The CBB
http://www.the-cbb.co.uk/

Books: Tom Tackles the Chalet School
http://www.the-cbb.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4109
Author:  jennifer [ Sun Mar 02, 2008 4:59 am ]
Post subject:  Books: Tom Tackles the Chalet School
This book was initially published as two short stories, and later combined into a paperback. A synopsis can be found here

What do you think of Tom's background and her upbringing? Is her relative happiness in the Chalet School and her admiration of Daisy realistic? We see some interaction with Madge and her family, including Sybil - how does this fit in compared to the events in Gay from China, two terms earlier? How does this book compare to the other short novels (Mystery and Rosalie)?
Author:  Alison H [ Sun Mar 02, 2008 11:22 am ]
Post subject: 
It's rather obvious that it wasn't originally part of the series - the timing of Dick and Mollie's return doesn't quite seem to fit - but IMHO it's much the best of the three. It's interesting because there are themes on it that, whilst they're standard GO themes, hadn't previously been covered in CS books - tomboys for one and "admiration" of elder girls for another.

I think that Tom's a lovely character, in every book she appears in. Her upbringing is very weird, though :roll: . It's realistic that you get "tomboys" like Jack Lambert or like George in the Famous Five, who just aren't into "girly" things, or maybe like Bill in Malory Towers who've been brought up with a lot of brothers and no sisters, but Canon Gay bringing his daughter up like a boy because he wanted a son sounds like something off a Jeremy Kyle or Oprah Winfrey show!

This is slightly OT, but I think that a really strong point of the Armishire and St Briavel's books is that there's no "heroine" at the school at that point. People like Tom, teenage Robin, Gay Lambert and various others, are very kind and help other people, and in their cases it comes across in a really positive way, whereas Mary-Lou and adult Joey end up seeming annoying and interfering because EBD involves them in every single problem even when it really doesn't concern them. Daisy is probably the most successful CS girl ever - academic success, sporting success, good looks, popularity - but never seems annoying because we aren't constantly being told how pretty/wonderful she is as we are with Len. The main characters in this book - Tom, Daisy, Bride etc - are all lovely without ever being annoying.
Author:  Lesley [ Sun Mar 02, 2008 11:31 am ]
Post subject: 
I do wonder just how weak Tom's Mother was - did she have no input into Tom's upbringing? And the fact that Tom had been told by her Father that girls had no honour - makes me wonder firstly just how good a clergyman he was having that opinion of half his parishioners and second just how much contempt he felt for his wife.
Author:  RroseSelavy [ Sun Mar 02, 2008 12:33 pm ]
Post subject: 
While I took the book for granted when I first read it at the age of 11 or 12, now I have the same questions as Lesley. Tom's father definitely has some unresolved issues and I do wonder what sort of relationship he had with his wife.

Tom has always been one of my favourite characters, partly because of her personality but partly because, as others have said elsewhere, she's allowed to be different from the typical Chalet girl. I love that first scene in the study where Hilda and Bride (I think?) are stunned by her manner :)

[Following is contentious and may be more suited for St Hild's, please could one of the mods move it if you think that's best. It's just a curious wondering]

I find it interesting that Tom continued in her 'masculine' role well into adulthood. Also, most young children have very clear ideas of gender and will rebel if you treat them as the wrong sex, yet Tom seems happy to have been brought up like a boy until she was 12. Which means that I now find it hard not to read her as possibly transgendered, as opposed to just a tomboy.
Author:  JayB [ Sun Mar 02, 2008 2:43 pm ]
Post subject: 
I have to say that I have no problem with Tom's upbringing. It happened as a result of circumstances whereby her parents switched roles, and her father stayed at home and took on the childcare, while her mother went out of the home to do the work. Tom thus didn't have what at the time might have been considered a traditional maternal or female role model as a child.

