The CBB :: View topic - Would the boys be jealous?

Sybil thought. “In a way, I suppose it has,” she admitted. “But boys are different, Auntie Jo. And then David’s been away from home whole terms for years now. He’s in the Rugger team, and the debating society, and he’s working jolly hard this year—he told me so. He wants to be a doctor like Dad, you see.”

The poor Maynard boys are shipped off as weekly boarders with the Emburys from an early age. I think Mike is only 5 or 6 when he goes. Then they’re off to prep school at 8 where it would be difficult for Joey and Jack to visit them or see them at half term.

I have to confess to having always been a bit shocked by EBD's depiction of Joey sending Mike, aged 5, down to Montreux to share the Embury boys' tutor as a kind of weekly 'boarder' (ie he only comes back to the Platz on weekends), and saying offhandedly that he'll stay down there for the weekends too when the winter weather comes.

I think there was just a limit to how much could be fitted in, especially stuff that didn't directly relate to the school. I would love to've heard more about what happened to certain favourite Old Girls in later life, and to've learned more about the backgrounds of some of the staff, and I would definitely like to've seen more of the Russell and Bettany boys, but there was only so much "room", for lack of a better way of putting it.

It does bring up the issue of how boys must break those psychological boundaries with mother as they develop whereas girls continue to have [often lifelong] boundary fuzziness; what I call smothering, EBD might be likely to call closeness.

Oh, absolutely. But given the 'room' constraints -- and that the focus, given the genre, needed to remain chiefly on the exploits of current CS girls -- isn't it interesting that EBD did, for instance, give Joey so many male children? Or just so many children and wards, when she must have known she couldn't give all, or even most of them, anything beyond the most cursory narrative attention? ... EBD needn't have given Joey a family that was too baggy to deal with...?

Certainly a five year old would want his mother, at least occasionally.

A son is a son until he takes a wife,
But a daughter's a daughter the rest of her life."

Pado wrote:

Certainly a five year old would want his mother, at least occasionally.

Too true. I have six grandsons aged 12 down to nearly 2 (cousins, not a Joey family!) and they all need their mums. The 12 year old is gradually weaning himself away and will continue to do so till it's time to go to university, but the idea of sending a 5 year old away is horrible.

Oh, they're all very fit. Joey got rid of the boys last Thursday and Mike was going down to Montreux yesterday. Oh, didn't you know?" as both Miss Burnett and Miss Andrews exclaimed. "Winnie Embury has found a tutor for Robin and Paul and she suggested that Mike should go to them during the week to share him. Joey won't send him with Steve and Charles until he's seven and the twins are too young for companions for him and he's never out of mischief as a result. Joey simply leapt at the idea. I think," she added pensively as she swerved to avoid a man and a mule that were occupying the crown of the road, "that she has a new book simmering. Anyhow, Mike will go down from Mondays to Fridays and spend the week ends at home. And, of course, he's fairly handy if Joey wants to see him apart from the week ends, so it's a good arrangement all round."
"What will happen when the snow comes?" Miss Andrews asked.
"I wouldn't be knowing. Winnie may keep him at Montreux for the rest of the term. At any rate he's settled till that happens, which is something.

Of course, what EBD should have done was marry one of the Old Girls to a wealthy chap who would set up a school for boys on the next mountain! Then the whole shebang of boys could board there.

(Worked for EJO in her Swiss books).

There were plenty of pupils who were at the school in either Tyrol or Switzerland because their parents, guardians or siblings were being treated at the San and wanted them nearby. What happened to their brothers :shock:

What I always forget about is that, at times, the CS kindergarten when it exists, includes little boys, doesn't it?

Doesn't Madge proclaim a few weeks after Kevin and Kester are born that one will be going into the Army and the other one into the Navy? .

It's interesting that unlike David and Rix, none of the older Maynard boys want to be doctors :wink:

Doesn't Madge proclaim a few weeks after Kevin and Kester are born that one will be going into the Army and the other one into the Navy? I don't imagine for a minute that she and Jem would've forced them into doing so had they said they didn't want to, but on the other hand
I'm not entirely convinced that it's just meant to be a joke :roll:

It would probably have been horrendously boring for Mike at the Platz - Felicity has friends there, but there's no suggestion that Mike does, or that Felix does for that matter - and as Joey and Jack would have looked down their noses at the village school then sharing the Emburys' tutor would have been a convenient way of starting off Mike's education, but it does all sound rather uncaring

I'm sure that's exactly why Mike is shipped off to the Emburys. Doesn't it mention in quite a few books that he's very bored on the Platz but that Joey won't send him away to school till he's older?

