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

[ShellacB]

Hi everyone. Here is the new thread!

Is she described in the books as having a fringe once she's adopted the earphones hairdo -- I thought I remembered that she is, but not sure...?

A vintage hair website I've just looked at says the earphones hairdo had fallen out of favour by the mid-20s, so Joey would have been like someone adopting a beehive in the 1990s, or a Rachel in 2026! (Did EBD intend this? Was it part of the whole 'Mamma and Papa' thing?)

I also remember reading somewhere that in the US the style was known, revoltingly, as 'Cootie Garages'... 😱

Absolutely, but EBD seems to have continued the idea of girls putting their hair up when they hit adulthood long past the time when this was actually the norm -- it was pretty much a Victorian and Edwardian thing, at least in the UK, US and France, and fell out of favour after WWI when women entered the workforce in more numbers and the bob and crop became fashioned. OK, Nazi ideology liked the 'peasant' plaited hair look, but it would seem odd to me that Joey or the other foreign girls would adopt it while living in Austria.

Joey, for one, has always worn her hair bobbed. Wouldn't it seem obvious to keep it bobbed, as it was now an adult woman's hairdo as well as being easy care? I suppose it made more sense for girls like Frieda, who'd always worn their hair long. Simone always had a bob as well, before starting to grow her hair (like Joey) specifically so she can put it up, which seems a bit illogical...

But wasn't Jack serving abroad when Joey was pregnant with the triplets?

Yes, he was so he wouldn’t have seen her when she was heavily pregnant.

However, as a few of us have commented it is odd that Dr Chester who was treating her and her own brother in law Dr Jem who lived down the road didn’t notice that she was pregnant with Triplets!

Has anyone done an in-depth study on the potential symbolism of the medically implausible phenomena (such as Joey popping out a set of presumably full term, fully healthy, previously unidentified triplets, and also the prevalence of being non-specifically "delicate") in the Chalet School books? I've never seen any, though I'd be surprised if it hadn't been done.

Maybe her diet of gallons of milk and cherry jam and bread twists, not to mention endless roast veal and pastries bursting with whipped cream not only cured her delicacy but also made it possible for a full term pregnancy of triplets to be pretty much overlooked.

Although she was still delicate enough to either faint or need to be sedated when anything remotely upsetting happened.

'I know,' said Carandache (jealously).

Eg falling into a box.

Or her son climbing over a cliff.

Antonia Forest's Falconer's Lure (1957) has the housekeeper Mrs Herbert telling Nicola, who has just had her hair cut very short, that she will be jealous of her sister Ann's plaits when Ann comes to put them up (Nicola doesn't think this will be the case). Ann and Karen are both described as having plaits in Autumn Term (1948) - Karen would have been nearly 18 at that point as she went to Oxford the following year.

In the Abbey books, identical cousins Joy & Joan adopted different hairstyles but occasionally Joy copied Joan’s to confuse people. And Jen simply had hers bobbed.

Didn’t Madge tell Joey she’d have to grow her hair now she was growing up?

Medically speaking though, for many auto immune conditions (for instance) pregnancy can hugely reduce the severity of the condition

I have been "delicate" most of my life due to an only recently diagnosed condition but I sailed through my pregnancies

The triplets but is rather extreme obviously but I loved the triplets story as a child

In the Abbey books, identical cousins Joy & Joan adopted different hairstyles but occasionally Joy copied Joan’s to confuse people. And Jen simply had hers bobbed.

Joy later had her hair cut short, while Joan kept hers long.

Wasn't Jen's hair cut as a result of an accident, and she didn't grow it again? Like Mary Lou later.

Re Joey and the triplets, we do have to account for the fact that there wasn’t any scanning apparatus in 1940 to definitively confirm a triplet pregnancy.

However, it is still very hard to believe that Dr Chester and Dr Jem wouldn’t have noticed her being larger than average and deduced that it was at the very least a twin pregnancy with the use of stethoscopes and heartbeat detectors.

I forgot about Jen’s accident. Did she hurt her back while saving someone else?

I forgot about Jen’s accident. Did she hurt her back while saving someone else?

No, it was a motorbike accident. I forget if she was on the back of Joy's bike or someone else's, but Joy's carelessness caused an accident. It's in Abbey Girls Go Back To School.

However, it is still very hard to believe that Dr Chester and Dr Jem wouldn’t have noticed her being larger than average and deduced that it was at the very least a twin pregnancy

Peter Chester had twin sons himself - he should have known what a twin pregnancy looked like!

I must be mixing her up with Mary-Lou or maybe Dimsie. Thanks @HonoriaBulstrode.

The risk of complications in triplet pregnancies at all stages, and of the babies being born very prematurely and having problems related to that, is massive, all the more so when the fact that there are three babies hasn't been recognised before the onset of labour. Someone sailing through her pregnancy and unexpectedly popping out three bouncing babies is heading for the realms of magic realism. Not that I'm the slightest bit averse to magic realism, it just set me off wondering if there's a load more of it in the books.

Oooh, that's interesting! Is that because your body basically goes, "must turn off immune system in order to not accidentally reject tiny intruder"? I've never been pregnant, though I've had chemo, which seems to involve similar risks re infection, and I did notice then that my eczema improved quite a lot.

I think it's more just ignorance on EBD's part. I don't think she knew much about pregnancy/obstetrics at all, as a spinster. And triplets are incredibly rare - less so now, with IVF and better fetomaternal medicine meaning they're far more likely to survive - but even now only 150-200 sets are born in the UK each year (I know this because I recently looked it up after having a cluster at work!) so a lay person in the 1930s would likely have no idea about the risks and complications involved. I think she just thought it sounded like a good dramatic plot device!

Josephine Elder, another girls' fiction writer, also had a set of triplets. They were young children, so not main characters. They appeared in Exile for Annis, published 1938, so possibly EBD wasn't aware of them when she wrote Exile. Josephine Elder was a doctor, so she'd have known about pregnancy and obstetrics.

In the same family as the triplets there was an older set of twins and the boy twin was what I suppose would be called developmentally delayed today. Very unusual for a children's book.

And to be fair, it was a good dramatic plot device ! Reading the books as a child it seemed so exotic and exciting

I believe so, essentially that there's an element of immune suppression

But isn’t that just Miss Bertie being her old-fashioned Ancient Retainer self and hankering after the fashions of her youth? I mean, Karen and Ann have plaits at school, but Rowan and Ginty wear their hair cropped, and Rowan isn’t much younger than Karen, and there’s no expectation ever mentioned that she’ll grow hers (or indeed how Karen wears her hair at Oxford. We only know she’s the only straight-haired one of the older Marlow sisters.)

Mind you, the timeline is so mad in the Marlowverse it’s hard to really think about hair fashions when a schoolgirl character can be claustrophobic because of being trapped in the Blitz while her slightly younger sister dresses up as a punk.