Onwards, upwards, marching in a prayer.Onwards, upwards, sometimes fun to share.Onwards, upwards, a joyful walk we bear.You'll get there, you'll get there, you'll get there.
Hello, and welcome to Top Hole, the podcast about Eleanor M. Brent Dyer, the Chalet School, and anything vaguely connected.I'm Deborah Lofus, and I'm a fan.The usual provisos apply.
With respect to pronunciation, spoilers, and bonkersness, please see episode zero. Well, the summer holidays are over and here we are at the start of the autumn term, the beginning of a new school year.
Even now, decades after my own school days, September provokes a ripple of excitement about this, the forthcoming change and the potential of the weeks and months ahead as we start the journey towards Christmas.
So today I'm considering the final time the Chalet School experiences the beginning of a new school year with a look at the 55th Chalet School book, Challenge for the Chalet School.
Challenge for the Chalet School was first published in 1966, with a Dorothy Brooke cover showing Mary Lou, Jocelyn and Bruno in the snowstorm.It looks very Swiss and the situation suitably challenging.
The hardback also had a frontispiece, a line drawing captioned, I've as much right as Moira to the book, page 76.
So presumably the three girls in the picture are Leslie, form prefect, who was just firmly adjudicated on the dispute, Moira with the book, and Evelyn protesting and about to set the whole of 5A against her.
Armada brought Challenge out in paperback in 1991, reprinting it in 1993, presumably having underestimated the number of fans desperate to complete their collection.
Gwyn Jones' cover shows two chalet girls with backpacks in the mountains, probably Leslie and Evelyn on their way to the auberge.Girls Gone By published Challenge in 2007 and again in 2023, so it's a title with reasonably good availability.
In 1966 EBD was over 70 and living with her friends the Matthewmans in Surrey in a flat above theirs.She had retired from teaching and her written output now limited to chalet school books was slowing down.
Up to now she had in retirement produced two chalet school books a year but Challenge was her only book published in 1966 and from this point until her death in September 1969 she produced just one book a year with none at all in 1968.
Challenge covers the first term of what is to be the Chalet School's final year.
EBD of course didn't know this at the time she was writing it, but she did know that it was to be the triplet's final year at the school, so there is an end of an era feel about these last few books, which I don't think is entirely coming from the perspective of the modern reader.
And EBD's choice of plot for Challenge is an interesting one.Well, I say plot.There are multiple plots going on in this book, and none of them is breaking new ground.
But EBD's skill here is in intersecting all the various plots, and she starts with a bombshell, by removing Miss Annersley for the term.
Although Miss Annesley's absence is at fairly short notice, she has been invited on a tour of educational establishments, it is not wholly unplanned.
So instead of having to bring in an emergency, unknown headmistress like Miss Bub, the chalet school is to be left in the relatively safe hands of Nancy Wilmot.
Nancy is, of course, an old girl of the school, even if she was only there for a term or so after St Scholastica's, her original school, merged with the Chalet School back in Tyrol days.
And by this point, Nancy has been teaching for eight years at the Chalet School in Switzerland, so she has a good experience of the school's approach to teaching and pastoral care.
But she's never been a head teacher before, so Miss Annecy's absence counts as the first of the school's challenges for this term.
And the absence of Miss Annersley makes an immediate difference, as is made clear in Miss Wilmot's beginning of term speech.
I can imagine Miss Annersley saying, if you hear nothing but French the whole of one day, you must have learnt a few words and phrases by the end of that day.
But I can't imagine for a microsecond Miss Annersley ending this sentence with, unless you're a complete moron, which is how Miss Wilmot rounds it off.
The word moron was coined in 1910 with a clinical meaning, referring to intellectual disability in an adult who functioned at around the level of a 7-12 year old child, one degree higher in classification than an imbecile and two degrees higher than an idiot.
Moron, imbecile and idiot have all been used interchangeably for many years as insults, referring to lack of thought rather than a cognitive disability.
Nobody, layperson or medic, would nowadays use any of these terms to describe someone with a cognitive disability, and they'd fallen out of favour with psychiatrists by the mid-20th century.
But perhaps E.B.D., and by extension Miss Wilmot, had not quite caught up.E.B.D.also has Len using the phrase ghastly square, as in the others would think you most ghastly square if you did talk like a 19th century novel.
But that's possibly her only concession to the 1960s in the entire book, and even square in its slang sense dates from before the 1950s. On the whole, Miss Wilmot does an excellent job, even if it's clear she doesn't much enjoy it.
Her enjoyment is likely to have been tempered by Miss Farrar's absence after an episode of appendicitis.Miss Wilmot and Miss Farrar are best friends.
