As the new film Chalet Girl is released, Julia Stephenson looks back on her days at an exclusive Swiss resort, and recalls how she and the other chalet girls were far from glamorous. In fact they were fairly podgy, and absolutely rubbish at skiing.

In the late Eighties I worked as a chalet girl in Switzerland. Back then this was a rite of passage for 20-something Sloane Rangers who had done a rudimentary cordon bleu course and were happy to cook and clean a chalet in return for the chance to spend four months in a swanky ski resort.

The season began for me one cold December morning when I boarded the chalet girl bus to Crans Montana, departing Sloane Square 6.30am sharp, along with nine other chalet girls whose names all ended in `a’ like mine.

Several appeared to have led very sheltered lives, a statuesque blonde called Arabella memorably announcing that it was her first time on a bus of any kind.

Sadly, chalet girls are now extinct and have been rebranded `chalet hosts', a dreary utilitarian word, a bit like air stewardesses being called flight attendants. On the plus side, chalet hosts can actually cook, whereas in my time cooking ability was less important than coming from the right sort of background and displaying a cheery disposition.

I loved being a chalet girl and wrote the novel Chalet Tiara based on my experiences. It’s currently languishing on Amazon, priced at 1p. So imagine my surprise when a friend rang and insisted a new film had just come out based on my book.

I thought it a bit of a cheek that no one had told me but, feverish with anticipation, I dashed to a local screening only to face crushing disappointment.

The film — very run-of-the-mill despite an impressive cast that includes Brook Shields, Tamsin Egerton, Bill Nighy and Ed Keswick from Gossip Girl — was nothing like my book, whilst plucky heroine Kim is like no chalet girl I have ever met.

Unlike most chalet girls, Kim is no stranger to the domestic arts as she can actually cook, clean and make a bed — the latter being something we all managed to avoid. We would bribe our hapless punters with `fun-size’ Mars bars that we chucked onto their unmade beds as an incentive for them to make their own.

And it has to be said, life as a chalet punter in the Eighties wasn’t great. But as most of them had been to public school they were used to being constantly hungry and enduring squalor and discomfort – indeed often appearing to relish it. We are told that those who have attended boarding school find prison no hardship. At least in prison you have access to constant hot water and edible meals, something that could never be guaranteed in our chalets.

Each of us was furnished with a copy of the much-feared Bladon Lines' Chalet Girl Cookbook (unaccountably out of print) with its penny-pinching recipes for cooking tripe and stodgy puddings. We ensured our packed lunches (requested by only the most penurious punters) were particularly inedible to prevent anyone asking for them twice. I fear there would be riots if the inmates of Her Majesty’s prisons were offered one of my packed lunch offerings containing sandwiches filled with liquidised stuffed tomatoes, themselves filled with leftover boeuf bourguignon.

Food was re-cooked and served up in many cunning guises until we finished it. It’s astonishing no one ever died of food poisoning. But to keep within our meagre budget of £3.50 for breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus rock buns for tea, corners were often cut.

It is assumed that ski resorts are heaving hotbeds of romance; indeed the film is full of chalet girls getting off with tycoons and ski instructors. Unfortunately we didn’t see so much action. Crans is a quiet resort, popular with elderly Pekinese-carrying Euro-crones and their gigolos. Besides, in those pre-ladette days most of us were pretty naive and happy to make do with innocent crushes on ski instructors

Left: There are toilets to clean, but what do I care?

I spent most of the winter swooning over a local cheesemaker who I’d bumped into at the local fromage counter. Hans was a real charmer. Tall and weathered, he wore a Moroccan hat and was boiling over with enthusiasm for the exciting world of le fromage. Seeing how keen I was on cheese he whisked me to his secret subterranean cheese HQ, an underground Tardis carved deep into a deserted hillside.

Pressing a hidden switch, steel doors swung open and I followed him down a steep ladder into the bowels of the earth. The door slammed behind us and we were alone in a vast room whose walls were lined with hundreds of cheese wheels. Opera music blared and a huge white crystal shimmered, apparently to stimulate the maturation process.

As we stood sipping delicious Swiss wine I thought with a shiver of alarm that I was alone in this secret cheese bunker with a perfect stranger. I was in quite a vulnerable situation, I thought hopefully. But then a telephone rang – it was his wife wondering when he was coming out of there, and the romantic mood was broken. He whisked me out of the bunker and that was the end of that.

There was only one scandal, but it was steamy enough to keep us all going for months.

Chalet girl Jemima, the daughter of an admiral and engaged to an etiolated estate agent called Rupert, developed a sudden passionate crush on a ski instructor called Jacques, a notorious heartbreaker. They would enjoy energetic rendez-vous inside his bubble car and be spotted emerging near the top of a mountain, hot and sweaty, and quite unable to ski at all. The rest of us were madly envious.

The affair ended in tears when Jacques was poached by Arabella, the one who had never travelled on a bus. She may not have known much about public transport but she certainly seemed to punch his ticket. Jacques was smitten. The situation was doubly awkward as Jemima and Arabella worked together running the same chalet.

