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

[ShellacB]

Hi everyone. Here is the new thread!

Hi, posting here slightly cheekily (though I'm pretty sure I've posted on one of these before) to ask the wisdom of crowds whether there's any reason I shouldn't let my five year old DD read Chalet School.

Context: I have a fairly big collection of the books from my youth. I also have a 5 year old who is a very good reader (one of the books she's currently reading is A Little Princess so I don't think the language of CS will be an issue) and who is absolutely loving Malory Towers. I'd like to hand her my Chalet School books as they will keep her going for ages, but just wondering if there's anything that should give me pause. There's plenty of people on here who clearly know the books very well so hopefully you can tell me if so!

Or if there's particular books I shouldn't give her yet? I will at least pre-read and probably hold off on giving her the WW2 books as although she's got a vague awareness of that time period, oddly enough I don't fancy giving a full run down on concentration camps to her yet. But not sure whether there's any other books I should avoid.

I started reading them around 10. I dont think they are unsuitable, even the WWII ones. But I doubt she'll fully understand or appreciate them at 5, and as a massive fan that saddens me. Id save them for a few more years.

I’d be very surprised if even a precocious five year old found them that appealing, tbh — EBD’s style is rather cluttered, she often writes as much from the POV of adults as children, and even the child characters are invariably a lot older than your daughter, other than the ghastly Robin. I was eight or nine or so, I think, and was reading Jane Eyre and Great Expectations more easily than the CS books.

(I also think there’s a fair few things I’d want to explain/contextualise/omit altogether for a very young child. The naughty Balbinis being punished by their mother’s death and Jem brutally rubbing it in, the use of ‘n**r’ and ‘savage’ etc, just for starters.)

I agree, I'd wait a bit. She might be able to read all the words - except for the French and German bits - but she hasn't got enough life experience to understand it all. Quite a lot is told from the point of view of adults.

ETA - the opening scene of the first book is a conversation between two adults.

There are also the historical/cultural differences - Austria in the 1929s/1930s, lack of technology, different clothes and so on - which she would need to have explained.

I think I was 8-10 when I started reading them and found it difficult to keep track of all the characters. I read them in whatever order I could get them from the library and remember not understanding that Dr Jem, Dr Russell and Sir James were all the same person.

I was a pretty advanced reader (similar to your DD) and I started reading them at 7. That was the right age for me I think but I would have benefited from an adult to talk through how the world had changed since they were written. I'd hold off for a few years. She'll get more out of them.

I started reading them in the 1960s, which was less removed from the 1920s and 1930s than the 2020s are. My mother was born in 1929 and she talked about her childhood. I knew quite a lot of people who didn't have cars or telephones, people didn't routinely fly or travel abroad. So I didn't need to have the background explained to me in the way a present day child might need to have it explained.

I agree with those saying to wait a few more years, I was a very advanced reader and was assessed as having a reading age of 16 at the age of eight. I am sure I would probably have been capable of reading the CS books at 5, but I think there are things in them that would be too difficult to process and as PP said so far removed from a modern child’s experience. I had one set of grandparents born in the 1890’s and a grandmother born in 1902 so I had some sort of historical context for the world of 1920’s from their stories.

I would also make sure that she reads childrens literature as well, I experienced a sense of loss at university age that I hadn’t read books like Winnie the Pooh as I was taking adult books out of the library and from my parents’ bookshelves at the age of 5. I actually read some of those children’s books at university, I felt I was missing something that other people had experienced and they weren’t part of my internal world.

Thanks all for the good advice - I'll hold off on them for two or three years. She does get plenty of lovely classic children's stuff like Winnie the Pooh as well, don't worry (and newer stuff too - she loves those awful Rainbow Fairies books, which fortunately our library has a good supply of).

There's definitely things mentioned there I wasn't aware of or had forgotten. I was a precocious reader as well but didn't come across CS until I was a bit older - 8 or 9 I think. And my parents weren't always completely on the ball about what was suitable - I read Biggles at DD's age, for instance, which is not something I would hand to her!

My oldest DD was an advanced reader and it was so hard to find books for her ability that weren't too old in subject matter for her. Whatever you don't let her read the Hugh Loftus Dr Dolittle books!

