What is it about boarding school stories? I know I would have hated boarding school and yet I’ve had a love affair with their fictional counterparts for fifty years, and I know I’m not alone.
It started with Malory Towers when I was six. From the moment I met Darrell, admiring her brand-new school uniform in the mirror, I was hooked on school stories.
The girls’ adventures seemed perfectly poised between realism and romance. Their friendships and rivalries, dreams and disappointments, were entirely believable, while the very idea of a remote Cornish boarding school with rocky sea-swimming pool and stables, was, as Darrell and her friends would have said, ‘too wizard for words!’
From Malory Towers it was a natural progression to St Clare’s and then – oh joy of joys! – the Chalet School, which had 59 books. They weren’t all available in Belfast in the eighties, and maybe the decades-long quest to collect the whole series is what kept me reading and collecting school stories all through my teenage years, when I knew I was meant to read about boys and discos, and beyond. I even, as a student, wrote a PhD thesis about girls’ school stories – those for grown-ups as well as for children. I’ve never minded what age a story is supposed to be for. Maybe that’s why I write books for children, teenagers and adults.
The schools I went to weren’t at all like Malory Towers or the Chalet School. My secondary school, Victoria College, Belfast, had a boarding department, but we daygirls were never allowed inside. The corridors were lined with old photos of hockey teams and prefects from the past – I used to spend breaktimes gazing at them, imagining the lives of those long-ago girls with their tunics and bobbed hair. They looked so like the girls in the stories I still (secretly) loved.
When I became an English teacher I spent a year as a mistress in the girls’ boarding department. That wasn’t much like the school stories either but there were midnight feasts and Matrons (one cosy, one scary) and bedtime cocoa. But a year was enough for me.
And so to Fernside. I had always wanted to write a girls’ school story, and I sneaked some school-story elements into some of my earlier historical novels – Name upon Name is set partly in a school, and Hope against Hope in a girls’ hostel. And then, in an Irish Times interview about another book, I was asked why I’d never written a girls’ school story, given that I had a such an interest in them. I said I would love to write one! Little did I know that someone at O’Brien Press would read the interview, and think, A school story by Sheena Wilkinson? We might like to publish that…
Fernside, a boarding and day school beside the River Lagan, is imaginary, but it’s very like a lot of the girls’ schools that sprang up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Of course there are dormitories and prefects, lessons and sport, friendships and fallings-out – and a bit of mystery too. I’ve loved writing all my books, but in many ways First Term at Fernside is the book I started dreaming about all those years ago, when I was six, and I first looked into the mirror with Darrell.
As for me, well, all the best school stories are in series, so you'll find me at my desk today, halfway through Fernside Book 2. But that, as Kipling says, is another story.
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