First Term at Fernside

There’s a reason that boarding school stories remain so popular, and Sheena Wilkinson, who has a PhD on the subject, understands it absolutely. First Term at Fernside feels like a classic of the genre and, though set in 1920, has a contemporary sparkle that will make it irresistible to the broadest range of today’s readers. The six girls assembled in Fernside School’s Lilac dorm are a typically disparate group. There’s cousins, sensible, sports-mad Robin and nervous, newly arrived Linnet, who has behavioural traits that would, thankfully, be diagnosed today; Evangline, super-devout; Fran, who loves animals as much as Linnet and longs to be a vet; lively Babs who has a crush on Rudolph Valentino; and, last to arrive, Sadie, as obsessed with school stories as the author and recovering from polio, but determined to keep up with everyone else, whatever it takes. Their adventures over one half term are mostly of the domestic sort, such as Linnet’s inability to plait her hair, Robin’s efforts to get into the netball team, and a trip out to day girl Enid’s birthday party, but none the less absorbing, nay thrilling, for that, such is the life Wilkinson brings to her characters and the setting.

The ongoing effects of World War I are made clear too. Robin’s father was killed, and she and her mother are struggling to cope. This theme is also explored in the story’s most dramatic plotline: what is going on in neighbouring property Rowanbank. Linnet and Sadie both take to stealing into Rowanbank’s overgrown grounds as a much-needed place of quiet, even refuge, the school’s constant noise and bells affecting Linnet’s equilibrium in particular. It leads them to suspect that animals disappearing from the area are somehow ending up there. The investigation they lead, with Robin and Fran, have results which readers will anticipate being developed in future books.

The girls’ different personalities are very well drawn, as is the nature of the friendships formed; the confines of dorm and school enabling the acute understanding of the others’ strengths and weaknesses that only the kind of life they share can bring. It makes for exactly the kind of reading that boarding school stories offer, built on friendship, appreciation of others, self-awareness.