the Chalet School and I have bought "Behind the Chalet School: A Biography of Elinor M Brent Dyer". Is there any hope for me going on to live a normal life?

It just seemed to disappear. Think they were having problems with site security.

I just got the biography too- it’s quite interesting!
There’s a terrible lot of weather in her books, isn’t there! Always baking, pouring or snowing.

I read this a few years ago. I have to say I don't think any of the biographies really told us a great deal about EBD herself.

I have The Chalet School Companion by the same author which was published i the mid 90s and it provides great detail regarding background to the series etc, but also nothing particularly indepth about EBD herself.

That thesis sounds fascinating, @IthinkIsawahairbrushbackthere - could you link to it, please?

https://oro.open.ac.uk/19005/1/pdf19.pdf

Thank you, @BallybunionTao - that’s my afternoon’s reading sorted!

They might have opened their huge homes to evacuees and introduced colour, beauty and music into their lives through country dancing.

Not Ros, or not after Dunkirk anyway. Too close to the coast - Kentisbury was based on Arundel, wasn't it? Just looked and Arundel was part of the anti-invasion defences, with soldiers camped in the grounds and officers billeted in the Castle.

Jen and Joy might have had a school or a govt. dept. or essential business billeted on them, rather than ordinary evavuees.

Both EJ Oxenham’s Pixie and the woman she was based on went out to France in the First World War to teach the soldiers folk dancing while they were off duty.

https://www.ju90.co.uk/ctfolk/ctfolk6.htm