The inevitable froideur caused a serious breakdown in the smooth running of the chalet, with Arabella sloping off for days at a time leaving Jemima to do all the work.

I recently bumped into Arabella getting her Afghan hound washed at the pet parlour in Harrods. Now married to a captain of industry, it transpired that she had returned to Crans the previous June for a passionate reunion with Jacques.

Arriving a day early she dashed round to his flat only to be delayed by the cows blocking the main street on their way to milking. They were being driven by Jacques.

And we'd been told that when he wasn't ski-instructing he worked as a stuntman on James Bond films. As the scales fell from her eyes she scarpered back to Sloane Square and the soothing embrace of the Mother Ship (Peter Jones department store).

Bafflingly, chalet girls have the same collective allure as nurses in the British male psyche, yet we weren’t glamorous. Hearty and with thighs strong enough to crack a walnut, we were the object of many a public schoolboy’s fantasies. But glamorous? Certainly not! We wobbled about in salopettes and rarely got round to putting on any make-up. (Sharing a bathroom with seven others meant no time for one’s toilette.)

So I was bemused when the stunning Tamsin Egerton appears in the film. With her glistening blonde tresses, honey-coloured skin and designer ski gear, I assumed she was portraying a supermodel visitor to the resort. But hold on, Tamsin is not playing a supermodel but chalet girl Georgina, and without an ounce of spare flesh on her.

Talk about taking poetic licence a bit too far! Chalet girls are a podgy lot. Sugary yogurt, Suchard chocolate and melted cheese was our staple diet, with the distressing result that we ended the season several stone heavier than when we began.

Left: Too glamorous to be a chalet girl

Another misassumption is that chalet girls can actually ski. Oh how I snorted when Georgina sneers to the film’s heroine, the non-skier Kim: `A chalet girl who can’t ski? That’s ridiculous!’ shaking her faux mink headband in disbelief.

But it's true, chalet girls were rubbish at skiing. We were too lazy, not very sportive, and too busy stuffing ourselves with uncooked cake mixture to get our expanding bottoms up the mountain before midday — and only then to bag a nice sunny table at the restaurant for lunch (preferably paid for by the punters).

I soon came to feel about skiing the way Mark Twain felt about another sport: `Golf is a good walk spoiled,’ he memorably wrote. If might just as easily have said that skiing ruins a perfectly good skiing holiday. After all, fresh air, snow, mulled wine, jolly après-ski parties and soaring mountains are wonderful. Why ruin it all by strapping planks onto your feet, risk life and limb, endure freezing winds and broken capillaries, and dice with death on a swaying chairlifts?

But heroine Kim is made of sterner stuff than we were. As a skateboarding champ she takes to snowboarding immediately, learning to twirl, jump and somersault to Olympic standard in half an hour. It’s amazing.

A detail that does ring true is the general squalor and hideous Seventies décor of the soi-disant `luxury chalet’ depicted in the film. The sagging sofas, grubby beige carpets and ancient filthy kitchen reminded me of our own accommodation in Crans.

In the film the two girls have to share a tiny bedroom, constantly tripping over discarded knickers and ski passes. They were lucky. There were four of us in our chalet dorm and I spent four months on the top of a bunk bed. It’s a miracle I got any sleep at all.

By the end of March the snow was melting and I was losing hope on the romantic front. But my spirits lifted when an attractive single male punter staying in my chalet took a shine to me. I abandoned lazy days in the patisserie with chalet girl Sally — and actually went skiing with him instead. (Out of character, I know, but love makes you do strange things.)

I also made a special effort with his packed lunches, and the chalet cuisine and general hygiene magically improved. On my return from the Alps we got married, but after months of skivvying I had developed an aversion to all forms of domesticity. We existed on a diet of readymade meals which I insisted he heat up as I refused to go into the kitchen. We parted on amicable terms and he is now married to a ski guide who bakes gluten-free cupcakes.

I am now dating a keen outdoor sportsman who I met at the gym (I go there to have facials). Hoping to impress him, I may have let slip something of my skiing prowess (my old skis are prominently displayed in my sitting room rather as one might display a Maori mask, as a sort of curio) and my flat is liberally dotted with pictures of me shovelling spag bol into my mouth in mountain resort restaurants.

Last winter shortly after he suggested a skiing holiday I tripped on a pot-hole and broke my ankle, which was perfect timing. But this year, with all my limbs intact, I may have to come clean that my sporting days are truly over – not that they ever really began if I’m honest.

But I could certainly be tempted into a pair of tight ski pants, Versace snow boots and faux furry hat, as modelled by Tamsin Egerton. It's just the outfit for a ramble around the readymade meals in Waitrose.

Read the Daily Mail version of this article here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1365144/Sex-skivvying-squalor-My-life-REAL-chalet-girl.html#ixzz1GUn3VqFv

Julia Stephenson’s latest book, Letting Go of the Glitz is published by Crown House