EBD doesn't just tell us this, she has Miss Wilmot call her friend Kathy, darling, when Miss Farrar is taken ill.And quite apart from the worry of the emergency operation, Miss Wilmot is bound to miss her badly while she is away.
And of course, this means the staff room is now two mistresses short, adding to Miss Wilmot's workload. so it makes sense that Miss Wilmot doesn't much enjoy being headmistress.
I only hope it doesn't deter her from applying for the post when Miss Annersley finally retires.The school is pretty big by now, with 400 pupils and presumably the staff to match, even if not all the mistresses are named for the reader.
EBD does name 14 prefects or sub-prefects, and most of these were prefects the previous year.It seems there was not the usual clear-out of the six forms at the end of the summer term.
The school's size is a problem for one of its new girls this term, senior Evelyn Ross, who previously attended a small private school with expectations of being school captain in the coming term.
When her mother has to come to the SAN, Evelyn, who is 16 and has 1O level, expects to leave school altogether, but instead she finds herself in 5A at the chalet school.Not unnaturally, she finds it hard to settle down.
At one point the school had a policy of not accepting seniors for exactly this reason, but there are always exceptions, especially when there is a family link to the San.
Evelyn is not only uprooted from her friends and routines, and forced to go to a new school, she is also expected to work hard, talk in French and German, and play team games such as hockey, none of which she enjoys.
It's hardly surprising that she struggles. EBD acknowledges that Evelyn's background, which is not her fault, makes a contribution to her struggle.
But EBD also describes Evelyn as proud and apt to be lazy over physical exercise, with a side swipe at the fact that Evelyn prefers to stay in bed rather than get up early, something which, on behalf of all night owls, I strongly resent.
I'm not entirely clear whether Evelyn has overcome these apparent faults by the end of the story, but she does appear to have settled down, although it took a falling out with her entire form and a falling out with Margot Maynard to achieve it.
The falling out with the rest of 5A is the sort of thing we've seen before at the Chalet School.Lots of girls have, in the past, found themselves at odds with the rest of their form, and on the receiving end of chilling politeness as a result.
In this case, EBD is able to tie this plot in with her Nancy Bilmota's headmistress plot, because Nancy has to be told, by Matron, when to intervene.
Miss Annersley would have known without being told and would probably already have had Joey on the phone for advice, although one of the other plots in this book means that the option of consulting Joey is not really available to Nancy.
Anyway, Nancy pulls in the 5A form prefect, the eminently sensible Leslie Anderson, to find out exactly what's going on and encourage her to get it all sorted out.
I'm not sure we've previously met Leslie, who falls between two cohorts with the triplets above her and Jack Lambert and co below her, but she's a good form prefect with strong leadership qualities.
The falling out with Margot Maynard continues a theme of the previous 20 or so books, in which Margot Maynard is a problem.
Margot is still Margot, and has now reached the rank of Games Prefect, her attempted murder of Betty Landon two years previously apparently not preventing her from assuming this responsibility.But Margot is not a very good Games Prefect.
She doesn't organise her time effectively to balance her Prefect duties with her academic work, and she is, as ever, inclined to be short-tempered, particularly on the hockey field.
She consistently winds Evelyn up, lacking the ability to alter her approach to suit the individual she's dealing with, eventually treating an accidental scooping of the hockey ball as an intentional foul, which I misread for 30 years as international foul, making the entire incident even more dramatic in my mind.
Evelyn, in response, hits the ball as hard as she can and it injures form prefect Leslie, who has become Evelyn's closest friend.Fortunately, everybody blames Margot for the injury rather than Evelyn.
Margot is, of course, full of remorse, my filthy temper again, and Miss Burnett encourages her to keep on trying to keep her temper.
Those who have the hardest work with their own characters usually turn out the finest men and women if they keep on trying.
This is one of EBD's consistent themes, but Margot really is running out of time now if she is going to become a fine woman before she leaves school.Usually by the time a character has reached the sixth form, this sort of thing is all sorted out.
Of course there are things going on at Freudersheim which may well be affecting Margot's ability to concentrate at school.
Little Phil, the youngest Maynard, had mastoid trouble the previous year and has more recently caught polio, for which she is now being treated at the San.
This is a huge worry for Joey and also for the triplets, who were all concerned about their youngest sister's apparent lack of recovery. Joey's focus in this book is on Phil at the SAN rather than what's going on at the school.
That's quite a switch, and one which leaves Miss Wilmot even more on her owner's head.Joey is normally butting in or being called in fairly regularly when Miss Annersley is at the helm.