“You’s always going’ fwom me, Mamma,” Cecil mourned.
“Only in holiday time, pet. You and the babies have me all to yourselves in termtime,” Joey said, kissing the small face. “Presently, all these big people will be at school again and then I’ll be with you always. They must have their share of me, you know. Be a good girl till Mamma comes back and help Anna and Rösli to look after Phil and Geoff and Bruno, will you?”
Cecil nodded vigorously, “I’ll help. Come back soon.”
Joey gave her another kiss and then fled, for Jack was calling imperatively. “Come on, Jo! We shan’t be off by midday if you dither like this!”
She scrambled in and sat down beside Roger. “Cecil feels neglected, I’m afraid. However, as I’ve just told her, once all you folk go back to school, she can have all of me she wants.”
“Poor little Cecil!” said tender-hearted Len.

ETA And it seems to have been quite common for small boys, at least, to have been pushed into the Navy pretty young. For example Peter Marlow is at Dartmouth and his older brother Giles is in the Navy and they're a Navy family. If Peter hadn't wanted to go to Dartmouth, would he have been given a choice? Is this ever discussed in the Marlow books?

But most five year olds would be at school and have people to play with there.

I don't know that Joey and Jack would have looked down on the village school for a small boy. Don't Steve and Charles, or maybe just Steve, end up going to one in Island or therabouts? Would there have been a village school on the Platz that was close to Freudesheim?

Her own triplet daughters, now eight years old, were members of the Kindergarten, and looked for ward to entering the Junior School next September, when her eldest son Stephen, a sturdy young man of five, would go to the Kindergarten.

Why isn’t Auntie Jo teaching all the senior history?” Peggy asked.
“Because she couldn’t possibly spare the time,” Miss Wilson said promptly. “Stephen only goes to morning school, and then there are Charles and Michael.”
“Will Steve come here, then, with Len and Con?” Peggy asked thoughtfully.
“No; there’s a nice little kindergarten school in the same road as the new house, just five minutes’ walk away, and he’ll go there.”

[From Island Jo and Jack are conversing, Jo speaks first:

"... it's going to mean that the children have to be boarders. We can't take the girls away, but I'm not being deprived of all my crew yet. Stephen won't go in September as we'd planned - or not unless the school is back at Plas Howell by then."
"Not a hope, my dear! ... All right, Stephen can stay and either go to the village school for a year or two, which won't hurt him, or else I'll see if Fairfields can take him. Only that means weekly boarding, remember."
"He's too little for that. Let him go to the village school. Mrs Lott has the babies, and she's a nice creature, and they're happy with her. We'll think of Fairfields in two or three years' time. He's not much more than a baby now."
"Okay" Have it your own way. But I warn you he may pick up all sorts of language."
"I can deal with that! But with Margot in Canada, and the other girls at school on this island, I simply must keep my boys or go crackers!"
"It'll come to that in six or seven years' time, though, Jo."
"I'll have got more used to it by that time," Jo retorted

I ended up quoting more of the above than I initially planned as I thought it made an interesting comparison in the context of the discussion about Mike. Stephen at this time is five but is considered too young to weekly board at Fairfields. Mike at the same age is ok to board with the Emburys for what effectively appears to be the whole term!

I do have another theory: the majority of families within the English community on the Platz are just starting up, IIRC Jo is the only one with an established family, so there are no suitable 'English' playmates for Mike. However if Jo had sent Mike to the village school, unlike in the Tirol or even in England, her world building in Switzerland hadn't really given us the friendly sense of community with the lower classes that was so evident in the earlier books (first with Herr Braun and the Pfeiffens and later with Grandma and Father etc.), so there were no working class urchins for him to befriend either! Therefore in order to give Mike friends and schooling (and get him out of Joey's way) it was easier from a literary point of view to send Mike to stay with someone who was already built into the story, rather than having to waste time and words on making developments just for Mike.

The company of the Embury boys really is the only reason given for his going, as well - we're told Winnie has a tutor, sure, but Joey at this point had only just taken on Maria Marani to replace Beth Chester, who had been specifically hired as governess for the older children before they were old enough for prep school. So sending Mike to the Embury's to share their tutor rendered Maria redundant (and her post at the Maynards isn't mentioned again, is it? So must have been very temporary).

We don't see Maria again but she stays at the Maynards for some time. She stays until she marries Walter McLaren, the tutor to the Embury boys, whom she met when collecting and delivering Mike. I think this may not be in the paperbacks. If it's there, it's certainly in less detail.

Loryat wrote:

But most five year olds would be at school and have people to play with there.

But doesn't most schooling start at the age of 7 in Europe? And if they were going off to Prep, that starts at 7. Pre-Prep starts before then (equating to R andYears 1 and 2 now), but I don't know if they would have sent off a child that young, especially if it meant sending Mike off to the UK so young.
So if Mike wasn't going to start at Prep school until 7 he could still possibly have the problem of being bored ...

