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Themes: Guardians
http://www.the-cbb.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4993

Author:  Róisín [ Wed Sep 10, 2008 7:42 am ]
Post subject:  Themes: Guardians

A lot of the girls have guardians who are appointed to care for theme because their parents are dead or unavailable. What do you think of both the guardians, and how the situation was handled? Examples include Mr Irons, various aunts (Katherine, Carola, Lavender), the redoubtable Joey, ...

Please raise any issue in relation to this topic below :D

Author:  JennieP [ Thu Sep 11, 2008 12:45 pm ]
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Frankly, I feel more sorry for the kids that end up with Joey as a guardian than I do for Betty with Mr Irons. Imagine being orphaned and then stuck in a family of up to 18 children (I think that was what someone calculated) with an immature attention-seeking mother figure and an absent father-figure, where most of the parenting is done by over-worked domestic staff and children are brushed off on their older foster-siblings, on the basis that "there more there are the easier it is as the older ones look after them" or words to that effect.
Give me an orphanage any day...

Author:  Alison H [ Thu Sep 11, 2008 1:04 pm ]
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Most of the guardians - except Madge and Jem in relation to the Bettanys and Robin - are presented negatively in one way or another. Some are just nasty, e.g. Annis's aunt. Some aren't very interested in their charges, e.g. Betty Wynne-Davies's guardian and Carola's cousin. Some are well-meaning but either scatty (Aunt Luce) or not very good with children (Polly Heriot's guardians). Even those who don't actually do anything "wrong" are either openly criticised, e.g. Lavender's aunt for not ensuring that she gets a proper education and Verity's grandparents for being old-fashioned, or do things deserving of criticism, e.g. Stacie's aunt who packs her off abroad when she doesn't want to go and doesn't even manage to visit her when she's had a serious accident.

To be fair, some of them are in an awkward position and become guardians when they aren't really ideal for the job - Stacie's aunt already had a big family to care for, and Polly's guardians admitted that they didn't know much about how to deal with teenage girls, and even Carola's aunt perhaps can't really be blamed for wanting to lead her own life.

The one who really breaks the mould is Jacynth's aunt, who sacrifices everything for Jacynth. And the most bizarre choice of guardian has to be Joey for Erica - why on earth did Erica's mum pick someone whom she hadn't been in touch with for over 20 years??!!

Author:  JayB [ Thu Sep 11, 2008 3:44 pm ]
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Kathie Ferrars' aunt and uncle are very good. She grew up in a loving household, had a good education, and when the time came was encouraged to be adventurous in her choice of job. Maybe they kept Kathie young for her age, but no parent or guardian is perfect and there are a lot worse mistakes they could have made.

Melanie Lucas' aunt and uncle strike me as a bit useless. They insist that Melanie must go to Switzerland with them when she wants to stay at her school as a boarder, and it doesn't seem to occur to any of them to write to Melanie's parents to ask what they think. Then when they get her to Switzerland they find she can't cope with the climate and she ends up having to be a boarder anyway.

Author:  Honor [ Thu Sep 11, 2008 8:36 pm ]
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I always thought that I would have hated to have ended up in Joey's family (I remember thinking about it when I was about 12 and thinking I wanted to be with the Russells instead!). There must have been no privacy at all when everyone was at home and apart from the odd half hour 'insightful' chat with Joey she would not have really bothered with individual attention I would have thought.

Kathie's were lovely - you are right there JayB. She is a great character - really kind and caring and was obviously brought up in a nice household.

Author:  Maeve [ Sat Sep 13, 2008 3:44 pm ]
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Was the idea of guardians simply a plot device for EBD, to explain why some of the girls end up at school or why they are poorly behaved? Or does it reflect a social reality of when she was writing?