But two characters maintain the connection with Froydersheim during this story.Firstly Dr Stacey Benson, currently residing in the flat at Froydersheim and roped in as a part-time teacher to cover for the absent Cathy Farrars.
and secondly Mary Lou Trelawney, recovering from a chest cold, who stays for a couple of weeks after half term.
Mary Lou appears on the scene to comfort the distraught Evelyn when news comes of her mother's relapse, a task Joey would normally have taken on, and is also the person who goes out in the snow to rescue the errant junior, Jocelyn Marvel.
Mary Lou brings with her news not only of the convalescent Miss Faraz but also of other old girls.
Vi Lucy is doing a course in design, Hilary Bennett is at Bedford presumably studying PT as that's usually what studying at Bedford means in the shallow verse.Clem is off to Corsica, activity not specified but probably painting.
Clem's brother, not obviously an old girl but known to loyal readers, is at Oxford University and Verity is expecting a baby or going all out for a big adventure as Mary Lou puts it.
These snippets about old girls are so valuable in the later books as they help to create that chalet school world we all love.
Jocelyn Marvel is the other problem new girl alongside Evelyn, but Jocelyn is much lower down the school in lower four and a problem for a different reason.
Her parents are abroad, so Jocelyn has been living with an aunt and making her life unbearable with pranks and disobedience.
Jocelyn recognises that she will not have nearly as much freedom at school as she has with her aunt, but her repentance comes too late and she's packed off to the chalet school, having made up her mind to be even more unbearable there than she was at home.
Her parents are unsympathetic, so EBD has a degree of sympathy for Jocelyn.EBD generally lays responsibility for bad behaviour by a child at the door of the parents, and Jocelyn has, after all, effectively been abandoned by hers.
And Jocelyn does always own up after playing her tricks.But Jocelyn is relentless, and eventually drags her playmates into trouble too.
Their first group escapade is to start abstracting the belongings of Upper 4A from their lockers and redistributing the stolen items to other people's lockers.
They are eventually caught and find themselves in such monumental trouble that they come within a whisker of missing out on the half-term fun.
After half-term, Jocelyn has the idea of using cobbler's wax to glue a desk drawer shut so Dr Benson is unable to open it.
This backfires, because Dr Benson can't access the mark book, so they forfeit all their marks, and also because the class then has to explain to the mistress at the start of each class that the desk drawer is glued shut, giving each mistress the opportunity to tell them off.
It's a brilliant episode for the reader, if not for the members of Lower 4, which is rounded off by Dr Benson telling the girls that she's not going to take any further action because it was such a babyish trick to play, a statement which offends Lower 4's dignity.
Jocelyn then proceeds to attempt to work her way around the common room without touching the floor.That old dodge groans Miss Wilmot and bangs her head, but even this doesn't knock some sense into her.
At a nativity play rehearsal, she behaves badly, is accused, wrongly but understandably, of deliberately removing a chair when another girl was in the act of sitting down on it, and then storms off.
After sulking for the rest of the day, she decides to run away.She has several chalet school predecessors in taking this action.
Griselle runs away in the first book, Stacey herself a few books later, Gay Lambert during Miss Bub's eventful term, but where each of them had an objective, Jocelyn, being considerably younger, has none, only to give the authorities a nice time looking for her.
In the event, the authorities resolves itself into Mary Lou, who is on her trail, assisted by Bruno, by mid-morning. By the time Mary Lou catches up with Jocelyn, it's snowing, so it's a pretty dangerous situation.
Mary Lou of course deals with this with superb common sense, but she does lose her temper at one point, something I don't think we've seen her do since she threw herself upon Phil Craven during the game of impertinent questions, and certainly we don't see her do it again.
Stop that whining and come along at once, she snaps, in most uncharacteristic fashion.
Mary Lou is not one of my favourite characters, but this little interaction makes her less perfect and more human, and in my mind at least, goes a long way towards offsetting her normal, somewhat irritating Mary Lunas.
Having rescued Jocelyn, Mary Lou exits Stage Left and returns to Oxford University.
Ted Grantley, now second prefect, agrees to apologise to Jocelyn for wrongly accusing her of deliberately unseating Leolene, and matters with Jocelyn are all resolved.
Miss Annersley then returns, so now that the challenges have all been successfully dealt with, the school turns its attention to the end of term nativity play. I do not enjoy the Chalice School's nativity plays, and this one is no exception.
It involves a man, woman and child travelling through various scenes in history before all the characters end up worshipping the newborn Jesus in the stable.This particular nativity includes the full text of two specially written carols.
