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The CBB -> Joey's Trunk

#1: boyfriends Author: Laura VLocation: Czech Republic PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 11:49 am
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apart from Elma Conroy are any of the Chalet girls mentioned as having a boyfriend whilst at school? Surely there must have been some boys up on the Platz that would dare to try and see the girls!

#2:  Author: KatherineLocation: London, UK PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 12:01 pm
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Guess we have to count Len and Reg.
And wasn't Marie still at school when she became engaged? She met the Baron at a Sale, I think.
Suppose it depends on our definition of boyfriend.

#3:  Author: MiaLocation: London PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 12:02 pm
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Joan Baker is hanging around with the disreputable Vic Coles in her home town before she goes to the Chalet School.

#4:  Author: JennieLocation: Cambridgeshire PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 12:03 pm
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Marie was still at school. She and the Baron met when she was captain of the rowing team, when they beat the Saints in a race along the lake.

#5:  Author: RayLocation: Bristol, England PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 12:16 pm
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Mia wrote:
Joan Baker is hanging around with the disreputable Vic Coles in her home town before she goes to the Chalet School.


Yes; but the real question with THAT one is exactly what sex was Vic Coles, anyway?...!

Tisn't clear from the text, and though I know I assumed it was male when I first read Problem, when I reread it more recently, I did start to wonder...

Ray *dragging everything down to the gutter*

#6:  Author: KateLocation: Ireland PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 12:21 pm
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Ray wrote:
Mia wrote:
Joan Baker is hanging around with the disreputable Vic Coles in her home town before she goes to the Chalet School.


Yes; but the real question with THAT one is exactly what sex was Vic Coles, anyway?...!

Tisn't clear from the text, and though I know I assumed it was male when I first read Problem, when I reread it more recently, I did start to wonder...

Ray *dragging everything down to the gutter*


*makes inviegley drabble noises*

#7:  Author: RayLocation: Bristol, England PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 12:24 pm
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Kate wrote:
Ray wrote:
Mia wrote:
Joan Baker is hanging around with the disreputable Vic Coles in her home town before she goes to the Chalet School.


Yes; but the real question with THAT one is exactly what sex was Vic Coles, anyway?...!

Tisn't clear from the text, and though I know I assumed it was male when I first read Problem, when I reread it more recently, I did start to wonder...

Ray *dragging everything down to the gutter*


*makes inviegley drabble noises*


Nononono. Someone else can handle that bunny thankyouverymuch.

*looks at tiny bunny that just appeared on her desk*

Go on; shoo! Go and pester someone else!

Ray *too many bunnies; too little time*

#8:  Author: KateLocation: Ireland PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 12:35 pm
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*sends bunny treats* Very Happy

#9:  Author: NellLocation: exiled from the big smoke PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 12:35 pm
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But Ray you were wanting CS bunnies...

#10:  Author: Alison HLocation: Manchester PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 12:38 pm
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I always assumed Vic Coles was a boy until I read an article about Problem in which it was suggested that Vic could've been short for Victoria, but I still think Vic was Victor!

Marie and Eugen agreed to get engaged in New House, although the official engagement party wasn't until after Marie had left school. I always got the impression that Jack was interested in Joey whilst she was still at school, although obviously they didn't get together until later.

Ailie and Janice and co have a discussion - I think it's in Adrienne - about boyfriends, but it's only about non-CS girls who have boyfriends.

I sometimes wonder when exactly Gisela and Gottfried, and Bernhilda and Kurt as well, "changed" from having friend's brother/sister's friend relationships to having "romantic" relationships, but we're never told much about how either couple got together. And Peggy Bettany and Giles Winterton for that matter.

#11:  Author: MiaLocation: London PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 12:40 pm
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I wondered too, but I now think it's a boy - I think a girl wouldn't have that shorterned version of Victoria then. Vic... I don't know for sure but I just think it's very much a boy's short (for the time).

I always thought he was like a teddy-boy type... Smile

And I suppose men/boys could get away with having 'an unsavoury reputation' more than girls could... EBD would have phrased it different and said FemaleVic wasn't ladylike or something... and sharing fish and chips sounds like a teenage date type thing...

Also they mention boyfriends when Joan starts at the CS so I assumed she knew boys.

Them's my theories!

#12:  Author: FatimaLocation: Sunny Qatar PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 12:40 pm
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I agree that Vic Coles was a boy - wouldn't a girl have been called Vicky?