Generally when a child was about seven the parents had to decide how the family was to be split. There were two main choices: send the child 'home' to boarding school in Britain: send mother and child 'home' and maintain a long-term home there. There was no air travel. Sea voyages were long, expensive additions to the boarding school fees, and were seldom subsidised by the father's employer. ...Either way children and at least one parent became strangers and the younger the child at the split, the wider the subsequent gap...Parents and children who habitually, or only in the school holidays, share the same roof, do recognise one another across the street. When parents and growing children are reunited after an interval of years, they can find each other physically unrecognisable'.

I'm just reading No Time for Romance (Lucilla Andrews) and found this:

Quote:

"I'm glad the babies didn't get it," Barbara said, revert¬ing to the German measles at Freudesheim. "And Beth says Stephen didn't either, though he's had to be in quaran¬tine for the full time. Wouldn't it have been ghastly if he'd given it all round in a quite new school?"

But isn't the issue with India that the climate was generally held to be so unhealthy for British children that they had to be sent 'home'?

whereas Stephen and Charles would have gone for 2 or 3 months at a time without seeing their little brothers and sisters.

I just wanted to go completely OT to say that the Old Boy's Network still exists! :

How often didthe boys come home? For summer, but did they come home for Christmas and Easter as well? A lot is made of the Christmas plays, but I don't ever recall Joey saying something like 'the boys will be home, too'. You would have thought that as she is so family-orientated she might/would be excited by their return to the fold, especially at Christmas, and would comment on it .

I don't know that EBD thought about it consciously, but it may have been so engrained culturally that having her characters send boys to boarding school would be automatic.

Jem certainly always seems to "know a man" somewhere - evn to the extent of being informed that Nazi Germany was about to invade Austria before it happened, by someone "in the know" who was working in Germany :roll:

- and I've always assumed that that was due to an old school tie type of thing. I've also always assumed that Jem went to Winchester, just because we're told that that's where David goes and I would think Jem would want his sons to go to his own former school.

Mind you, if anywhere has an "old school tie" thing it's the CS! How many Old Girls get jobs there, or get jobs through connections with people they knew from there :wink:

I do also find myself wondering whether the whole Mike being sent to the Emburys thing would have been approached rather differently, if Mike had been a five year old girl. Would EBD have been more likely to invent some local playmates to keep little Michaela from being lonely, rather than show Joey sending a girl of that age away from home voluntarily?

. EBD even shows potentates from Europe attending English public schools! (Though am I right in thinking that this did sometimes happen in real life?)

Author:	julieanne1811 [ Sun Feb 21, 2010 11:54 am ]
Post subject:	Would the boys be jealous?
This is just a tiny thought brought into being from reading the last post on 'Beginning of Madge's ...' Anyway, it has occured to me (and it's probably occured to you years ago ...) that the MBR boys are sent away to school and get none of the attention that the girls get. Now, there is a good literary reason for this - the CS a girls' school so we can easily follow the girls lives, of course. But JB quoted this from Peggy (I think): Quote: Sybil thought. “In a way, I suppose it has,” she admitted. “But boys are different, Auntie Jo. And then David’s been away from home whole terms for years now. He’s in the Rugger team, and the debating society, and he’s working jolly hard this year—he told me so. He wants to be a doctor like Dad, you see.” But aren't the lives of the CS girls equally filled at school? And they often have equivalent ambitions for future years. In the real world, imagine having two children - a boy and a girl. You send the boy to school far far away, and rarely see him. The girl goes to school locally and you see her often. The boy is, in effect, invisible. Of course, to have any kind of reality would have made the CS books unwieldly and blurred, so I'm probably trying to inflict on them too much reality. But it does seem to me that the (almost) total absence of the boys would cause huge problems for them in the real world. Not all the boys have the traditional PS character - we know that Charles is rather a sensitive soul. I wonder how he coped? Boys can get very homesick, too, although their homesickness is probably resonded to differently than that of girls' (although given Elinor's robust treatment of homesickness in the books, that might not always be the case!). Were boys more robust (or better able to keep a stiff upper lip and hide their unhappiness) in the past? Actually, thinking about that, they probably were. Society now favours a 'feminine' model, encouraging the sharing of feelings which were once expressed at your own peril. Even given that, I wonder what the boys thought? Were they jealous of the family contact their sisters had? What did they think about their sisters having almost instant contact with help from family members, where they would have to try and work things out alone, far from family influence? That makes me think of something else too - Elinor says (somewhere) that it's important that a girl (can't remember who) has conatct with her family, in order for family influence to remain (my words). Did she think either that this wasn't as important for girls, or perhaps she thought that boys imbibed family thinking more securely and quickly than girls? We see no (and I'm still collecting the HBs, and am having to rely on the PBs in the meantime, so I don't necessarily have the full picture), expression of jealousy towards the girls when they do all meet up - as in Peggy. In the real world, would there might not have been some comments made? This could have been done, to give the falvour of the problem, even if it wasn't followed up. Apart from the literary consideration which gives the reason why the boys are invisible, would this have worked at any level in real life? And if it was the case, what would the boys have thought about it?