I tried really hard to read them properly in preparing this episode, but as usual my eyes just slid over them towards the ending of the book, which consists of both Elin and Jocelyn
But not, I notice, Margot Maynard reflecting on the importance of the nativity and what it means in their own lives.Margot seriously needs to pull herself together.
She's 17 and into her final year at school, but she lacks self-organisation and self-discipline, both of which she will need while at university training to be a doctor.
She's improved in the sense that she didn't actually try to kill anybody in this book, but it's not good enough. Of course, her parents do keep adding to the family.
Adrienne, Erica and Marie-Claire have all joined the Maynard household since the beginning of this calendar year, although Joey does at least appear to have stopped threatening to give birth to quads.
I think Margot is affected by this disruption within Freudersheim, which also means her parents have even less time and attention to give her.
Margot is unquestionably the most difficult of all the Maynard children, and when there is a difficult child, EBD is usually quick to pin the behaviour on poor parenting, but not apparently in the case of Margot.
There's reference to some spoiling when she was little, although this is retrospective, there's little evidence of it in the few books covering this period, but no commentary on their poor parenting of Margot as a teenager.
If Evelyn and Jocelyn behave the way they do because of faults by their parents, then surely this applies to Margot too. I actually quite like Evelyn, because I suspect she embodies how I would have felt if I had attended the chalet school.
All that getting up early, playing team games, speaking foreign languages, having zero control over what to wear or what to do or when to do things, it's not for me.
And the prospect of living with over 400 other people, I feel faint at the very thought.We don't hear about Evelyn again after Challenge, so we have to assume she's settled down and made the best of things.
Jocelyn I am not so keen on, as she appears to be a right pain in the neck, and the sooner she is trained in civilised behaviour the better.It's immensely satisfying when Mary Lou snaps at her.
But we've not seen the last of Jocelyn, as readers who have read to the end of the series will know, she will pop up again, among other things, proposing motorboat races in the regatta in the final book of the series.
There is a general understanding among fans that the Swiss books are not as good as the earlier books.But that's not a universal rule, and even a poor Chalet school book is miles more fun to read than a lot of other books.
And this is not a poor Chalet school book.Of course, EBD was by this point frequently recycling plots you'd used before, and that's certainly true here, because none of the various plots in Challenge is new. But I think that's OK.
EBD hasn't previously combined these plots in this way.And to be writing new Chalet School books at all over 40 years after the first one was published is pretty impressive.
And although Miss Annersley and Joey Maynard are both off stage for much of the book, EBD brings in old friends like Mary Lou Trelawney and Stacey Benson.
This means longtime readers don't get too bogged down in the relatively large number of previously unmentioned characters we encounter through Evelyn and Jocelyn. There are a few loose ends.
The situation between Evelyn and Jane Carew simply fizzles out and doesn't develop in the way EBD hints at early on in the story.Marie Claire, adopted by Jack and Joey Maynard in the previous book, has disappeared from the Freudersheim nursery.
There is reference to three babies, but these are Cecily and the second twins. And EBD doesn't make a great deal out of Miss Annesley's absence.
It's presented as a challenge, but by and large, everything just ticks along nicely under Miss Wilmot's stewardship.I mean, yes, things happen, but they would have happened anyway.
Nothing goes disastrously wrong simply because Miss Annesley isn't there to oversee things.
There's no fretting in the staff room, even though Miss Wilmot's promotion meant the school was already a teaching mistress short before Miss Faraz went on the sick list, a situation which must have increased the workload of other mistresses.
Or did Nancy continue with her full timetable?Was anyone else qualified to teach maths to examination standard?If Nancy had to combine headship with a full teaching timetable, no wonder she didn't enjoy the experience.
But whether or not Nancy enjoyed it is not really the point.The point is that EBD was reminding her leaders that even in the absence of key characters, the Chalet School carries on.
EBD was aging, she was slowing down, and maybe she could foresee a day when she would have to stop writing Chalet School books.
Well, the Chalet School had survived the retirement of its first headmistress, several relocations, the temporary removal of key characters to Canada, and now a term without Miss Annersley.Maybe it could also survive the loss of its creator,
And of course, as things turned out, EBD's readers have, over the years, risen to this challenge even more magnificently than the school rose to the challenge of a term without Miss Annersley.
You have been listening to Top Hole, written and presented by Deborah Lofus, music and production by Kit Lofus.We'll be back in a couple of weeks, but in the meantime, you can find Top Hole on Facebook or email us at topholepodcast at gmail.com.
Top Hole is a Lofus Towers production.
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