#13:  Author: RayLocation: Bristol, England PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 12:53 pm
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Nell wrote:
But Ray you were wanting CS bunnies...


Yes - the ones who're supposed to be helping me write Francie! Or failing that, bunnies that will let me write a bedtime drabble.

Ray *who really REALLY should be programming* *and isn't*

#14:  Author: CatyLocation: New Zealand PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 1:34 pm
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Agrees that Vic Cole is meant to be male. I never noticed before that he/she is never defined.

*Send Ray's Francie bunnies lots of treats*

#15:  Author: TiffanyLocation: Is this a duck I see behind me? PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 2:26 pm
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I assumed Vic was a bloke on first reading, but now I'm wondering. Don't we see some adult disapproval of him/her/it? If so, wouldn't they say something about the impropriety of Joan hanging out with (shock, horror) a BOY? In EBD's world girls don't seem spend time on their own with boys.

#16:  Author: MiaLocation: London PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 2:35 pm
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Tiffany wrote:
I assumed Vic was a bloke on first reading, but now I'm wondering. Don't we see some adult disapproval of him/her/it? If so, wouldn't they say something about the impropriety of Joan hanging out with (shock, horror) a BOY? In EBD's world girls don't seem spend time on their own with boys.


It's one of the reasons given for the Bakers sending Joan away to boarding school, isn't it?

#17:  Author: Alison HLocation: Manchester PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 2:42 pm
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Mary-Lou always seemed very friendly with Tony Barrass, but only in a brother/sister kind of way.

#18:  Author: TanLocation: London via Newcastle Australia PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 2:56 pm
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I do remember that Mary-Lou makes a comment to Jack in Problem. They are talking about Joan Baker and her talk about boys. Mary-Lou makes a comment that they all have boyfriends of course ... jack's reply is along the lines that it is good for them to have boy-chums.

Oh dear, I must know that by heart. Shocked

It was one of the first books I owned.

#19:  Author: jenniferLocation: Taiwan PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 3:54 pm
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The Chalet school approved technique of marrying seems to be

1) Stay as naive as possible while at school

2) Marry the first non-related male you have any significant contact with

It does seem to be an abrupt transition. The girls are fairly young when they leave school, but go straight from being schoolgirls with, at most, wistful fantasies about marriage, to married with kids in no time flat. I would guess that, particularly for the Austrian girls in the early books, the parents had a great deal of control over which unmarried males they had contact with - insuring that the first man who displays any interest in them is someone suitable. The Austrian girls weren't allowed to even go across town without an escort when they were at home, so random meetings of eligible young men would be rare.

I cringe when I think of some of the girls going off to co-ed universities far away from home. The triplets, for example, have been living since the age of ten in a small, isolated mountain village in a British enclave and attending a sheltered girl's school. Most of the other doctors seem to be fairly young (no doctors with young sons), and there are really no other English boys up there. The only boys in their age range that they see are cousins, brothers, and foster brothers, except for Tony Barras.

Then they go off to university in a different country, with girls (and boys) with much more experienced backgrounds, and absolutely no clue of how to interact in it.

#20:  Author: MiaLocation: London PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 4:03 pm
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jennifer wrote:
Then they go off to university in a different country, with girls (and boys) with much more experienced backgrounds, and absolutely no clue of how to interact in it.


But how would the other students have more experienced backgrounds? In the fifties (the triplets would have gone then, wouldn't they) most of the UK's undergrad female population would have come from very similar backgrounds, I think. Especially Oxbridge. And then women's colleges had a lot of curfews and rules as well.

#21:  Author: KateLocation: Ireland PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 4:41 pm
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I don't think they had as little contact with other boys as we assume they had - it was just that we didn't see it. The girls often went on holiday to friends' houses - these friends often had brothers. And many of Joey's friends have sons. The triplets would know the Embury boys quite well, for example, as well as Marie's Wolferl and Gisela's boys - and probably the Lucy, Chester and Ozanne boys. We just never heard about them meeting as EBD wasn't too comfortable writing about boys.

#22:  Author: JayBLocation: SE England PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 4:56 pm
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I think the triplets' social circle and knowledge of the world was much more restricted than that of other girls their age at that time. They didn't know anyone outside the small expat School/San community. They hardly knew anyone who wasn't a teacher, a doctor, or a CS girl. More importantly, perhaps, they didn't know anyone whom their parents didn't also know. We never hear of one of them saying over breakfast at Freudesheim 'I think I'll pop down to Interlaken today.' Even in their late teens their days still seem to be planned for them by their mother. They didn't have television, we don't hear of them going to the cinema, I don't recall if we ever hear of one of them reading a newspaper.