It seems to have suited Tom, since she arrived at the school a confident, well balanced young person with a good relationship with her parents. We are of course getting into the realms of nature vs nurture here, but EBD has shown girls rebelling against unsuitable upbringings - Grizel and Ted, to name two, Polly and Carola and Rikki to a lesser extent. So in her world nature counts for something (in fact the point is emphasised in Richenda). Girls do not meekly adapt their personalities to the requirements of their parents or guardians.

I didn't notice when I read the book as a child that it was two short stories put together, although it is obvious on reading as an adult.

EBD keeps Tom as a central character throughout her time at school, instead of largely forgetting about her after her own book, so we see her growing up. I think EBD is successful in keeping her true to the character she started with, while giving her added maturity over the years. The way she talks about her vocation is very moving, and I think more effective than some of the preachifying we get from ML in the later books.
Author:  jennifer [ Mon Mar 03, 2008 6:00 am ]
Post subject: 
I have a soft spot for this book, one of the first CS books I read.

I like Tom. She's unique in CS land, and isn't just a Tomboy stereotype - her strong religious feelings and make an interesting counterpoint to her masculine tastes and lack of sentimentality. She stays unique, too, but comfortable in her own personality.

I do wonder about her father - not so much the raising her in a tomboyish manner, but his extreme disappointment in not having a boy (to the extent of renaming his daughter "Tom" and aggressively raising her as a boy), and also his contempt for women. He tells his daughter than girls are sneaky and dishonourable in general, which is a pretty sweeping indictment.

Tom and Bride and their group are my favourite friend group of the series. They are friendly, nice girls, with a variety of personalities and no dominant leader. We also see them evolve over a long period of time - Bride, Primula, Nancy and Julie and the Ozannes are at the school from very young juniors, and others, like Tom, Elfie, Primrose and so on are there for a long time too. We get a number of books that focus on that group - Highland Twins and Lavender Laughs as junior middles, Tom Tackles and Rosalie as middles, and Island, Shocks, Bride Leads and Challenges as seniors, so we see them grow up naturally, as well.

Quote:
This is slightly OT, but I think that a really strong point of the Armishire and St Briavel's books is that there's no "heroine" at the school at that point. People like Tom, teenage Robin, Gay Lambert and various others, are very kind and help other people, and in their cases it comes across in a really positive way, whereas Mary-Lou and adult Joey end up seeming annoying and interfering because EBD involves them in every single problem even when it really doesn't concern them.


I think that is a very good point - the Tyrol books are dominated by Joey, and the Swiss books by ML and Len. The Armishire books have a more gentle mix of characters, with a number of leaders, but no domination of the school by a single personality.
Author:  Sunglass [ Mon Mar 03, 2008 10:30 am ]
Post subject: 
I've read this only once and a long time ago, so my references may be a bit skewed. What interested me about it was not so much Tom's tomboyishness (having had Enid Blyton's George as my personal hero/ine as a small child, she seemed familiar in the same problematic way) as the way in which the CS endorses Tom's worldview, by and large, and she isn't subjected to anything like the complete reinvention many problem new girls have to go through before they become 'proper' CS girls. She is allowed to retain her boyish name, appearance and forthright schoolboy manner throughout her school days. (She's one of the relatively rare 'special' new girls who are very different, but not 'wrong' because of it.)

All that she has to really change is her belief that girls are sillier and less honourable than boys. In fact, given that Matey (I think?) ends up having to explain the CS's ideas on codes of honour after there's some argy-bargy about making signs or passing notes in prep being dishonourable, arguably the CS has to justify itself to Tom, after her initial disappointment, rather than the other way around! (Am I remembering this right, anyone?)

