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

[ShellacB]

Hi everyone. Here is the new thread!

Joey had her plaits in earphones over her ears, not over the top of her head.

As well as being extremely dated, I would have thought it was uncomfortable and impractical to have a mass of hair and hairpins over one’s ears.
Most teenage girls would have begged their mother to switch to a modern style.

Also impressive is the speed at which hair grows in the Alpine climate. Jo goes from a straggly bob in her final term to the dreaded earphones in September!

Yes, good points - Mrs Bertie is a brilliantly awful character, with her smug spouting of cliches and always having to have the last word. Rowan sums it up when she can't bear to ask her where Mrs Tranter's sister lives even though the alternative is tramping the fields to find someone else, because she can't bear the carry-on Bertie would make of Mr Tranter's stroke. The Marlows were, of course, stuck with her forever - they'd make enemies of the whole village if they tried to get rid of her!

Reading The Chalet School in Peril. It is very good!

At times it would be hard to tell that it wasn’t written by EBD!

Definitely more of an adult novel than a children’s one. It goes into the details of the political situation in great depth

I have finished Peril. I could not put it down last night which is a good sign.

It is a really good book! This is coming from someone who has never been keen on fill ins. It was easy to forget that it wasn't an original. It was so well researched and genuinely filled in a lot of the gaps in Exile in a believable way.

I particularly loved that we saw a bit more of Madge, who is one of my favourite characters. It again made me realise what a shame it was when she faded into the background in the main series.

Also, the storyline was no worse for having hardly any Jo in it! I quite like Jo (particularly the Jo of this era) but you could see from this book that the storyline was no worse and maybe even slightly better when she wasn't shoe horned into every chapter in an increasingly unrealistic way.

I also found it an interesting choice to make Betty essentially the lead child character for a lot of the book. It was nice to see her background and I felt increasingly sorry for her in terms of how her story ended up. She was presented as brave and plucky leading up to and throughout the departure from Austria, despite having no real family to go home to. Obviously, this may have been different from EBD's interpretation of her, but it really made me wish that the school had been more understanding to her. Particularly when we were told that Elizabeth put the early ideas in her head and she just carried them out. It reminded me that her background was so lacking and she was so used to rejection, that it is not unusual that she took the breakdown in her friendship with Elizabeth so badly.

One missed opportunity was that we still didn't see Joey and Jack's wedding. Has any fill in author ever covered that? I understand that to do that Katherine would have had to take the story on to Guernsey and there was probably enough to write about in Tyrol.

It was nice to see Juliet's wedding as I always felt her departure and disappearance from the series was a mere footnote in the main books when she had been a main character for so long. Poor Grizel was overlooked in the bridesmaid category again despite them being best friends at school!

I'm reading 'Princess' and have just finished the part where they visit Zillertal. The girls are allowed to just wander through the woods on their own, despite the rushing river nearby, which a couple of the girls scramble down to. Not to mention the kidnapper!!! Eeeek - I bet Madge hadn't written a risk assessment!

I’ve ordered Peril and am looking forward to reading it

@Shellac yes Joey and Jack's wedding is covered in "Refuge" I will attach photos including the blurb from the back of the book.

Ah this is the one I haven't been able to find and would love to get hold of! Thanks

Yes, Mrs Bertie is an irremovable fact of Trennels life, like the Maynard's Anna, who refuses to marry because she wants to stay with Joey. (Though, mysteriously, Anna only gets introduced in Exile, doesn't she, having somehow got herself 'no one knew how, smuggled out of Austria to reach her beloved Fraulein Jo' -- did we meet Anna during her CS days? Did she have a particular adoration for Joey? or is this EBD retrofitting a way of giving Joey a 'faithful handmaiden' equivalent to Marie, who followed Madge to the Sonnalpe, I think?)

And of course who presages Jockel, who somehow managed to get himself and Rufus out of Tyrol and across Europe and find Joey (to whom he is also devoted, obviously).

It always reads a bit weirdly to me that two school servants, one of whom has what sounds like quite pronounced learning difficulties, are both somehow separately inspired by their love of a former CS pupil to escape from Austria ('no one knew hoe') and find her, one with her (enormous, striking, difficult-to-feed and smuggle) Saint Bernard into the bargain.

Especially as immediately after the account of how Jockel managed to escape with Rufus, we get an account of Friedel and Bruno's imprisonment, torture, and their difficulty in escaping, even though these are two intelligent, well-connected men with family influence and money behind them.

You're left with the impression that it's easier to escape the Third Reich if you're solely inspired by the love of Joey!

(Maybe the Marlows put up with Mrs Bertie partly because of Doris and her fabulous dressmaking?)

Mrs Bertie had been at Trennels a lot longer than that particular lot of Marlows, hadn't she. It's more her home than theirs. She'd been there with Great Uncle Laurence and Cousin Jon. Possibly known Cousin Jon from childhood. Getting rid of her would come under the heading of the things you couldn't do, to quote Nicola.

And it would have been difficult if not impossible to replace her and ISTR that Pam Marlow isn't a good cook.

