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 it's followed up with a reference to Jack looking at her 'curiously' and saying 'you'll have to grow up some day Joey.' I think the hint is there personally.

I agree

Yes that was definitely a hint.
Especially the adding in of the looking at her curiously

Only if you think that growing up involves marriage! I’d love to see someone tell Bill or Matey they weren’t grown up…

The looking at her "curiously" was the clue to me, not the comment about growing up

I don’t mean you, I mean Jack Maynard! It doesn’t seem to occur to him that Joey might be already perfectly aware of his attraction to her and not interested, or that ‘growing up’ might involve her saying ‘You? Eww! You’re practically Jem!’

Then again, EBD thinks that the appropriate proceedings for the right kind of match is a girlish, jolly schoolgirl or near-schoolgirl with absolutely no thoughts of love or sexual attraction, but whom a much older man, preferably a doctor, has had his eye on for years, and they lurch straight from her having no idea to a proposal to crisis/Nazis and a wedding with some CS involvement and a million babies, preferably involving multiple births.

Ah I see what you mean!

And yes, re- reading the books as an adult I found that dynamic quite unsettling

It’s also a bit rich for Dick Bettany to keep referring to Madge as “my good kid” when they are literally twins!

Perhaps the age gap thing is why the chaps all have “boyish fair heads”, so EBD can show us that it’s ok, they’re not bald old creeps perving on schoolgirls. All these doctors charging around the Tyrol looking like Michael Fabricant with a stethoscope, waiting patiently in the friend zone for a political crisis so they can finally get laid.

😆😆😆😆😆

😂😂😂

As for unforgiven characters, we always have to remember poor Sybil.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Just re-reading The Chalet School and the Lintons We know Joyce is a bad ‘un because she doesn’t give (11 year old) Robin a kiss goodnight, having met her a couple of hours previously after arriving in Sonnalpe with her seriously-ill mother.

It’s just been announced that each form will spend a day on Domestic Science. I’m wondering how they’re fitting this into the timetable, as it seems quite overcrowded already. Everyone does Maths, English, French, German, History, Geography, Art, Music/Singing. At least some girls also do Latin. Science is a bit patchy (they’re not bothering with it at the Annexe) but they have a Chemistry lab, which Evadne almost blew up (well, she is American). Then there’s Needlework, Games/Gym/Drill and RE, though I’m not sure if these happen outside the school day. But we must learn to be homemakers, as well as how to construe Horace.

😀 Absolutely!

Doesn’t Joey declare in ringing tones she’d still love Jack if he were bald somewhere, rather as if ‘bald’ was the same as ‘leprous’? But it clearly isn’t true. Even though Joey is a weird, sickly-looking child, who grows up to be an adult who never grows out of wearing her hair in weird earphones (something Dorothy L Sayers is using as joky shorthand for a weirdo in 1935!), she still bags a blond hottie medic.

I can’t help wondering if Jack is not much of a catch, or why wouldn’t one of the nurses have snapped him up? Mind you, given the number of children they have, he and Jo must be at it like knives (I know, I have a mind like a sewer and should pay all my pocket money in fines).

That bit where Joyce doesn't kiss the Robin and Jo decides to hold a massive grudge about it drives me insane!

Well, yes, it's mad. Even aside from the grudge and why Joey would expect an exhausted 14 year old who has just arrived in the country with a seriously ill mother to kiss a total stranger (or indeed why the Robin, who is 11, not a toddler, would be going around expecting bedtime kisses from a total stranger only a few years older than her) -- I don't think EBD has thought through the infection element of TB at all!

Mrs Linton has been forbidden by her doctor to go to the cinema or any other public gathering before they left the UK, so why on earth would someone as attuned to the Robin's health as Joey want a notoriously fragile child to be kissed goodnight by two girls who have been in close proximity to a potentially infectious case of advanced TB for months???

I hadn’t even considered the infection aspect, although TB was/is a mysterious disease, as people can be carriers/infected for years, but remain perfectly well. Hence the emphasis on healthy living - warm milk, tying your shawl across your chest, early nights etc - to attempt to ward it off.

If you read Betty MacDonald's brilliant The Plague and I, about her time in a US TB sanitorium in the 40s, you see how careful they were with infection with 'live cases'. I'd recommend this book to everyone; it's hilarious and fascinating.

Sure, but Mrs Linton definitely has active TB, rather than latent, as she's coughing, breathless and having palpitations, and her Harley Street doctor tells her her only chance is to go the San immediately, ship the girls off to the CS, and to expect to stay there three years! (I think he also says 'You're fairly well-off, aren't you?' )

And it's air-transmitted in droplets transmitted when infected people with active TB speak, cough, sneeze etc., and can stay in the air and potentially infecting for hours, which is why Mrs L was told not to go to the cinema and Joyce kicks off, and it was so endemic among poor people who lived in overcrowded, poorly-ventilated conditions. And why, frankly, the Russells should have kept the Linton girls away from Robin and Joey!

As an Irish person, it was always interesting to me that there was no stigma to having TB in the CS books. In Ireland, many of the old TB sanatoria still exist as hospitals (I once had ankle surgery in one which felt like a prison camp!) and older people remember people with TB who were being admitted to a sanatorium, or even people visiting them, getting off the bus at the stop before because of the stigma -- it was a seem as a 'dirty' disease, a disease of the poor.