Author:	Sunglass [ Sun Feb 21, 2010 1:19 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
Here you come up against the problem of the Founding Families being Perfect, so EBD didn't feel able to explore these kinds of issues - sibling jealousy, friction etc - the way she does in 'problem' families, like, say Jessica's Wayne's. It's compounded, I think, by the fact that EBD just wasn't interested in writing boys, and didn't in any case feel the need to in a girls' school series, and even if she does give central characters lots of male children/brothers, she largely ignores them. We see more of the male Richardsons in Joey and Co in Tyrol than we ever do of any of the Maynard boys, and in A Future, EBD keeps telling us 'the boys went off about their own business', so she can concentrate on the girls. I always think that by the later Swiss books that there must have been a big cultural divide between the triplets and their brothers who were being educated in the UK, and who were relatively seldom at home - Freudesheim must have been much less their 'home' than the girls' and the younger Maynards. You get little hints of things, like Joey regretting the boys don't speak German well, and the boys leading the singing in the minivan with the latest (presumably UK) pop songs, but she doesn't really explore it. I do think she thinks that home and family are less important for boys. She seems to think it's acceptable that they are much more involved with their peer group than their families - like what sounds like David's primary emotional involvement being with his school and his school activities, or like the way Joey tacitly lets her boys call her 'Mum', which we're told they've learned at school, while she's always been adamanant that the triplets never call her that. EBD's girls are expected to toe the family line/be emotionally invested in the family in a way that boys aren't, I think.

Author:	Alison H [ Sun Feb 21, 2010 1:38 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
I think it would have been very hard for the Maynard boys in particular. It's mentioned somewhere that their German isn't very good, which is understandable as they were away in England for much of the time, so they must have felt quite lost in the Oberland, and because of the travelling it would have been virtually impossible for them to see their schoolfriends during the holidays. & Joey was so involved with the school and all the people there that they must have felt very left out. It must have been hard for the boys generally. Sybil's comments about it being OK for David are typical of the attitude that boys are tough and don't get upset about things: even if David had been very upset about his parents' absence, he would probably have felt unable to show it for fear of being thought a wimp, whereas it was OK for Sybil to show that she was upset. Boys of that time and social class would have been sent away to school, so I'm not sure how that could have worked differently: the difference is that their sisters would normally also have gone to a school with which the family had no more involvement than they did with the boys' school, if that makes sense.

Author:	JB [ Sun Feb 21, 2010 2:00 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
That does make sense, Alison. It’s one thing to send all your children to boarding school which you visit for speech day, etc, and from which they come home for half term and holidays. It’s another to send your sons to school in a different country while your daughters go to school over the garden hedge and see their parents regularly during term time. The poor Maynard boys are shipped off as weekly boarders with the Emburys from an early age. I think Mike is only 5 or 6 when he goes. Then they’re off to prep school at 8 where it would be difficult for Joey and Jack to visit them or see them at half term. I think that EBD did believe that home influence was much more important for girls and that she never quite reconciled this with the idea of girls and careers. There’s no suggestion that David joins the Russells in Canada or that he goes to Australia as company for his mother. Even later in the series, marriage is seen as the ultimate goal for women, even if they have careers beforehand, whereas boys are expected to be independent and make their own way in the world.

Author:	ChubbyMonkey [ Sun Feb 21, 2010 2:55 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
I always found it very realistic of its time - and if we take comments on here as suggestive of people's views of Joey's mothering, I'm surprised nobody has yet said that the boys were lucky to be away from Freudesheim! I do think that it must have been equally hard for the girls to have their parents there all the time and to never be allowed any independence. But recently I met someone who was at boarding school (I've been pumping her regularly for information ever since, and she must be sick of me by now!) and it's never seemed to bother her that she barely saw her father because she was always away from home during term time. She speaks very much as if it was a good thing that she had to learn independance from an early age, instead of being allowed to stay at home, and I can imagine boys of the time feeling the same. (And girls, of course!)

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Would the boys be jealous? http://www.the-cbb.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=7369

