The CBB :: View topic - Girls: Accidental Girls

I especially envied Carola as I was desperate to go to boarding school and in fact I used to try and work out how I could manage somthing similar - sadly the presence of my all -too-alive parents and a family home in the Uk made me realise it was not possible. but if they'd been overseas I'm sure I would have tried.....

I used to mentally review my wardrobe to work out what I had that would fit the uniform requirements (varying brown or blue depending on which I had most of)

I used to mentally review my wardrobe to work out what I had that would fit the uniform requirements (varying brown or blue depending on which I had most of) :lol:

BTW I now know what she did after leaving the CS. I read Feud in Fifth Remove fairly recently and the Headmistress is a Miss Heriot with red hair and a favourite with everyone. The kinders adore her. Just wondered if EBD was thinking of her original Polly Heriot? :lol:

I seem to recall somewhere that there was a discussion as to why and how Biddy came to be a CS pupil and it does centre around her abilities, thus it was decided she should be taught at the school itself. I can also imagine that as she was one of the more colourful characters EBD could have had a storyline involving 'Bill' being asked to remove her from the local school because they couldn't handle her !! ... gives me an interesting idea for a fill in !

Author:	Róisín [ Wed Jan 23, 2008 8:59 pm ]
Post subject:	Girls: Accidental Girls
"Accidental Girls" – eg Biddy, Carola, Katherine, Polly. Biddy is found after running away, then taken in by middlesand sent to a local school, before proving herself bright enough to be sent to the Chalet School. Carola runs away to the School and admits herself before being caught and enrolled legitimately. Katherine Gordon was sent to the School by mistake but had to stay as her relations were abroad; she ended up staying fulltime. Polly Heriot ran away from her elderly guardians from sheer boredom, and ran into Joey in a sweetshop - soon after she was a pupil at the School too. Did you feel these storylines were realistic? Were the individual cases different enough to feel like they weren’t repititious? Was it a valid plot for EBD to pursue? Anything you'd like to raise about these girls being accidental, please join in below

Author:	Alison H [ Wed Jan 23, 2008 10:07 pm ]
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Katherine's story was pretty silly IMHO - if the school'd been called something like St Mary's then I could just about understand there being a mix-up, but why on earth would there be another school in South Wales called "The Chalet School"?!! And for there to've been another girl with almost the same name, who then didn't turn up, and for both schools to've had heads called Miss Wilson, makes it even sillier! Not one of EBD's better openings to a story . The idea of girls running away because of boredom or family problems is easier to accept: the cases of Biddy, Polly and Carola are all fairly different so aren't really repetitious. The idea of the Guides adopting Biddy doesn't really work and seems to be conveniently forgotten about fairly soon afterwards, but it's good to see the way Biddy settles in at school and goes on to be a CS success story (returns to teach and marries a doctor!) after sadly losing her parents and stepfather so young. Carola and Polly are both interesting too - generally the problems of girls left behind by parents working abroad (notably the Bettanys) aren't really explored so it's good to see a different take on this, and Polly wanting to go to school makes a contrast with people like Stacie and Verity who had also been brought up in an "unusual" sort of way but didn't want to go to school.

Author:	jennifer [ Thu Jan 24, 2008 5:33 am ]
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I agree that Katherine's situation was pretty far fetched. What always puzzled me was what happened about money? Presumably she showed up without having paid the fees, or Mary-Katherine's fees were assumed to be hers. It didn't help that the plot was so similar to the previous book. The others are more logical, although I never did buy the whole "adopted by the school Guide company" thing. I could see the Guide company sponsoring her education, but to take legal responsibility for a ten year old girl? I wonder what Miss Wilson, as guide leader, though of that. Biddy's later care is sort of forgotten about as well. What happens to her when the school breaks up? She doesn't seem to be with the Russells, she doesn't have anywhere else to go, and she would be about fourteen then. Polly and Carola are both cases of girls who desperately wanted to go to school, so the fact that they fit in well and had fun is not surprising. I rather admire Carola's creativity in getting to the school.

