Chalet School

You'll get there, you'll get there, you'll get there.

Hello, and welcome to Top Hole, the podcast about Elinor and Brent Dyer, the Chalet School, and anything vaguely connected.

I'm Debra Lofus, and I'm a fan.

The usual provisos apply with respect to pronunciation, spoilers, and bonkersness.

Please see episode zero.

It's a Hayley week, yay, and today we're discussing that most important of EBD characters, the school's headmistress.

I'm fairly sure that the creators of Doctor Who were big Chalet School fans because how else did they come up with the idea of the Doctor regenerating into a different person? They'd been doing this at the Chalet School for decades.

As one headmistress moves on, another takes her place, carrying out the same role in her own way.

You'll get there.

Hello, and welcome to Top Hole, the podcast about Eleanor Anne Brent-Dyer, The Chalet School, and anything vaguely connected.

I'm Debra Lofas, and I'm a fan.

The usual provisos apply with respect to pronunciation, spoilers, and bonkersness.

EBD had a busy year with published books in 1932, which also saw Janey of La Rochelle, The Little Marijosé, and The Chalet Girls in Camp arriving on the country's bookshelves.

EBD had been a published author for 10 years, and in her biographer Helen McClellan's view, she was now in the top 10 of school story writers, if not yet one of the big four.

The Chalet School series had reached book number eight and the golden period of its history where Jo Bettany is head girl, and EBD seems to have been experimenting a bit in her writing.

The Chalet Girls in Camp takes the Chalet Girls completely away from the school environment.

For me, it was a, a particular moment when I was about, about nine years old.

I was reading one of the Chalet School books, a girls' school stories set in Switzerland and Austria, and one of the characters grows up to become a writer.

And in one of the books she gets a letter from a publisher, and there's a check in this letter.

Do you remember checks?