What I think is going on in 'Tom Tackles' is that EBD is consciously taking on the boy's school story, in bringing a girl which such schoolboy ideas of 'honour' etc to the CS, and also taking on some of the more hyper-feminine tropes of girls's school stories, like schoolgirl crushes/pashes. In having Tom (who is essentially a boys' school story character who's wandered in to the CS books) eventually thoroughly approve of the school's honourableness, and giving her an 'appropriate', and definitely 'boyish' hero-worship of Daisy, EBD gets to see off stereotypes of girls' schools as being less morally rigorous than their male equivalents, and filled with over-excited adolescents swooning over one another in the corridors. Basically, the boys' school story gets to come in, approve, and then develop a devotion to the CS - as symbolised by the divine Daisy.
Author:  Lexi [ Mon Mar 03, 2008 1:20 pm ]
Post subject: 
JayB wrote:
I have to say that I have no problem with Tom's upbringing. It happened as a result of circumstances whereby her parents switched roles, and her father stayed at home and took on the childcare, while her mother went out of the home to do the work. Tom thus didn't have what at the time might have been considered a traditional maternal or female role model as a child.


I haven't read Tom Tackles for a while now but I really don't remember this :? What work did her mother do?
Author:  JayB [ Mon Mar 03, 2008 3:31 pm ]
Post subject: 
After Mr Gay was laid up by an accident, Mrs Gay took on all the parish work which he, or a curate if they'd had one, would have done.

I'd never thought of it before, but I suppose Tom followed in her mother's footsteps as much as her father's, since Mrs Gay was probably running or at least overseeing boys' clubs, Bible study groups and so on, as well as the more usual Vicar's wife activities, and demonstrating that women could do these things.
Author:  Travellers Joy [ Mon Mar 03, 2008 3:46 pm ]
Post subject: 
But according to Tom he was only 'laid up for months' - it doesn't say years or that it ended his career - so I can't really see that Mrs Gay could be classed as the working mother and him the stay-at-home father. He did educate Tom himself, though - it seems that in this era writers thought vicars had unlimited time to spend teaching the local off-spring (see Torley Grange where the boys are sent at a moment's notice to the vicar every morning, when their school has to shut down because of drains!) - but as I read it, Mr Gay was only stuck at home for a relatively short time in the grand scheme of things.
Author:  patmac [ Mon Mar 03, 2008 5:18 pm ]
Post subject: 
Like RroseSelavy, I accepted Tom as 'normal' when I read this book first and, like Sunglass, George was my hero/ine as I was a tomboy as well, in fact my imaginary friend was a dog called Timmy :oops: I liked Peter in the Lone Pine books as well,

The name thing didn't bother me either as I only got named Patricia because my father wanted a boy and had already chosen the name Patrick - apparently my mother's 'bump' was such that all the older women told her she was carrying a boy! It was a joke in our family whenever I got into tomboyish scrapes and it never worried me.

We have several weak mothers in EBD land - Mary-Lou's mother, Polly's mother, early on there was Jem's sister, Margot (though how she survived as a matron I can't imagine). I'm sure there were others as well.

I did find Tom refreshing as a character and agree that, for characters, the Armishire books are much stronger than the later ones.
Author:  JayB [ Mon Mar 03, 2008 7:06 pm ]
Post subject: 
Quote:
We have several weak mothers in EBD land


Mrs Gay doesn't strike me as weak. She's always described as 'brisk', and she seems competent and confident.
Author:  Miriam [ Mon Mar 03, 2008 7:28 pm ]
Post subject: 
Quote:
I do wonder about her father - not so much the raising her in a tomboyish manner, but his extreme disappointment in not having a boy (to the extent of renaming his daughter "Tom" and aggressively raising her as a boy), and also his contempt for women. He tells his daughter than girls are sneaky and dishonourable in general, which is a pretty sweeping indictment.


From the book, this seems to have been a warning specifically before Tom went to school, rather than neccesarily an intrinsic part of her education. I think Mr Gay had the impression that the atmosphere in girls schools would allow a lot that would not have passed at a boys school, and was warning Tom not to lower the standards he had given her.

Neither Tom nor her father seemed to have a lot of real knowledge about grils schools, And living in the very poor neighbourhood where they were at the time would not be conducive to gaining accurate information about expensive girl private schools. It is very possible that his 'source' was the same type of schoolgirl magazine that Rosamund Lilley used to read, where scholarship girls were denigrated and there were some sneaky and dishounerable girls. He needed to warn Tom about this posibility, but did not intend to condemn all girls.

