The Chalet School

[ShellacB]

There seem to be plenty of old Chalet School Threads, but I can't find a current one.

In the middle of a re read. I have just finished the Tyrolean and Herefordshire ones. I loved them!

I do remember the Swiss books not being quite of the same quality, so not sure whether to read them all.

Could anyone recommend the best Swiss books if I was to skim through?

Well, leaving children in the UK for years at a time wasn’t unusual, it wasn’t usual to leave them as babies or toddlers, and it certainly wasn’t usual to go ‘home’ on holiday for a couple of months, fully intending to take your offspring back to India with you for another couple of years, only to be persuaded into leaving them behind. I don’t think EBD understood parenting, even by the standards of her day. Mollie is heartbroken at leaving her very young children at the Sonnalpe, but cheers up totally when she gives Joey a present of a typewriter. She genuinely thinks you can ‘train’ a child out of homesickness or ‘fretting’ and she appears to think that it doesn’t much matter to children where they are.

I remember as a child laughing at Mollie being cheered up after leaving her babies because she was able to gift Jo a typewriter!

Agree with the poster above about Jo to the Rescue. I am glad I didn't read it until I was an adult as it is definitely a story for adults rather than children. It is different in style etc from the other Chalet School books. In reality it is more of a spin off novel.

I love it! It is a great summer read.

It is a great summer read

Yes the Yorkshire in summer descriptions are very good, you can feel the heat when they're all sitting out in the garden. It's nice to see Simone, Frieda and Marie, especially Marie as we hadn't seen so much of her in the war years.

The part where Bob Maynard is killed is a bit odd, though. No-one says they're sorry to hear it, or asks Jo to pass on condolences to Jack. And there's no sense that Jack is grieving, just talk of practicalities and how much they dislike Lydia.

I think it was because of her ‘mercurial Irish temperament’. 🙄 I mean, EBD must have known actual Irish people living on Tyneside, but she never gets them right — the first two Irish characters in the Tyrol books are Anglo-Irish horsey types from Cork, one of whom is going to be presented at Court once she finishes school, and would have sounded 98% English. And Deira certainly wouldn’t have used the expression ‘The curse of Cromwell’, because her ancestors probably got their lands because of fighting under Cromwell! Also, the chances are that both Deira and Maureen’s families would have been burnt out during the war of independence.

And Molly, if she’s Dick Bethany’s boss’s daughter in Raj India, will also be Anglo-Irish and speak RP, not things like ‘Och!’ and ‘sure’ and ‘mavourneen’.

It also really grates on me when Biddy's Irish accent is described as slang which they need to correct her on.

I know it is a century ago, but it is still offensive.

At least she does include a good number of Scottish, Irish, Welsh and Cornish as well as English girls and girls from the US and Commonwealth countries.

Oh yes she certainly does and in many ways she was way ahead of her time in her attitude to different nationalities etc.

I knew a woman who had been sent 'home' to England from India when she was very young, and when I said it must have been hard for her mother was told, no, it was lovely for the mother who swanned around the raj going to parties, but horrid for the child. Still resented, 70 years after.

But if the children stayed in India, they were at risk of infectious diseases for which there were then no vaccinations or treatments. Cholera being the most serious, of course.

And depending on where in India they were, and what their father did, they would probably have to leave home at some point to go to school.

I don't think anyone's suggesting that sending your children 'home' wasn't the norm for the Raj Brits, only that it wasn't usual for babies or toddlers to be left in Europe after a furlough, as Dick and Mollie do, apparently on Jem's infallible advice. Six or so, school age, was more the norm.

Children did die in India, of course, but one can't help laughing at Mollie and Dick agreeing to leave their baby and toddlers at the Sonnalpe because of the health dangers of India, when before they've even left to head back to India, all of their children have gone down with measles and are quite seriously ill, and then get whooping cough.

Also, the Die Rosen nursery sounds like one of those 18thc baby farms foundlings got kept in -- am I right in thinking that in Jo Returns, it's got David and Sybil, Peggy and Rix, Bride and Jackie, Primula, Daisy and the Robin, with Mollie and Dick already expecting another baby (which turns out to be another set of twins)?

Agreed. Though EBD gets herself terribly mixed up there anyway -- Biddy leaves Ireland permanently at the age of six, never lives there again, spending her time between continental Europe, England and a trip to Australia, and there's no indication she's ever had any contact with family in Ireland. There's no way she would retain the slightest Irish accent or idiom after years in a school where she was continually corrected for it.

I'm always sorry she didn't do a book from Biddy's POV, after she'd stopped being treated like the school's peasant pet, 'adopted' by the Guide company, sent to the Tiernsee village school despite being actually an inhabitant of a school, with the idea that she'll be trained as a servant later on. Then, after she turns out to be clever, someone (who?) thinks she's too bright to be a servant and lets her actually attend the CS where she grows up to go to Oxford, be a CS mistress and (ultimate accolade) marry a San doctor.

I mean, you'd get whiplash with the sudden change at being included as a classmate and equal with the people you'd expected all along to grow up to be the people you cleaned up after.

I actually think Biddy was an example of a fairly egalitarian way of thinking. Many authors at that time had some poor girl enter a school on a scholarship or similar - only to be discovered to be Lord Somebodyoranother’s long lost grand-daughter. Biddy, in contrast, remains the daughter of an Irish NCO and maid - a fact which doesn’t prevent her from being as bright and deserving as any other CS girl.

Am I right in thinking that EBD got Biddy's name mixed up in one of the wartime books and called her a different name for a whole book before reverting to her original name again in the next book?

Yes, possibly O'Hara? Or am I getting confused with Juliet? Or did EBD get confused with Juliet?

Is it firmly established that Biddy spent even her first six years in Ireland rather than in India or some other imperial outpost with her father?