The Chalet School 2 - Still talking about it a century later!

[ShellacB]

Hi everyone. Here is the new thread!

while they all sludged around in grey.

A lady I once knew was about five years old when clothes rationing ended in 1949. She remembered vividly how everything seemed to be grey in the post war period, then all the stalls in her local market seemed to burst into colour with all the dress fabrics that became available when rationing ended.

Yes I loved Back Home! Amazing book.

I enjoyed the Chalet Girls in India spin-off too - I haven't read many of them and was v pleasantly surprised. I'm sure EBD's original (if she ever wrote it) was less culturally sensitive!

I loved Back Home. I read it when I'd just returned to the UK after living abroad for a few years and it did such a good job of depicting reverse culture shock through the eyes of a child.

You are giving me some ideas to add to my To Be Read list which I have ignored since I started my Chalet School binge.

I finished Prefects last night. There were other books that were less satisfying (I'm looking at you, Summer Term) but I'm not sorry to have reached the end of the series. I am deeply unsatisfied by the way baby Claire gets forgotten, even between chapters, and by the constant reappearance of Mary-Lou!

Having recently re read Eustacia as an adult, and the unabridged version as opposed to the Armada one I read when I was young, I've come to the conclusion that it reads as a recently orphaned child suddenly sent abroad being roundly bullied by girls and staff alike 🙈 thoughts....?

There was zero sympathy or understanding for her. There was no compassion from anyone. I'm sure she was hard to live with but no one tried to help her.

Yes I find it an incredibly uncomfortable read, and Jo was an absolute cow to her!

Yes - she does behave very badly at times, but there is never any consideration of how she could be supported to get used to school life with some minor adjustments (e.g. somewhere to read!) and sometimes she is blamed for things which weren't her fault at all, like Bill's broken foot (a total accident) and the Robin's subsequent anxiety.

Mary-Lou is like a Whack-A-Mole!! Mind you, so is Joey at times, when she’s continually appearing through the handy hedge gate from Freudesheim. I have a vision of someone paying Gaudenz to ‘lose’ the key.

I agree that reading Eustacia as an adult is pretty grim. She’s lost two parents in quick succession, is thrown into an alien family environment where no one wants her and she doesn’t understand the ‘rules’, and then dispatched to a continental boarding school precisely so that she can’t come home for the holidays.

And then no one is remotely sympathetic st the school either. She’s treated by the narrator as though her ‘priggish’ ways legitimise how unfeeling everyone is. And then ‘punished’ by the narrator for upsetting Robin by causing Bill to sprain an ankle, and then punished again with a serious back injury when she tries to run away.

Its not just that various characters mistreat her, its that the narrator decides she’s an ‘arrant little prig’ so she doesn’t get to grieve or be justifiably miserable.

EBD does have odd ideas about grief though. There’s a six or seven-year-old in one of the books who’s come to the kindergarten because both her parents died in an accident, & Hilda tells Jo there’s no need to worry about her because she’s perfectly happy.

Yes - Primula Mary Venables is 5 when her mum dies and depicted as basically too young to notice or care.

I guess this comes from a combination of a time when losing parents as a child was more common and EBD not really understanding young children.

I remember feeling uncomfortable reading Eustacia as an 8 year old child. I felt even more uncomfortable reading it as an adult!

The aunt, uncle and cousins were particularly bad to her. The cousins essentially bullied her for being different and rather than holding them to account the aunt sent a very recently bereaved child, who clearly struggled with social integration and was very clearly crying out for love and affection off to a strange school.

When she got there both staff and students were horrible to her and again bullied her for being a bit different. Joey was particularly appalling and blaming her for Robin being ill was ridiculous.

I also found the complete change in character to be wholly unrealistic. After the accident she transformed into a sainted martyr who was suddenly perfect in every way and never complained about the awful hand life had dealt her.

In my opinion, pre accident Eustacia was actually much more interesting and unique than the saintly, unrealistic, character she transformed into overnight.

I also didn’t like the idea that the book presented that you couldn’t be accepted unless you were exactly like everyone else and the idea that she had to completely conform to be worthy of the affection of Joey and Co.