Author:	Sunglass [ Sun Feb 21, 2010 3:41 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
JB wrote: The poor Maynard boys are shipped off as weekly boarders with the Emburys from an early age. I think Mike is only 5 or 6 when he goes. Then they’re off to prep school at 8 where it would be difficult for Joey and Jack to visit them or see them at half term. I have to confess to having always been a bit shocked by EBD's depiction of Joey sending Mike, aged 5, down to Montreux to share the Embury boys' tutor as a kind of weekly 'boarder' (ie he only comes back to the Platz on weekends), and saying offhandedly that he'll stay down there for the weekends too when the winter weather comes. I know there was a contemporary culture of sending your boys away to school at an early age, and the reasons given are perfectly rational in one way - Mike is bored and lonely in the Freudesheim nursery, where he is the eldest, when Charles and Stephen are at school. But, given that it's assumed that he'll follow his brothers to school in England when he's eight or so at the most, it shocks me a bit that a child of five has already more or less 'left home', only to return for holidays. And without the compelling health reasons that 'explained' why European children like the Bettanys were sent home from India. Joey was much more reluctant when it came to sending Stephen away when the Maynards were living in Carnbach, but there's no hesitation with Mike, apparently. In some ways it does feel as though the Maynard boys get a raw deal. I mean, the claustrophobia of Freudesheim's proximity to the CS must have been awful too, but surely there's a happy medium between practically living in your female children's school and on the other hand sending your male children abroad, as if there were absolutely no Swiss schools or international schools in Switzerland which would have been suitable...? I can imagine a situation where the triplets - or Margot, at any rate, secretly envied the boys, and maybe sensitive Charles secretly at times wished he could come home slightly more often...

Author:	Nightwing [ Tue Feb 23, 2010 11:09 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
Sunglass wrote: I have to confess to having always been a bit shocked by EBD's depiction of Joey sending Mike, aged 5, down to Montreux to share the Embury boys' tutor as a kind of weekly 'boarder' (ie he only comes back to the Platz on weekends), and saying offhandedly that he'll stay down there for the weekends too when the winter weather comes. To be fair to Jo, EBD seems to have next to no idea about children aged from toddlers to 11 - once they're no longer 'babies', but before they're old enough to be Juniors. She sometimes depicts 4 or 5 year olds as very mature, and sometimes has 9 or 10 year olds acting like babies! And then, sometimes she actually manages to get it right - Rix in his nursery days always seemed quite well done, and Winnie Embury's reluctance to play with the younger children who were, to her, very much younger than her.

Author:	Pado [ Wed Feb 24, 2010 1:35 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
My immediate instinct was to say perhaps the boys would be relieved to be away from her...but that's not really fair, is it? Certainly a five year old would want his mother, at least occasionally. It does bring up the issue of how boys must break those psychological boundaries with mother as they develop whereas girls continue to have [often lifelong] boundary fuzziness; what I call smothering, EBD might be likely to call closeness.

Author:	Kathy_S [ Wed Feb 24, 2010 2:10 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
"A son is a son until he takes a wife, But a daughter's a daughter the rest of her life." Maybe EBD took that one seriously? (Actually I think the publisher would have had fits had EBD chosen to spend too much time with the boys. It says a lot for the popularity of Jo that EBD was allowed to write the holiday books at all.)

Author:	Alison H [ Wed Feb 24, 2010 8:28 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
I think there was just a limit to how much could be fitted in, especially stuff that didn't directly relate to the school. I would love to've heard more about what happened to certain favourite Old Girls in later life, and to've learned more about the backgrounds of some of the staff, and I would definitely like to've seen more of the Russell and Bettany boys, but there was only so much "room", for lack of a better way of putting it.

Author:	Sunglass [ Wed Feb 24, 2010 8:57 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
Alison H wrote: I think there was just a limit to how much could be fitted in, especially stuff that didn't directly relate to the school. I would love to've heard more about what happened to certain favourite Old Girls in later life, and to've learned more about the backgrounds of some of the staff, and I would definitely like to've seen more of the Russell and Bettany boys, but there was only so much "room", for lack of a better way of putting it. Oh, absolutely. But given the 'room' constraints -- and that the focus, given the genre, needed to remain chiefly on the exploits of current CS girls -- isn't it interesting that EBD did, for instance, give Joey so many male children? Or just so many children and wards, when she must have known she couldn't give all, or even most of them, anything beyond the most cursory narrative attention? I know the eleven children thing is primarily as an expression of Joey's 'wholesale' personality, but it's a widely-held 'rule' of writing not to include more characters than you can deal with. I always feel like large sections of Joey's family is a bit like the 'other' towers that weren't North Tower in EB's Malory Towers - you're told they're there, there's an occasional reference to a North Tower girl having a friend from one of the other towers, but for real purposes they don't exist! But while EB had to have enough unimportant other girls to make up the numbers to a plausible school size, EBD needn't have given Joey a family that was too baggy to deal with...?

Author:	julieanne1811 [ Wed Feb 24, 2010 10:15 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
Pado wrote: It does bring up the issue of how boys must break those psychological boundaries with mother as they develop whereas girls continue to have [often lifelong] boundary fuzziness; what I call smothering, EBD might be likely to call closeness. This is interesting ... I agree that boys have to break boundaries with mother, but in my experience, sadly they often don't. Girls grow up, get married and, yes, still have mother around often. But many many men of my aquaintance stay closer to the maternal apron strings. It's of note that the Bible says in Genesis 'a man will leave his family and cleave to his wife'. But when, instead, the woman has to move to be near the man's family (look at India, for example), the man never really grows up and the woman can really suffer. It's not only in India though - in the UK, where men are afraid to leave their family connections and insist on having their wife move to be near his relations, you can find that 'mother' remains the dominant person in the man's life, rathere than the wife... Women are very powerful and have the chance to change this situation by ensuring their men grow up to be men, but they often want their boys to stay near them ...