On the subject of Chalet School - I'm reading Adrienne at the moment and have found out that Robin is in a convent in France. You would have thought with all the money Joey and Jack seem to have they could have made a trip to visit her. The youngest children haven't even met her.

I started reading them at 7. That was in the very early 90s and that was a hugely different time from now with the lack of mobile phones and internet in most homes so the books were nowhere near as far removed as they would be now.

Camp was the first one I read and largely due to them being on a campsite I remember having no realisation of how long ago they were written. It wasn’t until I read Exile about a year later and realised that it was set in the second world war!

I read them out of order from the library too and I was also confused and surprised to find out halfway through one book that Lady Russell was the same person as Madge Bettany and that Joey Maynard was the same person as Joey Bettany!

Whilst I was 7 when I started them I think that nowadays I would wait until 8 or 9 if introducing them to a child. I think a lot of it went over my head a bit in the first few years of reading them and as others have said a lot of the books are written from an adult point of view. Especially the war ones like Exile and Goes to it and others such as Reunion and Jo to the Rescue. Parts of The School at the Chalet are more from an adult perspective also and in my opinion the adult Madge is the main character in that book.

If looking for more childlike ones I would start with Jo of the Chalet School, Princess (although there are some scary parts!) and in general the earlier Tyrol ones where they tend to focus on younger children like Joey, Simone, Elisaveta etc.
Three go to focuses on a young Mary Lou too. She is much less irritating than later older Mary Lou!

I've had a few nights of poor sleep and as a result have reread most of the Tyrol books. I'm not sure I've ever read the full versions before as opposed to the Armada paperbacks - they are very charming! A few reflections

1. The health stuff - I know we always talk about it, but it's so pervasive. It was such a different world before antibiotics and most medical treatments. I still haven't worked out what (if anything) was actually wrong with the Robin that required so much fussing and anxiety.
2. There is so much local colour - including quite a lot of sympathetic detail about the lives of the Tyrolean peasants and how much they suffered during hard winters. It feels like Brent-Dyer saw, or at least heard about, this first hand.
3. The girls and staff seem to spend vast amounts of time trekking up the mountain to the Sonnalpe or down to the railway station at Spartz - both steep walks of 2-3 hours. Alpine life was very inconvenient before widespread roads and car ownership!
4. I remembered how much I sympathised with Eustacia in her overwhelming desire to find somewhere quiet and private to read. I expect most boarding schools are terrible for introverts but surely the Chalet School is particularly so.
5. Exploits is an incredibly dull book with barely any plot apart from a bit about Thekla, and vast reams of theatricals and the like. However, Lintons and New House are much, much better. Gillian and Joyce are really convincing characters, as are Margot Venables and her abusive husband - it's clear that EBD had met weak, selfish men like this. I can't remember any depictions of unpleasant characters as good as this later in the series (which is a shame).
6. Joey is actually pretty fun and believable before her marriage - obviously charismatic but with various faults and weaknesses. I'd forgotten this as she is so ghastly for the rest of the series.
7. Even though I am now in my late 40s, I still had to repress tears when the Mensches' grandmother, aged 100, goes to join her beloved daughter who had died 70 years earlier, just as I did when first reading the scene aged 10.

Margot Venables and her abusive husband - it's clear that EBD had met weak, selfish men like this.

I think Stephen Venables must originally have been like Daisy - charming, vivacious, good looking - and that's why Margot fell for him. But he didn't have Daisy's brains or character - she must have got those from the Russell side. He was the sort who always have big plans but lack the capacity to see them through, and when things go wrong it's always someone else's fault. He might have been ok if he'd been content to be a bank clerk or a schoolmaster.

....when the Mensches' grandmother, aged 100, goes to join her beloved daughter who had died 70 years earlier,

If Die Grossmutter was 100, how old must Herr Mensch have been? He can't ever have known little Natalie - she must have died long before he was born. (Perhaps she should have been his grandmother, not his mother.)

Yes, I agree the Mensch dates don't quite work. I guess we have to assume that Herr Mensch is the youngest and had children later in life, in his early 40s.

When I was a young child I had an aunt who was "delicate", just 10 years older than me and I assumed that Robin was the same. My aunt died when I was 4 and I always thought that Robin had the same illness.