Other girls, by the time they were getting on for nineteen, would have built up their own social circles, independently of their parents, through school, church, clubs, friends of friends. They would decide for themselves how to spend their days in the holidays.

Jay B.

#23:  Author: jenniferLocation: Taiwan PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 5:33 pm
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JayB wrote:
I think the triplets' social circle and knowledge of the world was much more restricted than that of other girls their age at that time. They didn't know anyone outside the small expat School/San community. They hardly knew anyone who wasn't a teacher, a doctor, or a CS girl. More importantly, perhaps, they didn't know anyone whom their parents didn't also know.


Yes, I think that's the difference with the triplets - you have the isolation of an all girls school, combined with parents who are intent on keeping them young as long as possible, combined with a fairly isolated home environment. As JayB says, even at age 18 a lot of their social life when home is still organised by Joey.

I don't think they'd encounter people like the Lucy/Ozanne/Chester boys and so on as much once they were in Switzerland, particularly once they give up Plas Gwyn and start spending their holidays in Austria.

#24:  Author: Alison HLocation: Manchester PostPosted: Sun Jul 02, 2006 10:28 pm
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Just been re-reading Adrienne, in which Janice says that she supposes they don't have time to think about boys much because they're too busy with school stuff, and then Ailie says that she wouldn't mind going out to dances but she'd never be allowed, but that she doesn't want to get married before doing anything else with her life and have umpteen kids like her Auntie Joey.

Apart from the way they seem to associate teenage boyfriends with early marriage, I quite like that conversation - I love Ailie's comment about Joey!

#25:  Author: macyroseLocation: Great White North (Canada) PostPosted: Mon Jul 03, 2006 3:31 am
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Alison H wrote:

Quote:
Just been re-reading Adrienne, in which Janice says that she supposes they don't have time to think about boys much because they're too busy with school stuff, and then Ailie says that she wouldn't mind going out to dances but she'd never be allowed, but that she doesn't want to get married before doing anything else with her life and have umpteen kids like her Auntie Joey.


At the end of that conversation Thyra says; "Anyhow, Miss Moore has been cocking an eye at us. We'd better stop talking about boys or she'll be coming down on us." This always made me think that (like the conversation Mary-Lou had with Jack Maynard about Joan Baker and boys) having boyfriends or even talking about boys while a girl was still at school was just not done, for whatever reason. Though Janice does mention that she knows of two girls at home (who are not CS pupils) who have boyfriends, and of course Marie von Eschenau and Len Maynard got engaged while still at school, but they seem to be exceptions, and neither Marie or Len is really shown as dating the men they eventually get engaged to.

I've always been interested in the contrast in attitudes towards boys and boyfriends in American and British fiction for girls. I've read a lot of teen fiction written in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s (like all the ones published by Image Cascade - http://www.imagecascade.com/ ) and the attitude in the American books is that dating and having boyfriends during the high school years is normal (though going too far with them is not looked on approvingly). But in most British books of that time (and Adrienne was published in 1965) the attitude seems to be that thinking and talking about boys is somehow vulgar or low-class.

I have an interesting book that actually talks about this. It's called Francie by Emily Hahn and was published in 1951. Francie's father has been travelling a lot on business for many years and wants to spend time with his daughter before she goes to college, so since he'll be based in England for a year, he takes her, against her wishes, to England with him and sends her to a boarding school. On the way over she meets Penelope, a British girl who was evacuated to the U.S. during the war and is finally returning. The following discussion takes place in England between Francie and Penelope;

Quote:
Francie sighed. "To be absolutely frank with you, Penelope, I miss all the boys, that's what's worrying me most. Don't you ever want a date? Why are all these girls so, well, indifferent to dates and men and all that? Why, you know perfectly well that any female back home who didn't have her Saturday night date just wouldn't rate at all."
Penelope's face took on the uneasy experession that Fancie had learned to associate at Fairfields with any mention of dating.
"Yes, I know. But they don't go in for all that until later on, in England," she said. "Not until school's over, or anyway only during hols. Thinking very much about boys is soppy. That's how the English look at it."
Francie said in amazement, "But that's absolutely mad! What's wrong with boys? Why, half the world is boys!"
"I know," said Penny, "but they don't think of that. It - it's just considered soppy."
"What's soppy? What's wrong with dates? In Jefferson --"
"It's different here, Francie. It's no use arguing with me about it, I didn't make the rules. I'm only trying to explain the difference," said Penelope reasonably. "I don't mean girls here live in a nunnery, necessarily. We go to parties sometimes, we dance with men. Only, as long as we're at school we're supposed to keep our minds on - shhh." The games mistress had blown her whistle shrilly, demanding silence. The girls all stood at attention.