Author:  Meg14 [ Sun Sep 14, 2008 1:31 pm ]
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I think you are right about having Joey and Jack as your guardians and what a nightmare it would have been the thought of an insightful chat with Joey sounds too terrifying for words! I always felt that the actual work was done by Anna etc with Joey rarely being involved (perhaps a much more Victorian idea of parenthood?). I suppose this impression is reinforced for me by episodes such as the one where she almost seems to invite the triplets to a formal interview to discuss their reports (can’t remember which book possibly A Future Chalet School)
Having said that I am not sure that I would have like being adopted by the Russells though as I always think of Juliet who seems to be taken on by Madge after a very traumatic time and then completely forgotten about. To a certain extent I always felt that with the Robin too who is sent off to Joey’s and doesn’t really seem to excite much interest in either Madge afterwards which I always found strange as Madge was the person presumably who was left in charge of her once her father dies.
I guess EBD felt that she couldn’t keep returning to same characters over and over again and new ones had to keep coming in and the Joey/Madge becoming guardians was an effective way of doing this but I always felt it bizarre that characters kept vanishing from view. Actually now i think about it I found it similarly frustrating in Neighbours (back in the days before I worked and I could watch it) the way that Kennedys kept adopting kids over and over but never mentioning their own who seemed to vanish and I am sure there were other characters who did the same. So obviously a common plot device when you need to bring in fresh characters!!

Author:  JayB [ Sun Sep 14, 2008 1:45 pm ]
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It happens in the Abbey books too. The older characters don't all fade into the background, but there are always new girls turning up and being nearly killed by the twins, and being 'adopted' by the Abbey crowd and having their problems solved/training provided for/romantic troubles sorted.

In the past of course with infectious diseases more prevalent and medical knowledge less advanced, people were more likely to lose one or both parents before they reached adulthood. But it does become an over-used plot device in long running series.

Author:  Tor [ Sun Sep 14, 2008 2:30 pm ]
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That is a really interesting point, Meg14. I think it probably sums up how I felt about the Russell/Bettany attitude to wards, though I hadn't been able to put my finger on it.

Author:  claire [ Sun Sep 14, 2008 3:59 pm ]
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I wonder if the difference is that Kathy was brought up from a newborn

Author:  Alison H [ Sun Sep 14, 2008 4:21 pm ]
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I remember (I'm showing my age here :oops: ) when Home and Away first started being shown in the UK and the writers/producers said that they'd deliberately decided to write a soap in which the main characters were foster parents so that they could write teenage characters in and out without it seeming odd or disjointed, and (I haven't watched it for years - this was in the Tom and Pippa days!) it did work very well.

As you say, Meg, it doesn't work so well when natural or adopted relatives just keep appearing and reappearing. I always find it very odd that Joey so rarely mentioned Juliet, to whom she was once so close, and that none of "the family" went to visit Robin when she was in France just prior to Adrienne. Mollie Maynard is hardly ever mentioned between her marriage and Reunion, and Primula Venables is never mentioned again after her engagement! It can be excused in TV soaps where you can't really keep bringing actors and actresses back for odd episodes, but not in books :lol: .

Author:  JayB [ Sun Sep 14, 2008 4:53 pm ]
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I suppose it was just too difficult to keep up with such a huge cast of characters, and to find a way of including news of them without bringing the story to a grinding halt.

As it is most books have Joey bouncing into the staffroom with news, and by the end of the series many (most?) of the mistresses were not OGs themselves and wouldn't know many of the people Joey was talking about. (Not that that ever stopped Joey, of course.)

It is odd, to the point of being unbelievable, that Joey didn't go to France to see Robin (was she in France at the time when Phil was ill? that would explain it) but I have several gripes about the story in Adrienne, which I'll save for the discussion of that book.

Author:  Fiona Mc [ Sun Sep 14, 2008 10:10 pm ]
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Honor wrote:
I always thought that I would have hated to have ended up in Joey's family. There must have been no privacy at all when everyone was at home and apart from the odd half hour 'insightful' chat with Joey she would not have really bothered with individual attention I would have thought.
\

Having grown up in a family of 12 kids, can pretty much guarentee it's really hard to get one on one attention with your parents when growing up and as much as Joey had Anna and Rosli she was essentially a working mother and did write 2 books a year plus had a husband who did shift work which meant a lot of stuff would fall on her.
However, that said, it's never boring and you do have a lot of built in friends and I would have hated being an only child or only had one or two siblings to play with. I guess the main difference I've noticed is in a bigger family you tend to be closer to siblings, talk over a lot of stuff with them, be influenced by what they say more so than parents. I must admit I always envied the Maynard kids cos they did seem to get a lot more one on one time with their parents than I ever did. It's just the practicalities of trying to fit it in with school, the house, sports and everyones needs.