By the time she was reaching the end of the series what little grasp EBD had on continuity and timelines was well and truly gone.

Summer Term was beyond daft and things just got worse. Now however I am reading Prefects, the last book, and I almost don't want it to end! What on earth shall I read next? (other than the many, many books I have in my Kindle library!)

Wrt Jo I have wondered whether she would now be regarded as asthmatic. Possibly the same is true of Robin (and even Robin's mother). I don't know if that would have increased the danger of pulmonary TB for them.

The Robin’s ‘delicacy’ always reminds me of Mr Woodhouse in Jane Austen’s Emma, endless fuss over someone who appears in fact appears perfectly healthy! Or at least there never seems any concrete evidence to the contrary.

I get that her ‘delicacy’ is mostly for plot purposes (to give us an ongoing personal, tug-at-the-heartstrings connection between Joey and the San, and heighten the jeopardy of things like getting stuck out on the Stubai glacier overnight), but it cracks me up slightly that Jem ‘forbids’ Robin from doing settlement work after Oxford because it’s too taxing for a delicate girl, but immediately afterwards EBD sees no issue with her becoming a nun at a time when that would have required robust good health!

Canon law is very clear on postulants needing to be able to ‘bear the burdens of religious life’ (which would involve long periods of standing and kneeling in unheated spaces, fasting, limited rest and sleep, mandatory physical labour etc) and obviously no community living in close quarters wants to run the risk of a contagious disease like TB devastating an entire convent

Potential postulants would have been carefully screened and required a medical clearance before being admitted, and if a postulant couldn’t physically cope with the rigours of convent life, she’d have been sent back to the world before making her novice’s vows.

But Jem was also clear that Robin shouldn’t marry, so I suppose for EBD that left either becoming a nun or a CS mistress or some kind of mother’s help duties at Freudesheim!

Yes, I do feel like Jo is consistently susceptible to respiratory ailments and faints/collapses easily. Probably the poor air quality of English towns in the 1920s with everyone's house heated by coal would genuinely have been bad for someone like this.

Whereas Robin... there is nothing really THERE, as far as I can see.

It is remarkable that girls in the series (not just Robin) are dressed and undressed by others until the age of 10 or 11. I don't think children's clothing was so complicated as to require this, surely - they all just seem to wear liberty bodies and knickers as underwear.

I suppose "settlement work" in the 1940s, pre-vaccines, did involve frequent exposure to viruses, which Robin would be ill prepared for after a childhood spent mostly in isolation on a mountain. But yes life as a nun pre-Vatican II was also physically brutal.

This reminds me of something else - EBD's obsession with the importance of unquestioning obedience, and frequently expressed view that English and American children's upbringing was far too lax. I feel like, as a teacher/head, she would have been a regular on AIBU on this subject.

If Robin had stuck around just a while longer, I think she could very easily have ended up as a kind of second mother / maiden aunt to Jo’s growing brood. “Oh, Rob will do that….”

Not quite the same setting, but Back Home by Michelle Magorian is about a girl who was evacuated to America in early WW2, and struggles to fit in when she returns - she was seven when she left, and is twelve when she returns. Parts of it are from her mother’s point of view, so you get both perspectives.

Such a shame that she didn't stay around for longer. She was a lovely character from the point she reached Guernsey onwards and was allowed to go to the main school.

Then when she went from insufferable to very likeable she was very quickly written out!

Maybe EBD thought that too many likeable adult characters such as Robin and Madge would have taken away from how amazing adult Joey was! :)

Was that Rusty?

In Two Chalet School Girls In India by Priyadarshini Narendra, Robin gets rheumatic fever after being lost in freezing fog; and she herself says it "wouldn't be wise" for her to marry. Mollie agrees with her.

Yes, that’s the one. It’s an interesting book in lots of ways, but I always remember the section where she’s sent to boarding school and the other girls hate her because she’s too American/ too friendly/ didn’t experience the war the way they did. I’d read and loved Mallory Towers/ St Clare’s/ the Chalet School/ Trebizon, and this was the first book that I read that suggested that all the usual boarding school rules and standards were quite unfair.

Yes, I remember them sneering at her for wearing "traffic light colours" (red hair with a yellow top and green skirt) while they all sludged around in grey.