So, did the American and British books really reflect the attitudes of the two countries at the times? Both my parents grew up in the 1950s and they said they dated while they were in high school and went to mixed parties and socials (often held at the schools). My mother also said that boys were a common subject of discussion among her and her friends. But I don't know anyone who grew up in Britain then so I don't know what it was really like there. Perhaps some people here can tell me?

#26:  Author: Kathy_SLocation: midwestern US PostPosted: Mon Jul 03, 2006 4:59 am
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I've also wondered about this difference between American & British books, and to what extent it reflected cultural norms. The only other fiction I can think of in which this sort of culture clash is put so explicitly is in Michelle Magorian's Back Home, which involves the return of the heroine after evacuation from England during WWII.

I actually suspect the American books reflected only a certain subset of American teens, but that this subset may well have been held up as the norm.

#27:  Author: Rosy-JessLocation: Gloucestershire-London-Aberystwyth PostPosted: Mon Jul 03, 2006 9:20 am
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macyrose wrote:
of course Marie von Eschenau and Len Maynard got engaged while still at school, but they seem to be exceptions, and neither Marie or Len is really shown as dating the men they eventually get engaged to.


Both of these two get engaged to men that their parents know and approve of. Marie is probably the better example, given that Reg had Len marked out from the time she was 16 or so, and had asked her father yonks in advance (Whole new levels of creep) for permission to date her - not that they ever did date ask such - there were the odd wistful glances and then the world's most pitiful excuse for a proposal! Like it darling? No!

#28:  Author: CatyLocation: New Zealand PostPosted: Mon Jul 03, 2006 11:10 am
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I think that EBD really just set her books in the right era up until the war. After that she doesn't really keep up with the times, except for a few episodes like in Redheads at the Chalet school, Ted's smoking, Joan Baker & professor Richardson. Most of these don't really come across very realistically, so I think EBD just stuck with what she was comfortable with & ignored the rest. I can't remeber when it was she started writing full time, but I suspect she had little or no contact with teenagers from then onwards, so she lost even more touch with reality in her stories.

#29:  Author: RóisínLocation: Ireland PostPosted: Mon Jul 03, 2006 12:05 pm
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Macy Thanks for that link - those books look fantastic!

#30:  Author: Alison HLocation: Manchester PostPosted: Mon Jul 03, 2006 12:57 pm
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I agree about her getting out of touch. I don't think it's unrealistic that Marie, especially seeing as as a member of the aristocracy she would have been "protected" by her family, would in the mid-1930s have got engaged to someone she knew but hadn't actually dated as such, but I do find it wholly unrealistic that Len in the late 1950s would've got engaged to someone she'd never been "out" with.

#31:  Author: RóisínLocation: Ireland PostPosted: Mon Jul 03, 2006 1:01 pm
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Alison H wrote:
...I do find it wholly unrealistic that Len in the late 1950s would've got engaged to someone she'd never been "out" with.


But it's not like she didn't know him well. He was an almost constant visitor and family friend (more, even) since she was small. Why would they need a date, since they knew each other to that level?

#32:  Author: JayBLocation: SE England PostPosted: Mon Jul 03, 2006 2:15 pm
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Róisín wrote:
But it's not like she didn't know him well. He was an almost constant visitor and family friend (more, even) since she was small. Why would they need a date, since they knew each other to that level?

But how well can you really get to know someone when you only see them in company with lots of other people? And Reg would always be to a certain extent on his best behaviour with the Maynards, since Jack was his boss. I think you need to spend an extended amount of time in someone's sole company to know whether you've really got anything to say to each other.

Jay B.

#33:  Author: Rosy-JessLocation: Gloucestershire-London-Aberystwyth PostPosted: Mon Jul 03, 2006 5:15 pm
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JayB wrote:
Róisín wrote:
But it's not like she didn't know him well. He was an almost constant visitor and family friend (more, even) since she was small. Why would they need a date, since they knew each other to that level?