My thoughts on Joey adopting was poor Phoebe. She couldn't have kids so why couldn't she end up with some teenage wards. it didn't seem fair that Joey could have so many kids, and then get more and Phoebe misses out.

Author:  Alison H [ Sun Sep 14, 2008 11:02 pm ]
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I think the way that so many new characters are/end up as Joey's wards is one of the ways in which EBD got rather over-obsessed with Joey to the point of silliness towards the end of the series. Another example is the renaming of the Margot Venables Prize after Joey, which's recently been mentioned in another thread.

I actually feel very sorry for Joey at the beginning of Althea - even she says that she's got more than enough on with her natural children, Claire, the Richardsons and Erica, especially given Phil's recent illness, but Hilda talks her into looking after Althea temporarily as well, even though Althea could just as soon've gone to stay with Hilary or Biddy or Grizel, or, as you say, Phoebe!

Author:  Mel [ Mon Sep 15, 2008 9:56 pm ]
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I think by that stage in the series EBD was desperately trying to meet deadlines, please her fans and write a yearly Chalet book, so logic flew out of the window!

Author:  Maeve [ Wed Oct 15, 2008 8:15 am ]
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As Alison said above, most of the guardians (with the exceptions of the Russells and Maynards, of course) come off as being bad or, at least, incompetent concerning their ward(s).

But I've just been reading Genius for the first time in years and think the Rutherfords, Cousin Guy et al, are quite lovely people. They seem so normal and down to earth and while they don't understand Nina's genius, they understand that it's important and so send her to the CS. I think Couisn Yvonne is great to write once a week to Nina when Nina has nothing to say in return.

So, it seems kind of mean that when the Emburys show up, they are hailed as the musical cousins who really understand Nina.

Author:  Loryat [ Tue Nov 04, 2008 2:00 pm ]
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That's true but while I think the Rutherfords do make very good guardians for Nina they are motivated out of conscientiousness (sp?seems very long lol) rather than actually feeling a real bond with Nina (understandably as she can't have been very easy to get to know). But we do see Nina becoming more attached to the Rutherfords even after she's found the Emburys, and it's also nice for Nina to have more than five relations.

Author:  Jennie [ Tue Nov 04, 2008 4:08 pm ]
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I think that the Rutherfords did the best that they could for Nina. They had never met her before and had no idea how dedicated she was to her music, but they did try to understand, and when lady Rutherford laid down conditions for Nina being able to do her practice, such as keeping her fire in with plenty of wood, and having to dust and vacuum the room herself, she was being practical. Nina had no experience of living in the north of England and Lady Rutherford had plenty. Also, they were living in a large house with an inadequate staff, and she was, I think, concerned for Nina's health with such a rigorous practice schedule, and was concerned to see that Nina did have adequate food and drink, and kept warm properly. It cannot have been easy for them to take in another girl, especially one who had never had young companions before and didn't know how to fit in.

And don't forget that the post-war shortages of just about everything had to be coped with.

Author:  jennifer [ Wed Nov 05, 2008 3:16 am ]
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Jennie wrote:
I think that the Rutherfords did the best that they could for Nina. They had never met her before and had no idea how dedicated she was to her music, but they did try to understand, and when lady Rutherford laid down conditions for Nina being able to do her practice, such as keeping her fire in with plenty of wood, and having to dust and vacuum the room herself, she was being practical. Nina had no experience of living in the north of England and Lady Rutherford had plenty. Also, they were living in a large house with an inadequate staff, and she was, I think, concerned for Nina's health with such a rigorous practice schedule, and was concerned to see that Nina did have adequate food and drink, and kept warm properly. It cannot have been easy for them to take in another girl, especially one who had never had young companions before and didn't know how to fit in.


A good point.

The Rutherfords strike me as a nice, caring family, who wants to do their best by their new relative. When they figure out that she's a potential musical genius, and what that means, they work out a way to help her. At the same time, they aren't going to let her endanger her health, run roughshod over the rest of the family, or ignore all other facets of life except music.

Nina, on the other hand, is a nice girl who has grown up in a very limited environment. She's been with her father, and the whole focus of their lives has been her musical training - she's always had the best, and has never really had to consider the day to day needs of other people, or forgo practice because someone else is on the piano, or worry about money. She's been trained to believe that her music is paramount, and nothing else counts - which may make for a young prodigy musically, but not a very balanced or stable human being.

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