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

[ShellacB]

Hi everyone. Here is the new thread!

EBD is really bad at developing married women's characters. I just read Reunion for the first time since I was in my teens. I enjoyed it, and the Grizel plot is really well done.

But one of the reasons it doesn't really work for me is that all the married former pupils (and teachers) who come are incredibly lacking in character. They are defined purely by their number of children (all presented as beautiful and with lovely natures. None of them are causing their parents any worry or just going through a sulky phase).

Whereas the teachers at the Chalet School do continue to have lots of personality, say interesting things about life, etc. I wonder if this partly because EBD really enjoyed her colleagues' company, but found her married friends a bit dull and alien, and never quite got inside what their lives were like?

I was wondering why Joan's grandfather wrote to the school and not her own parents. I was wondering if Joan's grandfather was well to do and Joan's father had come down in the world and/or married beneath him?

I think Mr Baker senior was a respectable working class man who didn't like what he saw of the way his granddaughters were growing up. We're told Mr Baker came to visit and took Joan home to spend the rest of the holidays with him. I think he thought Joan needed closer supervision than she was getting from her parents and to be removed from Vic Coles. Boarding school would do that

I think he wrote because he thought his son was a wet lettuce who would do nothing about Joan until it was too late, but would go along with whatever his father told him to do.

I think when ML got all embarrassed about saying that Joan talked about boys, what EBD meant but couldn't say was that Joan talked about sex.

I knew a few Joans when I was at school; not the bullying aspect, but the boys, and I could envisage exactly the type of girl EBD meant.

it strikes me that, from then on, Joan was masking and pretending to be something she wasn't, and hiding her true nature.

I think it's interesting that what the authorial voice says about Joan is often different from what Joan does. For example at one point, I think it's in Excitements, she intervenes to head off a developing squabble between the triplets and Yseult. Another time she is really helpful in assisting girls to cross a flooded stream.

EBD does the same with Con Maynard - tells one thing but shows another.

I like New Mistress too. It was quite a fresh idea to have a book from the point of view of a mistress. And even reading it at whatever age I was when I first read it, I was all on Kathie's side in the Mary Lou affair. Any teacher I ever knew would have slapped ML down for answering a question addressed to another pupil.

I wonder if EBD first thought of trying the New Mistress idea with Biddy, when Biddy returned from Australia, but Biddy wouldn't co-operate - she was far too sure of herself.

New Mistress is a great book - but it definitely shows the worst side of Mary Lou! Im totally on Kathie's side.

I've just finished Feud. It's possibly one of the worst I've read. So much is made of the "rescue" of Minette leading to the school acquiring a second cat and then it all goes quiet and the cats are mentioned incidentally as having become friends and taken up residence in the kitchen.

Jack and Gillie for no discernable reason become good friends and - a friendship that is cemented in another cat related episode towards the end of the book.

And Miss Ashley's speech to Miss Holyrod at the end is hilarious.

But on a brighter note we only hear of Jo visiting the school once. Even the play is delivered by Dr Jack.

Mary Lou and Verity are both present at the Nativity play because Heaven forbid there could be a book where St Mary Lou is not mentioned!

In case anyone is interested there are still centenary versions of The School at the Chalet available on amazon.

I have ordered The Chalet School at Peril. I am not normally a fan of fill ins, but given this one is set during Exile and the reports on here are positive I am going to give it a go!

Peril is a good book I really enjoyed it, but I aldo recommend "A Refuge for the Chalet School" - where they arrive in Guernsey.

I used to love the Chalet School books. Haven't read one in years but am inspired to to pick one at random on ebay and dip my toe back in the wholesome water. (Hopefully the one I pick has little to no mention of the painfully good Robin 😂)

That's one of my favourites too. I love the way the staff fall over themselves to be chummy, 'we're all on first-name terms here' and so on.

I do wonder if EBD tried to run her own school along any of the same lines as the Chalet School - the curtseying, languages and so on.

Also Team Kathie!

I used to love the Chalet School books. Haven't read one in years but am inspired to to pick one at random on ebay and dip my toe back in the wholesome water.

Try Search: fadedpage.com before you spend any money. You can read and download them all from there for free. They're mostly the original hardbacks, not the abridged Armadas.

Robin is at her best in Exile and Highland Twins. EBD allows her to act her age and have a mind of her own. She's rarely seen after that.

I find the Robin's growing up a bit jarring. Shes the baby for endless books, then in Exile she's grown up into a teenager. No transition

Oh thank you! I will do that.

I agree, but think I assumed that EBD thought that married women, with the exception of Joey (and Madge to an extent, for a while), had no ‘story’, as they’d been assumed into domestic bliss, where only their fertility was allowed to speak for them! So their characters weren’t supposed to be interesting. Their story was officially over.