Tom was looking at things (as is stypical at that age) in black and white, with no idea of accptable grey areas. At the first sign of omething remotely underhand, she immediatly classifes it as black, and is loyal to her fathers upbringing, and condemns it. What she neeeds to learn in her first term is a degree of flexibility, while remaining loyal to her notions of houner.
Author:  Tor [ Tue Mar 04, 2008 12:27 pm ]
Post subject: 
I really like Tom as a character, and think she is one of the most vivid in the series... however I have to add the caveat that I read the wales books before any of the rest of the series, and so may be biased (peggy was my very first chalet, and I read them as I found them in shops in a completely random order).

I also loved Tom because of the dolls' houses. I just loved reading the descriptions of the hobbies clubs where they made and furnished them. I completely wrecked my own dolls house trying to renovate it in imitation of them :oops: I always though hobbies sounded very dull before then (just could not get excited about Jo's jigsaws or the needle work). But that is about the charatcer and the not the book, so OT sorry!

Actually, what I find hard to imagine is reading the CS without having has the short story fillers added in, if you had read them in sequence as they were published (rather than me as an 80's child reading them willy nilly). It must have been very strange to have gone from Gay/jo to the rescue to the later books where Tom is a fairly strong character and just have had her appear all of a sudden. Do you think EBD had her planned out in her mind, but decided to save her story for later, or that Tom just crept up on her, but then cried out for a filler in when it became clear she was a strong character? She is just such a very big part of the form dynamic of Bride and co, that it seems weird to have her step in fully formed with nary and word about her before?
:?
Author:  leahbelle [ Tue Mar 04, 2008 2:58 pm ]
Post subject: 
I like Tom. She's a very refreshing character, especially coming on the heels of such annoying new girls as Lavender.
Author:  JustJen [ Tue Mar 04, 2008 3:32 pm ]
Post subject: 
I loved Tom. She is one of the best characters that EMB wrote about. In fact I found that most of the girls in the Wales series are very real to me.
Author:  Sunglass [ Tue Mar 04, 2008 3:56 pm ]
Post subject: 
Just coming in on the topic of Tom's mother. I can't remember her at all from this novel, but she seems authoritative and even rather managerial (shades of a more likeable 'sodger'ish Vicar's wife?) at the beginning of Problem when she comes to Rosamund Lilley's house and tells her about the scholarship and buying the uniform. She also seems perfectly at home in the kitchen of the Lilley's relatively humble home, which I suppose contributes to Tom's ease with her boys' clubs and urban missionary work.
Author:  Lottie [ Tue Mar 04, 2008 5:42 pm ]
Post subject: 
Tor wrote:
Actually, what I find hard to imagine is reading the CS without having has the short story fillers added in, if you had read them in sequence as they were published (rather than me as an 80's child reading them willy nilly). It must have been very strange to have gone from Gay/jo to the rescue to the later books where Tom is a fairly strong character and just have had her appear all of a sudden. Do you think EBD had her planned out in her mind, but decided to save her story for later, or that Tom just crept up on her, but then cried out for a filler in when it became clear she was a strong character? She is just such a very big part of the form dynamic of Bride and co, that it seems weird to have her step in fully formed with nary and word about her before?
:?

Tom first appeared in two parts in the Second Chalet Book for Girls (1948) and Third Chalet Book for Girls (1949), so it was probably written at around the same time as the books either side of it. Rescue was published in 1945. Mystery appeared in the First Chalet Book for Girls (1947). Three Go was published in 1949.
Author:  Tor [ Wed Mar 05, 2008 5:09 pm ]
Post subject: 
Thanks Lottie! that explains it very nicely.
Author:  Kathy_S [ Mon Mar 10, 2008 3:52 pm ]
Post subject: 
I agree that Tom is an excellent addition to the CS, both in this book and as a character who develops during the series.