Author:	alicat [ Thu Jan 24, 2008 11:34 am ]
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I always rather liked all these storylines, tho the difficulties other people have mentioned never occurred to me when I first read them. I especially envied Carola as I was desperate to go to boarding school and in fact I used to try and work out how I could manage somthing similar - sadly the presence of my all -too-alive parents and a family home in the Uk made me realise it was not possible. but if they'd been overseas I'm sure I would have tried..... re Biddy, I think that until the last 30 years or so there seemed to be much less official fussing about who looked after children, so long as some adult or other was responsible for them, and I expect that in the 30s a foreign child being looked after by members of the ex-pat community at the Tiernsee would have been positively welcomed by the authorities, if they registered it at all, as saving them the trouble.

Author:	tiernsee [ Thu Jan 24, 2008 12:43 pm ]
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I liked the Wrong Chalet School and could imagine an artistic type like Katherine's aunt getting confused. However, the story had too many leaps of faith to make it realistic - the many different Chalet Schools everywhere and another girl happening to register at the same time called more or less the same name! Had she been called Jane Smith it might have been slightly (and I stress slightly) more believable. I loved the part where the Middles kept Biddy in the games shed and tried to smuggle her out food and clothes. As this was pre-war I never really considered the issues around legal responsibility or adoption - far simpler times! The other "accidental" girls - Polly's story more believable than Carola's but neither impossible to imagine.

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Author:	LizB [ Thu Jan 24, 2008 1:25 pm ]
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alicat wrote: I especially envied Carola as I was desperate to go to boarding school and in fact I used to try and work out how I could manage somthing similar - sadly the presence of my all -too-alive parents and a family home in the Uk made me realise it was not possible. but if they'd been overseas I'm sure I would have tried..... I used to mentally review my wardrobe to work out what I had that would fit the uniform requirements (varying brown or blue depending on which I had most of)

Author:	Tor [ Thu Jan 24, 2008 3:11 pm ]
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Quote: I used to mentally review my wardrobe to work out what I had that would fit the uniform requirements (varying brown or blue depending on which I had most of) Me too! In fact, I wonder if I am still somewhat affected by this. Twas not so long ago that i returned from clothes shopping, and when putting away my new purchases, clocked that I had bought a brown fleece with orange (?flame?) trim, and a deep blue (?gentian?) jumper with crimson stripes.

Author:	Elbee [ Thu Jan 24, 2008 4:22 pm ]
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LizB wrote: I used to mentally review my wardrobe to work out what I had that would fit the uniform requirements (varying brown or blue depending on which I had most of) And me

Author:	Fiona Mc [ Thu Jan 24, 2008 8:51 pm ]
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I never really thought of the believability of Katherine Gordon going to the CS as she was one of my favourite characters and its one of my favourite books as I liked hearing more about the group of girls she became friends with. I also liked her aunt as a character and thought Aunt Luce and Katherine got on well. I didn't think the Polly storyline was contrived and was pretty believable as she ran away in general not so much she ran away to school. I also liked her as a character and wish we had heard more about her. BTW I now know what she did after leaving the CS. I read Feud in Fifth Remove fairly recently and the Headmistress is a Miss Heriot with red hair and a favourite with everyone. The kinders adore her. Just wondered if EBD was thinking of her original Polly Heriot?

Author:	KB [ Thu Jan 24, 2008 8:57 pm ]
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Fiona Mc wrote: BTW I now know what she did after leaving the CS. I read Feud in Fifth Remove fairly recently and the Headmistress is a Miss Heriot with red hair and a favourite with everyone. The kinders adore her. Just wondered if EBD was thinking of her original Polly Heriot? Actually, as Feud in the Fifth Remove was published in 1932 and Jo Returns only came out in 1936, I think it's more likely that Polly came about as a result of Miss Heriot.