Author:	Alison H [ Wed Feb 24, 2010 10:33 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
That seems to happen with poor Jack - he spends his life surrounded by Joey's relatives and friends!!

Author:	Mel [ Wed Feb 24, 2010 11:58 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
Didn't Madge consider sending her five year old twins to the CS kindergarten. I think EBD forgot - but why would that be necessary?

Author:	Alison H [ Wed Feb 24, 2010 12:06 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
I think the idea was just that a CS kindergarten would of course be far better than any other sort of kindergarten ... but surely she wouldn't really have sent two 5-year-olds halfway across Europe . The other kids mentioned were all the children of people living on the Platz, which was fair enough.

Author:	RubyGates [ Wed Feb 24, 2010 2:00 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
Maybe Madge had an idea that the twins could live with Joey while they went to kindergarten. She'd looked after Joey, then her own kids and all her nieces and nephews and she thought she'd like the opportunity to offload the twins onto someone else for a while. Just a thought

Author:	Emma A [ Wed Feb 24, 2010 2:10 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
Sunglass wrote: Oh, absolutely. But given the 'room' constraints -- and that the focus, given the genre, needed to remain chiefly on the exploits of current CS girls -- isn't it interesting that EBD did, for instance, give Joey so many male children? Or just so many children and wards, when she must have known she couldn't give all, or even most of them, anything beyond the most cursory narrative attention? ... EBD needn't have given Joey a family that was too baggy to deal with...? This has often made me wonder, too, given that only the Triplets really seem to have achieved any personality or three-dimensionality, compared to the other children. They aren't necessary for plot purposes, either, apart from their effect on Joey (for example, falling down cliffs so that she faints afterwards), or for breaking the ice when she has new girls to tea, by asking them if they'd like to bath the baby, or similar (incidentally, did she ever get a girl who said, politely, "Well, I'd rather not, thanks," when asked if she'd like to help with bedtime routine?). The boys might well have felt that their mother didn't care as much for them as for the girls - they might have accepted a more hands-off approach from Jack, since fathers were often distant figures to many children during those times. Although they were probably very glad that neither of their parents bobbed in and out of their school!

Author:	Alison H [ Wed Feb 24, 2010 3:35 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
Sometimes a big family's essential for the purposes of the plot, e.g. in a upper-class historical setting when there isn't enough money to go round so Our Hero has to go off and make his fortune or Our Heroine has to attract a rich husband who'll marry her without a dowry, but the younger Maynard children just seem to be there to make the point that Joey has produced more children than her sister, her sisters-in-law or any of her friends, just as many people in CS-land have twins but Joey is the only one who has triplets. Maybe I'm just being cynical, but I think that's the main point of it! It might have worked better had there not been such a big gap between the triplets and Felicity, given that the boys don't feature much, but I strongly suspect that that was EBD yet again trying to prove that Joey was somehow "better" than everyone else by giving her three boys to even out her family after three girls! The older boys - the younger ones were too young to feature much - did all have interesting personalities of their own, to be fair: it was just that we rarely saw them. I really like seeing the whole family together in Future, especially the very realistic events of the journey to Tyrol in which the boys squabble over who's going to sit where and then they have to stop because one of the kids feels sick .

Author:	sealpuppy [ Wed Feb 24, 2010 9:58 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
Pado wrote: Certainly a five year old would want his mother, at least occasionally. Too true. I have six grandsons aged 12 down to nearly 2 (cousins, not a Joey family!) and they all need their mums. The 12 year old is gradually weaning himself away and will continue to do so till it's time to go to university, but the idea of sending a 5 year old away is horrible. I think the large family thing is partly because EBD had no idea of what pregnancy and childbirth were actually like, so it gave Joey something to do. And to beat Madge, of course. (Same happens in the Abbey Girls, a breeding competition). Don't know why she couldn't just have written more bestsellers instead. No wonder Joey misplaced her organ - though I think she should have had a hysterectomy then instead of the 'organ' being shoved back into place!