Tom, Miss Wilson points out on day one, has "character," and most of her ideals mesh perfectly well with those of the CS. All she really had to learn (besides French and a few other minor details) was that being "honourable" isn't limited to "gentlemen," something that all readers of the CS knew from the start. As for her mannerisms, most were shared by any number of tomboy heroines in my childhood reading: unladylike, yes; mannish, not really, for all EBD keeps saying so. Boyish, if you're going back to the era of
Quote:
Whistling girls and crowing hens
Always come to some bad ends,
dresses so long a you might learn to walk with a hampered stride, and an annoying lack of usable pockets in clothing for girls/women. (Actually the latter is still alive and well in some lines of clothing.)

For originating as a pair of short stories, I'd say Tom does pretty well as a stand-alone novel. There are a few things that grate, such as Tom appearing to forget that Daisy plans to be a doctor or that she's related to Bride, but by and large it flows well.

I thought the Daisy storyline rather realistic, since it's quite common for young (and not so young) people to take someone as a role model and then be shocked by feet of clay -- even though, in this case, the "flaw" was all a misunderstanding.

Trivia question of the day: Am I the only one who was amused by the idea that "not my cup of tea" is such horrendous slang that it had to be attributed to Bad Bill?
Author:  jenster [ Wed Apr 16, 2008 8:28 am ]
Post subject: 
Related to Tom, I've just reread Bride and there were references to a very close friendship between Tom and Loveday, can't remember the exact lines, but in a couple of places, and Tom went red or got embarrassed or something, seems like she had a pattern of crushes on girls, but this one might have been reciprocated?? Just found one quote:
Quote:
Tom passed over the hint that she and Loveday had been on extra special terms of friendship"
and "
Quote:
we don't go in for writing billets doux to each other. Both miles too busy"


PS - who was Loveday, don't really recall her being anything until she's announced as Head Girl, but maybe that's just my memory. I never really liked the UK books when I was younger, probably because they didn't have Jo and co or Mary Lou in them, but rereading them now they seem much more appealing!
Author:  Dreaming Marianne [ Sat Apr 19, 2008 8:57 pm ]
Post subject: 
Travellers Joy wrote:
He did educate Tom himself, though - it seems that in this era writers thought vicars had unlimited time to spend teaching the local off-spring (see Torley Grange where the boys are sent at a moment's notice to the vicar every morning, when their school has to shut down because of drains!)


"Brat Farrar" too - don't the twins go and see - oooh, what's his name? You know, Nancy's husband the vicar, every morning?
Author:  JayB [ Sat Apr 19, 2008 9:06 pm ]
Post subject: 
Although it was the case, wasn't it, that some clergy stipends were so small that if the man didn't have a private income he had to supplement it by whatever means possible. Private coaching or cramming was something that could be fitted in reasonably well with clergy duties. And if you had a big Georgian or Victorian vicarage, you could take boarders too.

(Sure I've come across a story or book about some boys who went to a clergyman to be crammed for university or Army entrance, but can't think what it was now.)
Author:  Sunglass [ Sat Apr 19, 2008 10:46 pm ]
Post subject: 
I think that's absolutely right re tiny clergy stipends and the necessity to make some money by tutoring anyone in the vicinity - Jane Austen's father was essentially running a boys' school in Steventon vicarage, and the preponderance of tutoring vicars in so many novels must have some basis in sociological fact...?
Author:  roversgirl [ Sun Apr 20, 2008 8:35 am ]
Post subject: 
Doesn't Matthew Lacey go to tutoring with the Vicar in the Melling Books? I think he's being prepared for University.
Author:  Mrs Redboots [ Mon Apr 21, 2008 5:20 pm ]
Post subject: 
And Hilary (male, despite his name), elderly, lame, poor and holy, tutors the children in Elizabeth Gouge's "Damerosehay" series.
All times are UTC
Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group
http://www.phpbb.com/