Ever thought about getting out of the UK on a paid holiday in the snowy slopes? Think again.
As Jenny Jones celebrated her bronze medal – the first medal on snow for Britain at the Winter Olympics – she reflected on when she was a chalet maid cooking breakfast and put paid to the myth that all chalet girls are posh.
Traditionally, being a chalet girl was a stopping-off point between leaving school and bagging a nice husband with whom to live in Fulham. You learnt how to whip up a sponge in your sleep, got drunk a lot and maybe did a bit of skiing in your spare time. Jones, 33, doesn’t fit that mould. A fireman’s daughter from Bristol, she worked as a chalet girl in Tignes because that was the only way she could afford to spend winter in the Alps.
Being a chalet girl is not glamorous.
A male friend didn’t get off so lightly: desperate to spend a season skiing he took a last-minute job as a glamorous-sounding plongeur and thus found himself washing-up for five months in Lech. For anyone who doesn’t know, the chalet girl gig works like this: in return for accommodation, a ski pass and a bit of cash, you cater and clean for a succession of holiday parties. That means rising early – breakfast has to be on the table at 7am – and whipping up a teatime cake followed by dinner. From mid-morning to teatime, and from dinner until the next morning – the clubs stay open until 5am – your time is your own. Those doing it properly don’t sleep for five months (they’re out partying) and do a lot of skiing. And if you think that Jones must have been in bed every night at nine to achieve what she’s achieved, then bear in mind that she has a favourite breakdance move, the “drunken caterpillar”. She also enjoys a G&T. So who are today’s chalet girls, and why do they do it? Because skiing is largely a middle-class activity, being a chalet girl has traditionally been so too. Tom Williams wrote the script for the 2011 film Chalet Girl, about a working-class girl who starts off being laughed at by all the other (posh) chalet girls, but ends up becoming a prize-winning snowboarder (and she gets the guy too). When the film came out it was hailed as Jones’s story, but in fact Williams wrote the script in 2004 before anyone had heard of her.
“I think who chalet girls are has changed, in the same way that who goes skiing is changing,” says Williams. “It’s not just a middle-class thing now. It’s becoming more affordable and more accessible and being a chalet girl has become less of a middle class, gap-year, school-leaver jolly than it used to be. If you want to be a successful skier or snowboarder, you can’t do it in the UK. You have to spend winters in the Alps and most people can’t do that without earning some money. So you’re either going to be a chalet host or a ski guide and that’s how you make it pay.”
Williams also points out that the concept of chalet holidays is peculiarly British, partly because unlike the Europeans we generally go skiing for a week, not a weekend, and also, he thinks, “We have some class-hangover thing where we like to have staff and pretend the house is our own. Chalet girl holidays are by the British, for the British. Foreigners don’t know what chalet girls are.”
Philli Boyle, 29, did a season on the slopes as a career move: finding herself between jobs at the age of 25, she took a job as a chalet manager, which involved helping to cook and clean at five chalets in Verbier as well as running their financial affairs.
“It was really hard work and a lot of pressure,” she remembers. “I wanted to do a season in the mountains, but I wanted to build a career too, so I took a job at management level and went on to be an event manager. The main thing for me was to get the work done and get out on the mountain and ski. That was what it was all about. If you’re running a chalet by yourself it can be hard at first to get more than a couple of hours’ skiing a day, but after a couple of months you get all your processes in place.”
It was in Verbier that Boyle learnt the ropes of hospitality: how to stay calm when everything goes wrong, how to keep smiling when the loos are blocked and it’s changeover day and you’ve got three hours to clean a chalet that sleeps 12.
“There’s been a cultural shift in the past ten or fifteen years,” says Moira Clarke of Esprit and Ski Total. “In the past, being a chalet girl was seen as a finishing school for a certain type of girl, but it really isn’t any more. We have people from all walks of life and every type of school. It’s not just the public-school children who apply. And gone are the days when we would hire someone who’s never cooked or cleaned or worked in any form. The gap-year job doesn’t really exist any more for 18-year-olds. What we’re looking for when hiring chalet girls is an ability to cook, to be flexible, to be a host. You’ve got to be able to look after people. We don’t want the sort of young people who’ve been on chalet holidays with their parents and think it’s going to be an extension of that. We want people who understand that it is a job. And we get a lot more these days who are 22 or 23. It’s a postuniversity job because they’ll have shared houses, slummed it for a while and understand that someone has to clean the toilet and the cooker.”
Catherine Beasley worked as a chalet girl in Val d’Isère in 2000, when she was 18. Now an architect, she disproves the idea that chalet girls are all thick Sloanes. What did she learn from her season? “To ski fast!” she says. “Most of my friends were men so I had to keep up. I’d always loved skiing and being a chalet girl was something you did on a gap year. The posher companies insisted you had to have a cooking qualification, which I didn’t, so I had to work for whoever would take me. The job is quite hard, but you’re there for the skiing – and the social life.”
The day started early and finished late: Beasley had sole responsibility for the cooking and cleaning of an eight-person chalet. Breakfast had to be on the table for 7am – porridge, eggs and croissants, then she had to bake a cake for tea at 5pm, clean the chalet and prepare the evening meal.
“To start with it took me hours,” she says, “but soon I was on the slopes by 11 and out till 4pm. I’m not sure that I cleaned very well. In the evening you’d serve a three-course meal, then we would go to the pub every night. We weren’t allowed to cook pasta or curry; they weren’t smart enough. And you earned no money: you relied on tips, but because I worked for a budget company the tips varied. I once got a box of marzipan. Another time someone gave me a pocket of loose change and half a bottle of gin. It’s a funny dynamic: people don’t treat you like they would if they were in a hotel; there’s a ‘You’re just a chalet girl’ mentality. But then we probably weren’t as professional or polite as you would be in a hotel. It was so fun: you’re meeting new people, it’s drunk and debauched and you’re away from home.”
Half bottles of gin were probably not so prevalent in Verbier, where Harriet Brown worked a season at the age of 18. “Our chalet was huge. It slept 30 people,” she remembers. “We were a team of five, including a chef , so I was waitressing and cleaning and sous-chefing. We worked from 7.30 till 10.30 but then we were free until 6.30pm. I work in finance now and it taught me hard work. It was a good experience. When you’ve just come out of 11 years at boarding school, it’s a good entry into the real world. A lot of my friends from school were doing the same thing. I thought it would be fun and I wanted to learn to ski.”
If Jenny Jones is anything to go by, the Alps may even now be packed with the Olympic medal-winners of tomorrow. And they’re probably cleaning your loo.