Yes, and when Captain Humphries dies, we’re told Robin has been ‘trained not to fret’ as though that’s somehow a solution to grief, and as though grieving the loss of your father was something like having a tantrum over not getting a treat, something that a well-trained child wouldn’t be allowed to give in to.

Yes, you’d sometimes wonder whether EBD had ever met an actual child!

EBD didn't like anything "messy". Grief was "one and done" type of thing. You could cry - within strict parameters - then go off and never mention it again. Just as pregnancy was never mentioned.

There is a passage in Reunion where Mary Lou discusses her mother’s death with Grizel, which may have been indicative of of EBD‘s view on grieving.

Mary Lou essentially tells Grizel that it would be wrong for her to be sad about her mother’s death because she is with God and it would be selfish for Mary Lou to feel sad about that. It struck me as being quite an unhealthy thing for a child to be made to feel bad about being sad about losing their only parent.

I recall something similar being said to about a character losing her Aunt in one of the Hertfordshire books. I can’t think off hand which one.

I know that EBD lost her brother, who she was very close to at a very young age and I wonder was she taught from early on that it wasn’t right to feel sad as the person was in a better place. Or perhaps that’s simply how she rationalised her own grief?

It could also be part of her religious beliefs. It seems a bit extreme but maybe she had this idea of death and heaven as a reward and something you shouldn’t be sad about even if it was your only living 39 year old relative!

Even with that, it seems far fetched that every small child in the stories would deal with the loss of one or both parents, and be expected to deal with it, in this unrealistic and unnatural way.

It's a long time since I read it, but the treatment of their new stepsister by the eponymous Seven Scamps is a fairly nasty exercise in intolerance, though it does get resolved

I think the aunt you might be thinking of is Jacynth Hardy's aunt in Gay From China?

Yes that’s the very one! Remembered after I had posted.

Something like Jacynth should be glad her aunt could finally have a rest after all the years she’d had to spend looking after Jacynth?

It is very protestant. One of my aunts was married to a fellow Dubliner who served in the Royal Navy, and was buried by an Anglican chaplain in Gosport who distressed and angered my father by interrupting the proceedings to order him not to cry. Contrast the standard Catholic closing prayers which start

EITHER
Before we go our separate ways, let us take leave of our brother/sister. May our
farewell express our affection for him/her; may it ease our sadness and
strengthen our hope. One day we shall joyfully greet him/her again when the
love of Christ, which conquers all things, destroys even death itself.

OR
Trusting in God, we have prayed together for N. and now we come to the last
farewell. There is sadness in parting, but we take comfort in the hope that one
day we shall see N. again and enjoy his/her friendship. Although this
congregation will disperse in sorrow, the mercy of God will gather us together
again in the joy of his kingdom. Therefore let us console one another in the faith
of Jesus Christ.

Sadness and sorrow are taken for granted, as is the need to huddle together for comfort. On the wider level within Catholicism there is also the belief in our ongoing relationship with the dead in prayer for them. The kind of 'one and done' mindset EBD presents is heretical.

The assumption that Auntie isn't working her way through purgatory is optimistic.

Yes, but though EBD was Catholic, was Jacynth? I also think that she deliberately avoids references to any doctrine or ritual that isn’t shared. So no references, despite her characters in general being very devout, to fish on Fridays, confession, fasting for Lent, Purgatory etc.

I think it’s party why she skips Jack and Joey’s wedding, too — Joey is unlikely to have converted yet, and a ‘mixed marriage’ would have had to be a very quiet affair.

Jacynth isn't but Jo is, and I'd expect her to refrain from expressing theological opinions one way or another.

Maybe Joey secretly holds all kinds of heterodox ideas — she went against the very clear Catholic doctrinal position on fortune-telling and the occult, after all, and she and the whole family buy into the unhelpful (and doctrinally unfounded) notion of Margot’s personal devil.

Which always makes me imagine Margot airily telling the Mistress of Postulants of her order ‘Oh, my devil made me do that!’ and the Mistress of Postulants thinking ‘Oh, rats…’

With today’s perspective it kind of feels like the cure for autism is a back injury.