Author:	Sunglass [ Fri Jan 25, 2008 1:02 pm ]
Post subject:	Biddy
The adoption of Biddy and the way her Irishness and class are represented by EBD tend to irritate me - although the adult Biddy is likeable, despite an improbable stage-Irish accent. NO Irish person, bar the worst and most stereotypical Hollywood excesses, spoke like that, and certainly didn't continue to speak like that after twenty years of living in continental Europe surrounded by other nationalities! I appreciate that adoption was regarded entirely differently at the time, and that modern concerns (given that her stepfather's sister was clearly well disposed towards the child, but couldn't afford to take her in, could the CS not have contributed towards her upkeep so that she could have some kind of family?) are out of place. But given the indignation of staff and prefects at the middles' initial adoption of her 'as though she were a puppy', it seems careless then to farm out the financial provision for a ten-year-old to a fledgling Guide company. Also, given that she is informally adopted by a school, why form the plan to send her to the local village school, not the CS itself, where she will presumably be living? There are scathing references to village schools throughout the CS series, and they are very much where the local peasants go to be made literate - presumably it is accepted that Biddy is to go there because she is lower-class, as there are plans to have her trained as a maid because her mother was. Certainly, she is penniless, but no one suggests taking Juliet out of the CS after she's left on Madge's hands. We never see - at least to my knowledge? - the decision that is clearly arrived at later, that Biddy should attend the CS - clearly her cleverness wins out, despite her unaltered brogue and tendency to frighten people with banshee stories. That would be a fascinating drabble - how Biddy joins the CS as a pupil. As would a more realistic look at how the teenage Biddy might feel about being a kind of school charity child and orphan, and why she returns after Oxford.

Author:	JoMoran [ Thu Feb 21, 2008 9:41 pm ]
Post subject:	Biddy
I seem to recall somewhere that there was a discussion as to why and how Biddy came to be a CS pupil and it does centre around her abilities, thus it was decided she should be taught at the school itself. I can also imagine that as she was one of the more colourful characters EBD could have had a storyline involving 'Bill' being asked to remove her from the local school because they couldn't handle her !! ... gives me an interesting idea for a fill in !

Author:	Fiona Mc [ Thu Feb 28, 2008 7:56 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Biddy
JoMoran wrote: I seem to recall somewhere that there was a discussion as to why and how Biddy came to be a CS pupil and it does centre around her abilities, thus it was decided she should be taught at the school itself. I can also imagine that as she was one of the more colourful characters EBD could have had a storyline involving 'Bill' being asked to remove her from the local school because they couldn't handle her !! ... gives me an interesting idea for a fill in ! One of the first drabble I wrote was about that but I would love to read more so go for it JoMoran!

Author:	Sunglass [ Thu Feb 28, 2008 12:15 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Biddy
JoMoran wrote: I seem to recall somewhere that there was a discussion as to why and how Biddy came to be a CS pupil and it does centre around her abilities, thus it was decided she should be taught at the school itself. I can also imagine that as she was one of the more colourful characters EBD could have had a storyline involving 'Bill' being asked to remove her from the local school because they couldn't handle her !! ... gives me an interesting idea for a fill in ! I'd happily read that fill-in, but I'm also interested in the class assumptions that had Biddy being sent to the village school rather than the CS in the first place. It's not as though anyone mentions checking her level of education in advance of that decision - so it doesn't appear to be based on the fact that she may not have been able to keep up with the CS Juniors. She's a servant's child, so she goes to the village school, whether or not she speaks any German at all... Are we told whether she lives at the CS, while going to the village school? If so, would she have been in a dormitory with the other girls? It would have been a very difficult situation, aged ten, to live in a boarding school of which you are not a member, and then to trundle off daily to a school everyone considers much less prestigious, where a different langauge is spoken and completely different things taught. We never actually get any further references to her, do we, after the Guides adopt her, and before we're told she's joined the CS?

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Author:	Róisín [ Thu Feb 28, 2008 12:47 pm ]
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Because she spends her holidays in the Russell home, I always presumed that that was where she was based while being sent to the village school. While there she would possibly have been kept with Marie's children, or under Marie's authority, if she hadn't any children at that point? Though she was a guide ward and under the guardianship of Miss Wilson, I don't think she would have been kept at the school itself. (But this is just IMHO!)