Author:	Rob [ Thu Feb 25, 2010 12:21 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
I suppose the short answer to this is No! Jealousy is NOT allowed in CS land!! (Margot’s jealousy in Theodora and Jessica’s in Mary Lou are dealt with very severely); not to mention EBDs men/boys are very traditionally macho-masculine types who sneer at emotion and refuse to give it houseroom. In reality, I think it is quite likely that they would be. I can certainly imagine, particularly whilst they were young, the Maynard boys missing mamma if they were say in the San and knowing that, had they been one of the girls, mamma – and possibly even papa - would have been in to see them. Also, AFAIK, there are never any mentions in the books of Jack or Jo going to see any of the boys in school plays, at sports days, on speech days etc; given that Jo not only attended every school event at the CS but also wrote their Christmas play, I can imagine this might have been cause for a little jealousy too (although of course it depends just how embarrassed of their mother the boys were!) Kathy_S wrote: A son is a son until he takes a wife, But a daughter's a daughter the rest of her life." This certainly describes my brother-in-law. He and my sister usually see my parents and I at least twice a week and live about 10 mins away. His parents however only get visited about once a month despite being only 45mins away! I'm not sure that I would be like that with my parents (though living back at home, sometimes I think there isn't enough distance between us!) When I was at uni I used to speak to my parents quite often on the phone and would text/email regularly. A lot of my male (and female) friends are more distant with their folks but I've always put it down to us being a close family (we used to see both mum and dad's parents at least once a week); I do have quite a 'feminine' outlook on life though, so I guess that might account for it! I don't think EBD would have thought me suitable SLOC material!

Author:	Fiona Mc [ Thu Feb 25, 2010 6:55 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
I always put boys being sent off to boarding school at such a young age as very much the English thing to do. I worked for countless families as a nanny in the UK who did exactly that. Boys went to boarding school when they were 7 or 8 and the girls got to stay home and this was in the 90's, so it's something that does happen quite often. In Australia its different. Kids tend to go to the local primary school and then get sent away at 12 (beginning of high school) and both would be sent not just the boys.

Author:	Artemis [ Thu Feb 25, 2010 7:54 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
Sometimes it causes real problems. My mother worked at a school about ten years ago where there was a little boy boarding who really didn't want to. He was seven. He had to board, but every day his mother would come to school in the morning and deliver his little sister, aged 5, to the Reception class, and every evening, she'd pick her daughter up, but leave her son, because he was a boarder. (He didn't even weekly board, so he didn't go home at weekends either.) One day they couldn't find him at school. He'd run away, to try and get home. The police finally found him about five miles away from school, walking along a road. After that, the headmistress refused to have him as a boarder . . .

Author:	Sunglass [ Thu Feb 25, 2010 9:43 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
sealpuppy wrote: Pado wrote: Certainly a five year old would want his mother, at least occasionally. Too true. I have six grandsons aged 12 down to nearly 2 (cousins, not a Joey family!) and they all need their mums. The 12 year old is gradually weaning himself away and will continue to do so till it's time to go to university, but the idea of sending a 5 year old away is horrible. The thing I remember finding odd about that entre discussion at the start of New Mistress- about Mike essentially living with the Emburys for the winter - is that EBD, for reasons best known to herself, seems to be making no attempt whatsoever to make Joey seem anything other than thrilled and relieved to part with various of her children! I mean, I know there are times when any parent would like someone to remove a child or two temporarily to give them some breathing space, but I do think that EBD's perfect maternal figure, with her enviably happy family and arms open to shower the world at large with affection and wisdom, comes across rather badly in this account by Biddy O'Ryan: Quote: Oh, they're all very fit. Joey got rid of the boys last Thursday and Mike was going down to Montreux yesterday. Oh, didn't you know?" as both Miss Burnett and Miss Andrews exclaimed. "Winnie Embury has found a tutor for Robin and Paul and she suggested that Mike should go to them during the week to share him. Joey won't send him with Steve and Charles until he's seven and the twins are too young for companions for him and he's never out of mischief as a result. Joey simply leapt at the idea. I think," she added pensively as she swerved to avoid a man and a mule that were occupying the crown of the road, "that she has a new book simmering. Anyhow, Mike will go down from Mondays to Fridays and spend the week ends at home. And, of course, he's fairly handy if Joey wants to see him apart from the week ends, so it's a good arrangement all round." "What will happen when the snow comes?" Miss Andrews asked. "I wouldn't be knowing. Winnie may keep him at Montreux for the rest of the term. At any rate he's settled till that happens, which is something. I think what really struck me was the way EBD reverses what we've all been talking about on here - that a five year old might want to see his mother regularly - and seems to view Montreux as 'handy if Joey wants to see him apart from the week ends' - isn't this the wrong way round? Not intending to Joey-bash here in the least, incidentally - I think this is EBD not realising that this conversation makes her favourite character look rather callous, 'getting rid of' her school-age boys, sending a five-year-old off to live with friends as a weekly boarder because he isn't old enough yet to go to school in the UK with the others, apparently because she's starting a new book, and Mike is too mischievous to be kept at home. It also struck me, though, that the Mike suggestion comes from someone other than Joey, from Winifred Embury, and that Biddy also makes it sound as though it's going to be Winnie's decision to keep Mike permanently at Montreux after the snows come, not Joey or Jack's. Maybe EBD thought at some level herself that she was in danger of making Joey sound distinctly unloving...?