But how well can you really get to know someone when you only see them in company with lots of other people? And Reg would always be to a certain extent on his best behaviour with the Maynards, since Jack was his boss. I think you need to spend an extended amount of time in someone's sole company to know whether you've really got anything to say to each other.


Exactly my thoughts. I mean, I would never have started to date my other half had I not somehow been left with him on my own once. Because before that I had some strange ideas about what he was really like. I don't think Len can really have known Reg that well - but then, did Joey know Jack all that well?

#34:  Author: RóisínLocation: Ireland PostPosted: Mon Jul 03, 2006 5:23 pm
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Hmm, see I think that there would have been lots of opportunities for Len and Reg to spend time alone together, within the closefamilyfriend-Freudesheim-School sphere. Especially because he was that little bit older and a doctor - there would have been no questions raised about Len walking with him unescorted, or them chatting in the garden etc. Also - Freudesheim was massive, with lots of big rooms and the garden. Other people could still have been around but Len and Reg could still have been private in their conversation, IYSWIM.

I think the same is true of Joey and Jack in Die Rosen. (Didn't Jack live there?) There would have been lots of excuses for them to spend time together - we only see a few of them such as the two of them driving to collect the Lintons, or walking Rufus - but that doesn't mean they didn't happen.

EBD never meant to give us a blow-by-blow account of either relationship. It does seem to us now that the two girls married quickly and to men that they didn't know so well (though I disagree with that) but they never married randomly. Falling in love and getting engaged didn't appear out of thin air for either Reg, Jack, Joey or Len.

#35:  Author: ChangnoiLocation: Milwaukee, USA PostPosted: Mon Jul 03, 2006 5:37 pm
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Kathy_S wrote:
I've also wondered about this difference between American & British books, and to what extent it reflected cultural norms. The only other fiction I can think of in which this sort of culture clash is put so explicitly is in Michelle Magorian's Back Home, which involves the return of the heroine after evacuation from England during WWII.

I actually suspect the American books reflected only a certain subset of American teens, but that this subset may well have been held up as the norm.


Back Home is great on this subject! One of the British girls believes that the heroine will get pregnant because rumor has gone round that she has spent nights talking with a boy in her pyjamas, and that this is how you "get a baby". There are also several references to waiting to date until after you've finished university or else you won't be considered "nice". Of course, this is set in the period immediately after WWII, and many of the characters expressing these attitudes are also portrayed as clinging to pre-war beliefs.

One of the American books that I have read from the 1930s portrays the heroine (aged 15) as not actually dating, but she also understands that she will soon date--probably when she has had her cotillion, and for that reason, she watches the adult women of her acquaintance very carefully to see how they interact with men, and then sort of models herself on them. So there are a lot of passages where she's trying on hats like she's seen her camp counselor do before her fiance visits, or using certain body language that she's observed to let her male friend, who will obviously in time become her boyfriend (named "Honky", by the way--this is a Southern book) know she's interested. Of course, she also wears makeup.

Chang

#36:  Author: jenniferLocation: Taiwan PostPosted: Tue Jul 04, 2006 9:29 am
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I wonder whether some of the differences in the portrayal of British/North American attitudes towards dating are class rather than nationality based.

The boarding school genre centres around girls who are upper and lower-upper class, socially and financially. Their parents can afford to send them to an exclusive boarding school, 'poor' means not having private means and (oh horrors) having to live off your salary, families have multiple servants and governesses.

In a lot of the US/Canadian books I can think of, the economic social class is much different - less upper class and more middle class and rural, with very different attitudes and ideas and rarely in a boarding school or same sex environment.

Actually, the social class and the sort of class-consciousness portrayed in the CS books is one I find culturally rather foreign. There is an awareness that they are well-bred, and they hold themselves above people who are regarded as lower class - comments about village children, the idea that lower class people can pick up manners by aping their betters and a very clear separation between the gentlefolk and the common folk.

I think these distinctions were heavily blurred in the process of emigration to the new world. Many of the people who came over did so to improve their financial situation, particularly the promise of owning land, because there was little for them back home. The social classes were mixed up, and people from lower classes could move upwards based on financial success, hard work or luck.

