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

[ShellacB]

Hi everyone. Here is the new thread!

Moving away from Eustacia but if I don't post now I'll forget!

I was really surprised in Prefects that Len at 18 was allowed to be in Reg's bedroom. Not at his bedside in the San but in a bedroom at Freudesheim. Aside from the discomfort at the thought of the two of them as a couple it seems a bit odd.

I was really surprised in Prefects that Len at 18 was allowed to be in Reg's bedroom.

That's why Reg assumes they're engaged - she wouldn't have been allowed otherwise.

Yes, it’s why he says ‘I take it we’re engaged.’ Ugh.

Though I’ve wondered why he’s put in Margot’s bedroom — doesn’t Freudesheim have vast numbers of bedrooms, one of which must surely be spare for guests, even given the large numbers of inhabitants? I think I remember counting fifteen bedrooms when Joey and Jack go around the house when they first move in!

Yes, I also found this to be very strange.

EBD is normally so reserved and prudish about these things that it seems odd that this one already particularly uncomfortable relationship is dealt with in such a manner.

Maybe that is another case for the argument that EBD herself didn't finish Prefects and that Phyllis wrote most or all of it.

Another would be that Prefects really does read to me as if it is the last book, written by someone who knew there would not be any more. There are a lot of loose ends such as Len's engagement, Margot's future as a nun etc that didn't need to be written into their last term at school.

I understand that whilst she had been unwell prior to it, EBD's death itself was fairly sudden. Of course there is always the possibility that she simply intended to retire as she had been unwell and deliberately wrapped everything up in that book. However, this wouldn't fit with her being unwell previously and still continuing to write. So perhaps all of the above in addition to the slightly different tone of the book, adds to the argument that someone else completed it or wrote it all.

In some ways I think it's a shame that the books carried on for so long. Reunion was the last one that I really enjoyed. Thereafter the inconsistencies really started to annoy me.

It was only last night that I realised that from 1950 onwards School Cert no longer existed and was replaced by O and A levels. So for 20 years EBD ignored a major change in UK education in a school based on UK lines.

She does mention GCE/O Level a couple of times.

It's all a bit muddly anyway because although she was publishing books through the 1960s, in school time Prefects took place in 1958.

I think that Len entering Reg's bedroom is made acceptable by the fact that it's her sister's room in her family home, he's immobilised in bed after an accident, they're engaged, her mother and Jem are downstairs and she's there with their express permission, while the closest we get to intimacy is her 'sinking down beside the bed' and him putting an arm around her. No kiss is even referred to! Len is more concerned with not letting anyone at school know.

Also, look at how thoroughly policed this sickroom visit is! She's told Reg has been found by Jem and Miss Annersley, forbidden to go and see him and told to pull herself together and go back to her prefect's duties, then, hours later, escorted through the school grounds and to the front door of Freudesheim by Nancy Wilmot and then given a lecture by her mother, in front of Jem, about 'not playing fast and loose' with Reg!

(Of course the rescue of Reg cracks me up anyway, because Joey advises the search party to 'hunt up any stilts the School has and send the men along on them'. )

It's a bit like Antonia Forest who kept the admission of naval cadets at Dartmouth as it had been at the time she originally wrote the first Marlow books, when Peter Marlow is at Dartmouth aged 14, despite the fact that she sets them all when they were written, by which time cadets were no longer admitted at that age.

Though one sometimes feels with EBD that it's more the attitudes of former times that she retains until well into the 1960s. So we've got a supposedly modern, with-it, 'eternal schoolgirl', attuned mother who is disgusted by a pair of a pair of passing Beatniks (who need 'a capable nanny anda good tubbing'), only grudgingly allows her teenage daughter to wear her hair in a ponytail, and then browbeats her into getting engaged while still at school!

.....escorted through the school grounds and to the front door of Freudesheim by Nancy Wilmot

I don't understand why she needed an escort to go next door, when in a previous book - was it Althea? - she travelled independently from Paris. And any girls who visited Freudesheim were accustomed to go to and fro by themselves.

It's a bit like Antonia Forest.....

AF had a little more leeway; I don't think there are any fixed dates in the Marlow books*, whereas there's no getting round the fact that the triplets were born in November 1939. But then AF mentions things like TOTP and Star Trek. I don't think EBD ever makes specific pop culture references.

*Not the modern ones; the dating of the Players books is fixed.

Though one sometimes feels with EBD that it's more the attitudes of former times that she retains until well into the 1960s.

Agatha Christie, who was the same generation as EBD, and her alter ego Mrs Oliver, are also sometimes uncomfortable with aspects of 1960s life.

There is an explanatory note about Dartmouth at the start of one of the Marlow books. AF was a bit stuck with her dual timeline unless she wanted to expel Peter 😆. I don't know how Dartmouth actually managed the change in admissions age, I assume they stopped admitting cadets but let the previous intakes continue through the school.

Well, there no getting around 15 year old Ginty being claustrophobic because she was trapped in a cellar in the Blitz while her younger sister is dressing up as a punk and her boyfriend is watching Up Pompeii, all in the same eighteen-month period.😃

And yes to AG and her authorial stand-ins, but presumably she hadn’t established Mrs Oliver as an eternal schoolgirl, unusually modern in her parenting, a bit zany, famous for her ability to empathise with ‘problem’ girls.