I also found the instant dislike for Joyce because she did not immediately adore and baby a child, not even that much younger than her, very odd and irritating.

Also, did anyone else think that Thekla's expulsion was slightly disproportionate for what she actually did?! I mean both Joey and Grizel ran away from school without telling an adult, Joey at least twice (even if for good intentions) and both of them were made head girls all of a year or two later!

I am currently reading Three go to the Chalet School and am struck by how differently it reads from all of the books before. You would almost think it was written by someone else!
There is a complete u turn on 'slang' from the likes of Joyce being absolute villains for not using proper grammar in previous books, to Verity Ann being disapproved of by Mary Lou and the other girls for NOT using slang. Every second line someone is being called 'a moke' with even Joey as an adult calling children that.

Also Mary Lou seem much older than ten when about ten books before in Lintons the Robin was still being treated like a toddler at the age of eleven or twelve. The eight year old triplets seem older than teenagers in previous books!

It just feels like a complete change in tone from all of the previous books.

Lintons is one of my favourite ever CS books, partly because I think it was the first one I ever read, when I was about nine, and rather confused by mentions of the Sonnalpe and curtsying and Kaffee und Kuchen etc. I'm not even sure I knew what TB was.

I love it now as an adult because of the set pieces (Mrs Jarley, the Home Economics class, the naming party at the Sonnalpe, the midnight feast), and the completely mad stuff, like Joey not noticing Madge is heavily pregnant and Madge hinting but not saying anything.

And the stuff that has aged spectacularly badly, like Joyce Linton and co pretending to be 'savages' in poor Miss Norman's class, and essentially playing blackface, with talk of corroborees, Joyce making her hair 'fuzzy', people putting feathers in their hair and painting tattoos on themselves and talking in 'grunts and clicks'.

I think both Thekla and Joyce get into undue trouble if you compare it to stuff people get away with scot-free in later books eg Margot braining someone with a bookend or Jack Lambert bullying Jane quite badly.

Thekla doesn't even show up to the class where the rest torment Miss Norman, she attends a midnight feast, is generally an unpleasant snob (but she's hardly unique in the history of the CS in that) and her crowning misdeed is getting Joyce out of bed at night and being unrepentant about it. OK, it's supposed to be part of getting Joyce into trouble to annoy Joey, but that campaign never actually gets under way.

It seems a bit bad to expel her when someone who causes a potentially serious head injury to another girl after losing her temper doesn't get anywhere near expulsion!

Yes actually in the context of Margot's behaviour later on it seems even more disproportionate. I actually had to re read a few pages to see if Thekla had done something else that I had missed to get her expelled. Even if the intention was to get Joey into bother, she hadn't actually done that yet and it seemed to be a plan that was going nowhere anyway. Her dislike of Joey seemed to come suddenly from nowhere too.

It was also almost as if EBD had decided to swap Thekla and Joyce halfway through, as at the beginning it was Joyce who was coming up with wicked plans, such as the tormenting of Ivy Norman. Thekla wanted no part of it all and then suddenly the roles were reversed. A bit like Elizabeth Arnett and Betty Wynne Davies, where at the start Elizabeth seems to be the more sinister, villainous one and Betty more of a vacuous airhead, who just did whatever Elizabeth tells her too and then almost overnight Betty later becomes the real villain and Elizabeth is reformed.

I never got the Sybil thing either. She made a mistake with Josette and her accident, but she was only a child who should have been supervised at the time. Joey didn't like her long before that anyway and that seemed to come solely from her being pretty and knowing it and being told it by other people. It was odd the way we were clearly never really meant to like Sybil, based on nothing but it was clear we were meant to like Margot Maynard despite EVERYTHING we were told about her. Purely because she was Joey's offspring and therefore must be okay underneath it all.

I do wonder whether the hatchet job on Sybil was so that as Madge's eldest daughter she could never take Joey's important place or become the obvious heroine ahead of Joey's triplets as the eldest daughter of the Lady who actually owned the school!

It’s why I don’t like modern TV adaptations of classic stories: the tick box culture makes them unrealistic. In Malory Towers TV series, the “lifeguard” was mentioned in every swimming pool scene, but never seen. The Chalet School characters get into so many safeguarding and bad weather scrapes that a modern tick box culture (which a modern adaptation would probably try to show) would be totally unrealistic.

Poor Sybil seems to be endlessly punished for being a mildly bratty child and being left in charge of a younger sibling without adult supervision around boiling water.

And her bratty childhood self is fairly clearly down to being stuck in a nursery that’s like some kind of mass baby camp that wouldn’t pass modern guidelines about child adult ratios for nurseries — I mean, as well as her actual siblings, one older and four younger, there’s an endless succession of babies Dick and Mollie keep producing in India, as though each time they visit they need to deposit at least one baby, if not two.

So that adds Peggy, Rix, Bride, Jacky, and I’m not sure how many more before the Bettanys returned from India? Add in the Robin and Daisy and Primula.

No wonder young Sybil was chanting to someone (Rix?) ‘You’re just a cousin. David and me belong!’

The poor child must have been desperate to stand out a bit as the actual child of the house, not just another random smallie Madge collected from somewhere. I’d have been insisting on my own good looks too! Anything to draw attention to myself in the throng.