Mind you, Karen does the unthinkable in weaseling her way into Mrs Tranter's tied cottage after Mr Tranter has his stroke!

Yes to Mrs Marlow being an 'erratic' cook -- I think it's the halfterm in End of Term when Rowan drives to pick them up in lipstick and tells them Mrs Bertie is ill, the grandmother is staying, and their mother is cooking?

By the sound of it, her upbringing would not ever have involved countenancing the prospect of her having to cook for herself in her future, and, in fairness, even though she didn't marry where she was supposed to, the necessity doesn't seem to have come up often.

Contrast the CS, where the girls are taught to cook from the late 20s, despite the fact that most certainly can't have expected to have to cook or clean for themselves ever.

Am I right in thinking that although we first meet Frau Mieders and cookery lessons in Lintons, we never see Joey and co, though they're still at school, taking a cookery class (though Joey does quote Frau Mieders at Madge in Exile). I mean, I know we're told that some of the girls are practised cooks and some have no idea at all, having never done any, but I'd be surprised if most of the early CS girls had ever cooked. I can imagine someone like Frieda, from a modest and very trad background having been taught to cook and clean in the expectation that she would be working alongside her servant/s, but surely Marie won't have? Would Joey have?

I don’t think EBD ever took the cookery classes very seriously except as an opportunity for hilarious mishaps involving mixed up ingredients.

Yes, I think they were mostly just a plot device. Interesting that they don't get as much of a mention in Switzerland, when I'd have thought in the post-war years servants were much harder to come by and more of the girls might be expected to cook for themselves in the end.

Yes to Mrs Marlow being an 'erratic' cook -- I think it's the halfterm in End of Term when Rowan drives to pick them up in lipstick and tells them Mrs Bertie is ill, the grandmother is staying, and their mother is cooking?

I vaguely remembered something to that effect, but couldn't recall which book.

I don't think Joey ever cooked. Remember those weird sandwich fillings she came up with in Joey Goes, when she was around 30 and should have known much better?

The argument was that all girls should learn cooking and housekeeping skills, even if they didn't expect to do the work themselves, so that they would know whether it was properly done.

The Abbey Girls couldn’t cook at all - when their cook was unavailable for some reason a guest ended up stepping in.

Yes, they were basically the same as the science lessons which were just an excuse for Evvy or Cornelia or someone to blow something up, but with garlic cloves substituted for explosives/bunsen burners!

(Mind you, confusing cloves with garlic cloves must count as one of the least likely comedy substitutions in school story history, and that's not even going into why the garlic was in a tin marked 'Cloves' in English in a storeroom that must have been used 99% of the time by school servants who didn't speak English...)

The Abbey Girls couldn’t cook at all - when their cook was unavailable for some reason a guest ended up stepping in.

I expect Joan could cook- someone must have cooked when they lived in the Abbey and you can bet Joy didn't -- but she wasn't in the story then.

And later Rosamund had her cookery certificate and a lot of them stayed on at school to do the cookery course (mostly so they could be May Queen), but I don't think we ever see them do any cooking.

I bet you’re right about Joan.

And Jen dropped the cookery course after about five minutes because getting Joy married was more important & only she could organise the wedding.

Poor Anne Bellanne - she didn’t want to become a cook because of what it would do to her social status, but both she & Lindy ended up as the Abbey Girls’ staff. Just like the long line of May Queens who looked after their kids.

EJO was quite limited in her ideas about careers, compared to EBD. If you weren't musical, being a writer was ok, and there are a few girl gardeners, but otherwise being a nursery nurse or getting married and having a baby every year seems to be the thing. No-one does anything intellectual or academic. Patch was told she'd better give up studying history and learn about babies!

And Rachel had her job as the caretaker as well as her writing, but Mary - Mary of all people with her own fulfilling career - thought Damaris should give up her career as a prima ballerina to marry Brian!

I think Rosamund could have been perfectly happy running her tea shop with her cousins if she hadn’t been whisked into becoming a countess.

Mary - Mary of all people with her own fulfilling career - thought Damaris should give up her career as a prima ballerina to marry Brian!

Yes but ballet seems to be regarded as not quite our sort of thing in EJO's world. I'd have thought ballet was quite mainstream by the time she wrote the Damaris books, but characters don't seem familiar with it.

Maidlin carries on singing after marriage, and Joy carries on composing, but that's music so it's ok. I think all the other married women just do Good Works like opening bazaars and teaching folk dancing.

I think Rosamund would have been successful at anything she took up and it's a pity she didn't get herself trained for a proper career when she left school. But of course her mother's illness intervened.

I know the later Chalet School books are increasingly unmoored from reality, but the Abbey books (after the first 6 or 7) are much worse - they feel like they're suspended in a fake sugary world, not helped by the fact that they deliberately have no external markers of when they're set, because the chronology of the books doesn't link up at all with the world outside.

Any thoughts on the unabridged version of Joey and Co In Tirol? I never read it when I read the books originally, I couldn't get hold of a copy. Just read it and finding a lot of it either strange or not reflecting the characters in their usual way...Also parts are rather far fetched even for EBD!