Well, there no getting around 15 year old Ginty being claustrophobic because she was trapped in a cellar in the Blitz

The intro to Traitor in the GGB edition mentions a German translation in which all references to WW2 were removed, and Ginty (called Jenny in the translation) is claustrophobic following being locked in a wine cellar during a childhood game. Obviously all that was to avoid sensitive war references though and nothing to do with the timeline as it was a standalone translation.

Yes, I think the later books still feel as if they are set long before the 1960s.

It is odd because in many ways the entire series could be set in it’s own timeframe (with the exception of the war stories obviously.)

To me Camp and Princess could easily be set in the same decade as the later Swiss books if we didn’t know about the difference in ages. They don’t seem much more remote timewise to me than the later books! I certainly wouldn’t necessarily know they were set in the 1920s and 30s!

The lack of moving into the current time later may have been deliberate. As another poster said the one timeframe that is definitive is that the triplets were born in November 1939. So on that basis in ‘real time’ Prefects can’t be set any later than 1958.

Although, I think EBD deliberately largely stays away from mentioning specific age and time after the war, specifically after arrival in Switzerland. I think that is there is one hint of it being 1950 in one of the island books. Earlier in the series there are various indications of time given. In School at EBD refers to the troubles in Ireland which were mid 1920s. There is reference to a specific Oberamagau in and Jo, which took place in the mid 30s.

Then obviously we know about the outbreak of war in 1939, which doesn’t fit in with those earlier times as if Joey was 12 in 1925 then she had to have been at least 26 by 1939, rather than 19/20 and 56 by end of the end of the series rather than 38 or 39! Although the age she had the triplets at also changes from 20 to 21 to 22 and back and forth as well.

I think by the time she got to Switzerland and was setting a book in each terms she started to fudge the timeline by ignoring real time and dates all together and pretending it was still decades earlier!

One of the books that mentions them going to Switzerland refers to the political situation in Austria, which puts returning there out of the question - which puts it as set pre 1955

I love Autumn Term and bought a couple of the subsequent Marlowe books and found them completely disorientating.

Yes, I started reading them long before buying books online was possible - I read Autumn Term first and the next one I found was The Cricket Term - I was confounded by the modern references in the latter (this was the late 80s so TOTP still very much staple viewing) and the fact that Karen, last seen heading for Oxford, had acquired three step children. I think I even went back and checked I hadn't imagined the steam trains and so in in Autumn Term!

I bought The Ready Made Family and The Thuggery Affair, expecting more cosy boarding school stories of frustrated acting talent. I must get around to selling them.

They're hard to find and go for quite a lot of money, especially if they are original hardbacks, so definitely sell them if you don't want them but be mindful that if you regret it, it might not be easy to buy them again.

Ready Made Family is one of my favourites; Thuggery is something of an acquired taste, I have to be in the right mood to read it. I find AF's invented language fascinating, it has shades of A Clockwork Orange, and the plot about a drugs ring using carrier pigeons is simultaneously brilliant and bonkers.

And Patrick, who is essentially a golden-eyed Jacob Rees Mogg, speeding chummily into the night with Jukey (sp?) in a stolen car!

I’d be hard put to it to choose a favourite Marlow book. End of Term is probably my favourite school book, as I love the Christmas play and Lawrie’s scene with Madame Orly and Patrick and Nicola’s night ride home from Wade Abbas, but the holiday books are so brilliant… Maybe Peter’s Room? For the hunt and Doris and the Chest and Nick and Karen’s conversation about the Brontes, while Karen is still cerebral and studious, before mysteriously falling for Edwin and dropping out of Oxford!

It’s interesting to compared AF with EBD on religion. Both Catholic converts, both traditionalists, both interested in writing characters who take religion seriously, but the approach and effect is very different.

They’re old paperbacks

Those two go for upwards of £30 even in paperback so definitely worth selling (or if you donate them to charity, let them know their value so they get the benefit).

I’d be hard put to it to choose a favourite Marlow book

It is difficult as mine varies according to mood, but I am consistently very fond of The Attic Term - it's so well-written. You know all along that Ginty is going to get caught but what you don't foresee is the catastrophe with exam papers. Peter's Room is probably my favourite non-school one.

@JoanOgden the delicate Robin makes me v cross from a modern medicine perspective. Her mother has died from TB so they are concerned that she’ll grow up to have TB. Therefore they have her brought up a TB sanatorium, socialising with the families of active cases, with no infection control, and none of the real life post-war developments in TB treatment. Then, after doing pretty much everything they can to give her TB, they tell her she’s too fragile to have children and has to be a nun 🙄

Robin’s story does sound ridiculous when it’s set out so clearly!

I have started to wonder how much longer the Sanatorium associated with the school would stay open, given that Prefects is set in 1958. A quick google suggests that TB was being treated by drugs by the 1960s, and presumably the Sanatoriums would have closed in the years that followed - the one in my city closed in the mid-70s. I haven’t read any of the follow-on books - is this covered in any of them?