I hate the way Joan is never fully allowed to reform, and for an unpleasant reason that’s referenced by several characters over the books — her ‘heredity’ is bad. She’s literally ‘ill-bred’. As a pp said, we’re told good things about her, but some new girl dislikes her on sight and when we’re told she’s got engaged to someone she met at business college, one of the triplets (Con?) says the early engagement is ‘horrid’, despite her own mother getting married very young. But everything Joan does is wrong.

I find the Robin's growing up a bit jarring. Shes the baby for endless books, then in Exile she's grown up into a teenager. No transition

There's quite a long gap, in school time, between New and Exile. Robin ages from twelve to fourteen. There was supposed to be a book covering Jo and Robin's trip to India which would have fitted in there, which was never published. That might have shown Robin growing up - once she escaped from Jem's suffocating regime.

EBD is really bad at developing married women's characters.

Maybe EBD's married friends, if she had any, were like the ones we read about here, who can only talk about their children!

When we’re told she’s got engaged to someone she met at business college, one of the triplets (Con?) says the early engagement is ‘horrid’, despite her own mother getting married very young.

And despite Len & Reg.

I remember Rosemary Auchmuty in A World of Girls (fascinating book about girls’ school stories) talking about Darrell & similar heroines being excellent examples of girls who would find it really hard to fit themselves into the mould of Blyton etc’s cosy, caring mother whose family was her world.

It’s years since I’ve read the book so that’s only an approximation of the quote but I was struck by it at the time.

She’s still being babied in the first part of Exile, though, even though she’s 14, I mean, by EBD as well as the other characters — we still, get the fragile, tubercular angelic face etc description, and when she (entirely accidentally) overhears Jem talking about the Nazis, she confesses to Madge like a small child who thinks she’s done something terrible, and is being addressed as ‘Little Bird’ by San doctors and not allowed to be out in the night air. At the same time, she’s the one who runs out to confront the Nazi mob, but that’s as if a different girl is doing it, not the ‘baby’ who’s then too fragile to then walk through the passage to safety, and keeps being carried by Jack and Gottfried.

Then after the break in Exile, she’s started growing her hair and is a very English schoolgirl all of a sudden!

....the mould of Blyton etc’s cosy, caring mother whose family was her world.

They weren't all like that.
There was Mrs Mannering, who was off running her own business and leaving Philip and Dinah to spend their holidays fairly miserably
Mrs Arnold(?) in the Secret series who was a pilot who went off exploring with her husband, leaving her children with unsatisfactory relatives, and going missing more than once
Fatty's mother in the Five Find-Outers who was always busy, so that Fatty did as he pleased
The mother in the Faraway Tree who didn't neglect her children, but had to divide her attention between them, running the house and earning a bit of money.

That’s a really good point.

I like the Enid Blyton mother who after their house burns down shunts her kids off to the lovely aunt at Mistletoe Farm and checks herself into a wellness facility (not sure what they were called in those days!) for some rest and relaxation.

(edited to add that google tells me she's called Rose Longfield)

Was that Six Cousins at Mistletoe Farm? And the aunt reforms them?

Yes! A wholesome country lifestyle and lots of hearty farmhouse fare sorts them out. I always enjoyed that book.

Aunt Linnie reforms them in Six Cousins, but they relapse in Six Cousins Again under the dastardly influence of their mother Rose, who has the audacity not to want to live on a farm and have High Tea every day. It's not until Rose undergoes a personality transplant by means of donning an overall and getting up at 6am to put the kettle on that they all live happily ever after.

(Despite my facetious summary these are my favourite two Blyton books and Melisande and Cyril were my childhood crushes).

They’re both brilliant. (Cyril of course has a giant crush Benedict the hermit. And Jack has some scene going on with Twigg the poacher.)

I loved the scene where Melisande impresses Jack’s school friend by being dainty, and he’s horrified by filthy Jane, so Jane starts a campaign of self-care that involves washing her jodhpurs and not biting her nails. And silly Aunt Rose fat-shames Melisande for the effects of all those high teas.

Yea Robin literally goes from being an unrealistic for her age baby to very mature (adult like) teenage girl over the course of Exile.

She is a baby at the start of the book, no different from how she was in New, and then she is an adult by the end of it, who has lost all hint of the accent she had kept for years beforehand!!

I know that they go through a lot in Exile and also is set over a relatively long time period but still it is not much more than a few months for a complete character change!

It is jarring, but Robin is a lovely character between Exile part 2 and Highland Twins. She isn’t annoying at all when she finally grows up and then she pretty much disappears just as she has become a good and interesting character! We don’t even hear Joey talk about her much in the later years.

I wonder again is that because she is no longer the school baby character that EBD saw no need for her in the story. Also, because she is now a very likeable adult she may have had to be gotten rid of in case she detracted from Joey as the main adult character. Similarly to the way Madge is semi written out…

Thanks for the recommendation!

Is that one still in print anywhere? Can’t seem to find it online with the exception of one extremely expensive copy…