Author:	Sunglass [ Thu Feb 28, 2008 2:13 pm ]
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So she would have gone to the local school on the Sonnalpe, and lived with the Russells all the time? Never even occurred to me, for some reason, but it does make a kind of sense. It also makes more sense of why she wouldn't have gone to the CS, and there is the possibility of her not sharing the nursery with the Russell offspring, as you say, but being with the servants and their children. Which actually makes her eventual sociable mobility via her CS education, even more interesting. Servants are servants for EBD. Even when she shows Joey's relative consideration for hers, and her politeness to Zephyr Burthill's chauffeur, they are still represented within very restricted codes - faithful retainers, who pass on marriage to go on being devoted to the family etc and slightly weak-minded creatures who tend to go into hysterics. (Though I think it's rich, personally, that Rosli gets blamed for getting hysterical about something, when Joey's frequent swoons and fevers are evidence of her creativity and sensitivity...) There are also moments of Stock Stupid Servant Stereotypes, like the beginning of 'Goes to It', I think, where one of the Welsh maids for some reason keeps telling the men they can leave the trunks downstairs, despite having just been explicitly told she must tell them to carry them upstairs... But Biddy, apart from that dratted stage Oirish accent (which she shares with Anglo-irish Deira O'Hagan!), is entirely a social equal when she re-emerges at the CS...

Author:	Róisín [ Thu Feb 28, 2008 2:19 pm ]
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Her upward mobility could be due to - her own forceful personality - the way that the girls, themselves confident and able to change her status, look upon her as their own adoptee - Miss Wilson's attitude. We don't really see a lot of her own opinions in the series - maybe she was actually really against classism!

Author:	Alison H [ Thu Feb 28, 2008 2:27 pm ]
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Biddy's "social mobility" is definitely very interesting. Whilst the stupid peasant stereotypes are very annoying - and perhaps surprising given that EBD herself wasn't from an upper/upper middle class background - I don't think that the idea that you stay whatever social class you started out is all that unusual. It can work all ways - you get plenty of self-made wealthy people saying that they're still "a working-class lad/lass from ... [wherever]". However, we're never given the impression that Biddy finds it odd being with people from different social backgrounds in the way that Joan Baker, in an era when class distinctions were becoming more blurred, did. Even Ros Lilley had reservations about going to a school where other people would be from different backgrounds. Although it's never mentioned, I'd also assume that Biddy stayed with the Russells during the holidays. She seems quite close to them, and later on they say that they'll pay for her to go to university if she doesn't get a scholarship. They may turn into rotten parents later on, but in the early days they were both much more caring - they looked after 4 of Dick and Mollie's kids, plus Juliet, plus Robin, as well as their own children, and they also took Stacie to live with them when she was recovering from her operation I would think that Gillian and Joyce lived with them during the holidays as well. Die Rosen must have been some sort of Tardis .

Author:	Sunglass [ Thu Feb 28, 2008 2:54 pm ]
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I think you're right, Alison - it's the overlapping combination of peasant stereotypes and servant stereotypes that makes some of EBD's servant characters annoying - some of the Austrian/Swiss ones often manage to be both stolid and kind of bovine AND hysterical and superstitious at the same time! And some of the devotion is naked wish-fulfilment. Such as Debby in 'Rescue', who stays on to do the washing up for the Quartette the first time she and Phoebe meet them. This is before they become friends with Phoebe or intervene in her health or about the cello - they've only just met, but this elderly servant, on her first encounter with four much younger women, automatically takes on the domestic task. Not all servants are treated the same, now I think of it. Biddy's mother and Rosamund Lilley's mother, though one is dead and the other no longer a servant, are both approved of by EBD, partly because they have learned the trappings of gentility - 'dainty' eating, cleanliness and good manners - from their employers and passed them on to their daughters. It can't be coincidental that Ros Lilley and Biddy are the two most unprobematic upwardly mobile characters at the CS, because their knowledge of appropriate middle/upper-middle class manners lets them benefit from the CS education without too much culture shock. Whereas Joan Baker is for a long time held back from concentrating on lessons by her lack of them. I suppose Biddy had the basics necessary for adjustment to the CS.

Author:	Róisín [ Thu Feb 28, 2008 2:58 pm ]
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I've just remembered that Biddy was present in Die Rosen in the halfterm of Exploits, if that somehow proves that she spent all the other holidays there, I don't know.