Author:	Alison H [ Thu Feb 25, 2010 10:09 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
It would probably have been horrendously boring for Mike at the Platz - Felicity has friends there, but there's no suggestion that Mike does, or that Felix does for that matter - and as Joey and Jack would have looked down their noses at the village school then sharing the Emburys' tutor would have been a convenient way of starting off Mike's education, but it does all sound rather uncaring .

Author:	sealpuppy [ Thu Feb 25, 2010 1:12 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
Of course, what EBD should have done was marry one of the Old Girls to a wealthy chap who would set up a school for boys on the next mountain! Then the whole shebang of boys could board there. (Worked for EJO in her Swiss books).

Author:	JB [ Thu Feb 25, 2010 1:50 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
sealpuppy wrote: Of course, what EBD should have done was marry one of the Old Girls to a wealthy chap who would set up a school for boys on the next mountain! Then the whole shebang of boys could board there. (Worked for EJO in her Swiss books). And it's perfectly logical that families at the San would have sons as well as daughters who needed educating. The MBR clan males do though seem destined for English public schools.

Author:	Alison H [ Thu Feb 25, 2010 1:52 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
There were plenty of pupils who were at the school in either Tyrol or Switzerland because their parents, guardians or siblings were being treated at the San and wanted them nearby. What happened to their brothers ?

Author:	Sunglass [ Thu Feb 25, 2010 2:03 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
Alison H wrote: There were plenty of pupils who were at the school in either Tyrol or Switzerland because their parents, guardians or siblings were being treated at the San and wanted them nearby. What happened to their brothers ? Presumably they stayed at their English public schools for all but the holidays (I mean, for the English families), given that in general, EBD presents boys as able to be dispensed with by their families much earlier and more easily and living semi-detached from family life from the age of seven or so, when they go to prep school...? As was being discussed on the other thread about Madge's selfishness, David isn't expected to be upset his parents are staying on in Canada, presumably because he doesn't see them that much anyway, and hasn't for years, while Sybil, although she's also at boarding school, is liable to be sadder. And when Madge insists she wants Josette and Sybil's company on the Australian trip, there's no matching presumption that David's company might be equally desirable, or that he might take a year out from university to accompany his parents... What I always forget about is that, at times, the CS kindergarten when it exists, includes little boys, doesn't it?

Author:	Emma A [ Thu Feb 25, 2010 2:06 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
Sunglass wrote: What I always forget about is that, at times, the CS kindergarten when it exists, includes little boys, doesn't it? Yes, in the latter half of Exile, Edmund Eltringham is prefect of the Kindergarten or some such position

Author:	JB [ Thu Feb 25, 2010 2:08 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
Sunglass wrote: What I always forget about is that, at times, the CS kindergarten when it exists, includes little boys, doesn't it? It does. Edmund Eltringham is form prefect of the kindergarten (or the youngest form) in Guernsey and Felix Maynard goes to St Nicholas when the school is in Switzerland.

Author:	2nd Gen Fan [ Thu Feb 25, 2010 5:04 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
Personally, I think that both the boys and girls in Joey's family get a rough deal in some way. With the girls it's through having a parent's total involvement in every aspect of their life (which you would normally expect going to boarding school would rescue you from). The boys I would expect must feel extremely lost and lonely when they are young and being sent away and ignored, while their sisters are cosseted near home. I would imagine that by their later teens this is seen as an advantage though - having the freedom to become themselves in a way their sisters don't. I also wonder how the MBR clan feel they can lay down in stone what their sons will do with their lives, when they see so little of them? (e.g. Mike for the navy).

Author:	Alison H [ Thu Feb 25, 2010 5:11 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
Doesn't Madge proclaim a few weeks after Kevin and Kester are born that one will be going into the Army and the other one into the Navy? I don't imagine for a minute that she and Jem would've forced them into doing so had they said they didn't want to, but on the other hand I'm not entirely convinced that it's just meant to be a joke . It's interesting that unlike David and Rix, none of the older Maynard boys want to be doctors .

Author:	julieanne1811 [ Thu Feb 25, 2010 5:46 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
Alison H wrote: Doesn't Madge proclaim a few weeks after Kevin and Kester are born that one will be going into the Army and the other one into the Navy? . I wonder which was to go where ..?

Author:	Nightwing [ Thu Feb 25, 2010 11:58 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Would the boys be jealous?
Alison H wrote: It's interesting that unlike David and Rix, none of the older Maynard boys want to be doctors . I like that it's Margot who's allowed to become the Maynard family doctor! It sort of makes me feel like, while the first son was the most important figure in the Russell and Bettany households, the girls were allowed to be important to the Maynards .