The closest example I can think of from North American lit would be Little Women, where they are more in the impovrished gentry mode. They've lost money, but the mother still spends her days in charitable work, and the two girls who do need to work do so as a governess and an old lady's companion, rather than going out to work in a shop or factory. There is the attitute that certain types of boy talk and behavior are vulgar, but there is socialising between the girls and boys, and as they get older it turns to courting. This, mind you, is set in New England, which would have been one of the bastions of the more formal, moneyed society, where the traditional class consciousness would be strongest.

#37:  Author: JayBLocation: SE England PostPosted: Tue Jul 04, 2006 2:30 pm
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Quote:
I wonder whether some of the differences in the portrayal of British/North American attitudes towards dating are class rather than nationality based.

I don't think it can be entirely that. Angela Brazil and EJO wrote about a similar type of girl, and they wrote about boy-girl friendships, with sometimes a hint of something more, back in the 1910s and 1920s.

ETA: I'm not sure we should think of the CS, or EJO's Abbey, as having anything to do with the real world, or in any way reflecting RL attitudes, especially the later CS books, when the time at which they were written had become so out of synch with the time at whic they should have been set.

Jay B.

#38:  Author: Loryat PostPosted: Tue Aug 08, 2006 5:54 pm
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Yes when you look at Enid Blyton's boarding school stories (even the Naughtiest Girl which is at a mixed school (!)) they never go in for boyfriends. The girls who talk about film stars are considered sily and even then they seem to be more interested in comparing themselves to female stars rather than lusting after male ones. Also, didn't women's colleges in the fifties and sixties have housemothers and curfews and things? So they would continue to live a sheltered life.

#39:  Author: patmacLocation: Yorkshire England PostPosted: Tue Aug 08, 2006 6:42 pm
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As a near contemporary of the triplets, I can only tell you how it was for me.

My parents were working class - father worked in a factory, mother worked part time in a school canteen to pay for my school uniform.

I got a scholarship to a rather good Convent High School, part boarding, part day girls.

At school, we were chaperoned whenever we associated with boys - we learned ballroom dancing with the boys at a nearby boys' equivalent of our own single sex school. I do remember one day girl who had a boyfriend from about age 15 and it was talked about in hushed whispers - incidentally she went on to marry him and is still very happy. The nuns and the lay staff were very keen for us to concentrate on our studies and boys were considered distractions (I wonder why?)

Quite honestly, with Lacrosse, swimming, tennis, cricket, netball, Guides, orchestra practice, choir practice, country dancing, visits to concerts and the theatre - not to mention homework - I don't think I would have had time for a boyfriend, even if I had had the inclination.

At home, in a working class environment, anyone who married in their teens watched carefully for signs of weight gain - after all, they probably 'had to' get married. Single motherhood was not an option and couples 'saved up' to get the necessary belongings for their first home. Credit or 'tick' as it was known, was something only feckless people considered.

I had my first 'boyfriend' when I was sixteen and it was so innocent you wouldn't credit it today.

That was England in the 50s and early 60s - I can see why some of you have problems believing it as it was 50 yrs ago.

#40:  Author: VickLocation: Leeds, Yorkshire PostPosted: Tue Aug 08, 2006 6:44 pm
    —
macyrose wrote:
So, did the American and British books really reflect the attitudes of the two countries at the times? Both my parents grew up in the 1950s and they said they dated while they were in high school and went to mixed parties and socials (often held at the schools). My mother also said that boys were a common subject of discussion among her and her friends. But I don't know anyone who grew up in Britain then so I don't know what it was really like there. Perhaps some people here can tell me?


It was similar in 1950's Britain. My parents grew up then & said they hung around in mixed groups & went to the local Youth Club & dances where they would have met boys. Although they were probably what EBD would have called "local village children" as they both come from working class backgrounds.

#41:  Author: JayBLocation: SE England PostPosted: Tue Aug 08, 2006 6:57 pm
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Loryat wrote:
Also, didn't women's colleges in the fifties and sixties have housemothers and curfews and things? So they would continue to live a sheltered life.

At that time, young men and women under 21 were still minors, so college authorities were much more in loco parentis than they are today. Women's colleges had to be more cautious than men's, for obvious reasons!

Jay B.

#42:  Author: macyroseLocation: Great White North (Canada) PostPosted: Tue Aug 08, 2006 11:12 pm
    —
Vick wrote:

Quote:
It was similar in 1950's Britain. My parents grew up then & said they hung around in mixed groups & went to the local Youth Club & dances where they would have met boys. Although they were probably what EBD would have called "local village children" as they both come from working class backgrounds.


Thanks, Vick, for letting me know. Very Happy



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