It is a truth universally acknowledged…

… that Summer Term at the Chalet School is a little bit pants. Train crashes! Swarming wasps! Impoverished orphans! Craters!

But oh, this illustration is superb. The edition I’m reading is a very tattered old hb (on loan from library) and so I’ll apologise for the picture quality. If I had a scanner, I’d have scanned it in but you’ll have to do with a photo.

And now that I’ve done that, please enjoy and LOL at Joey’s hair! Pastry missiles! The EARS of the schoolboy! The UTTER DRAMA OF THE SCENE!

 

“Erica bit firmly into a pastry roll and a large dollop of whipped cream shot out of the further end.”

9 thoughts on “It is a truth universally acknowledged…

  1. Oh this is glorious! Never has Joey’s Danish pastry hair been so brilliantly depicted! (If I was any good with Photoshop I would love to replicate this scene with Princess Leia as Joey and Yoda as the school boy…)

  2. I bought the GGB ebook of Exile a couple of weeks ago (it has a historical timeline and everything!) and was delighted – and by that I mean ‘in fits of giggles’ – at the illustration where Jo is running into the arms of Jack, who (being a 1930s chap out for a walk) has his trousers tucked into his socks. Tucked. Into. Socks. I showed it to the fellow CS fan at work and we’re been making ‘REAL men wear plus fours/trousers tucked into long socks!’ jokes for days. I may have to make gifs to use as badges/icons.

    I also very, very nearly paid over the odds for a hardback of Rescue this week, partly because I haven’t read it and I suspect that it is highly bonkers, but also because the frontispiece for it is *amazing*. Of all the incidents to chose to do an illustration for, Jo in the garden with the lump of meat wasn’t exactly the best choice…

      1. I’m fairly familiar with pre-war fashion, but it had *never* occurred to me that all those manly Sonnalpe doctors would be running around the mountains dressed like that. I’m never going to envisage those treks back up to Die Rosen in the same way again…

        The quote in the caption for the Rescue frontispiece is part of what made me laugh so much, quite truly. That and the expression of (highly unattractive!) grim disgust on Jo’s face!

      2. You are selling this more and more to me … “What’s that Joey? Another kid has fallen off a mountain side and is hanging off a young tree usefully growing in a precipice? I’ll be right there!” *pauses to tuck in trousers* πŸ™‚

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