First Day at St Elowen’s
Chapter Three
The first morning at St Elowen’s began with the deep clang of the old school bell, echoing through the corridors like a solemn announcement. Emily stirred beneath her blankets, blinking at the pale light filtering through the tall windows of the dormitory. For a moment she forgot where she was, the polished floor, the high ceiling, the line of green blankets were nothing like her cosy room at home, and then she remembered.
Her stomach gave a nervous flutter. Her first full day at boarding school.
Across the dormitory, Poppy was already sitting up, pulling on her jumper with neat, practised movements. Flick gave a dramatic groan and buried her face under her pillow. “Five more minutes,” she mumbled, her curls sticking out wildly.
“Come on, Flick,” said Sophie cheerfully, hopping out of bed with surprising energy. “We don’t want to be late on our very first day!”
Lucinda sat on the edge of her bed, clutching her doll as though it might shield her from the unfamiliar routine. Beth was folding her blanket back with military precision, while Iris quietly slipped into her slippers and padded towards the washroom without a word.
Emily pushed back her covers and swung her legs over the side of the bed, feeling the cool wooden floor beneath her feet. She remembered Miss Winthrop’s words the day before about tidiness, and so she carefully tucked in her sheets before reaching for her uniform.
The washroom was bustling with sleepy chatter and the splashing of cold water, for the hot ran out almost at once and woe betide the girl who dawdled. Emily brushed her teeth at a long row of basins, gasped at the shock of the cold tap, and tried not to look too obviously at the other girls. Everyone seemed so capable already, so entirely at home, as though they had been washing and dressing in this echoing, tiled room for years rather than a single day. At home there had been just her and Daisy and the quiet of the morning. Here there were a dozen girls all at once, elbows and toothbrushes and steam, and Emily found to her surprise that she did not mind it in the least. There was a warmth in the bustle, a feeling of being carried along in company, that she had not expected to like so much.
Back in the dormitory, the girls fastened their ties, straightened their blazers, and checked one another for stray buttons or crooked collars. Emily felt a strange comfort in the ritual. At home her mother might have done these things for her; here the girls did them for one another, and somehow that was better, for it made them feel already a little like a team.
A short while later, the breakfast bell rang, and the girls hurried down the staircase. The dining hall glowed with the golden light of morning. Bowls of porridge steamed on the tables, along with plates of toast, boiled eggs, and marmalade. The smell made Emily’s stomach growl.
“Sit with us,” Poppy said, tugging her gently towards a spot halfway down the table. Emily obeyed, perching on the long bench as platters were passed around. She took toast and eggs, watching the room around her. Girls laughed softly, exchanged news, and compared notes about what they expected for the day. Some of the older ones seemed completely at ease, while the younger new arrivals, like Emily, looked around with cautious curiosity.
At the far end of the hall, Miss Winthrop rose to speak. The room fell silent at once.
“Good morning, girls,” she said. “Welcome to a new term at St Elowen’s. For our new pupils, this will be a day of firsts. You will find your way around the school, meet your teachers, and begin your lessons. Remember our three values: courage, kindness, and honour. They are carved above the door you came in by, in the old words of our motto, and they are the marks of a true St Elowen’s girl. I expect each of you to live up to them, and to the traditions they stand for.”
Her gaze swept the hall like a searchlight. Emily sat up straighter, her toast forgotten.
After breakfast, the girls were led in pairs across the grounds for assembly in the Great Hall. The room was vast, with high stained-glass windows that glowed with jewel colours. A pipe organ stood against the far wall, and rows of chairs stretched neatly in lines. Emily sat between Poppy and Iris, clutching her timetable.
The assembly included a hymn, sung with surprising gusto, and announcements about the week ahead. Emily’s heartbeat faster when Miss Winthrop mentioned sports trials and music auditions. She wasn’t sure yet where she might fit in, but she liked the idea of trying.
Then lessons began.
Their first class was English, taught by Mrs Chattoway, a tall, brisk woman with spectacles perched on the end of her nose. The classroom smelled of chalk and old paper, with shelves of books lining the walls.
“Sit up straight,” Mrs Chattoway commanded. “Books out, pens ready. Today we will begin with composition. You are to write a page about your summer holiday, not merely where you went, but what you thought and felt.”
Emily bent over her exercise book. Her hand trembled slightly as she began to write: This summer I went with my family to Cornwall… She wrote about the sea spray on her face, the sand castles she built with her sister, and the long walks along cliff paths. By the time she stopped, she realised she had written more than a page. A small glow of pride warmed her chest.
“Good,” Mrs Chattoway said when she collected the books. “Some of you have a gift for words. We shall see how that develops.”
Their next lesson was French, and Emily felt her nerves return. The teacher, Madame Moreau, was indeed French, with dark hair pulled into a bun and a soft but lilting accent. She wrote simple phrases on the board: Bonjour. Comment t’appelles-tu? The girls repeated them in chorus, some stumbling, others confident. Flick exaggerated her pronunciation to make Sophie giggle, while Lucinda turned pink each time she was asked to speak. “Très bien,” said Madame Moreau, smiling. “Do not be afraid to make mistakes. Language is music, and you must sing it boldly!”
Emily found herself smiling despite her nerves. Perhaps she would grow to like French after all.
After a short break, they had Mathematics with Miss Townsend, who was precise and exacting. Numbers had never been Emily’s strongest subject, but with Poppy whispering quiet hints beside her, she managed the exercises without disaster.
Lunch in the dining hall was hearty, shepherd’s pie followed by treacle sponge. Emily sat with her dorm mates, and conversation bubbled more freely now.
“Do you think we’ll get to play hockey soon?” Sophie asked eagerly.
“I’d rather tennis,” said Iris quietly.
“Neither,” Flick declared. “I want to be in the school play. That’s the only sport I care about.”
Emily laughed, feeling more at ease. These girls were beginning to feel like companions, not strangers.
The afternoon brought History, in a classroom crowded with maps and dusty artefacts and a long timeline running right round the walls. Miss Danbury, brisk and bright-eyed, asked the class who could tell her which king had built the great castles of the Kentish coast. Emily knew this, or was almost sure she did, and, seized by a sudden longing to shine on her very first day, to be marked at once as one of the clever ones, her hand shot up before she had quite finished thinking.
“Edward the Confessor, Miss Danbury,” she said, with more confidence than the answer deserved. There was a small pause. Somewhere behind her, a girl tittered.
“A good guess,” said Miss Danbury, not unkindly, “and out by a century or two. Edward the First is your man, though I’m glad to see such eagerness. Eagerness we can work with. Perhaps next time we might let the thinking finish before the hand goes up, hm?”
Emily’s cheeks flamed. She sat very low in her seat for the rest of the lesson, her ears burning, wishing with all her heart that she had held her tongue. It was a small thing, and forgotten by everyone else within the minute, but it stung out of all proportion, and it taught her something she would have to learn more than once that term: that the wish to be thought clever, if you let it run ahead of you, had a way of tripping you flat on your face.
Music, last of all, was balm to her wounded pride. In the old practice rooms, with the afternoon light slanting gold across the piano, the keys felt familiar and forgiving under her fingers, and when Miss Montford nodded approvingly at her scale, Emily felt the sting of the history lesson ease at last. Here, at least, she need not try too hard to be noticed. Here she could simply play, and be glad of it.
By the time lessons ended, her mind was a whirl of impressions: stern teachers, bustling corridors, the endless maze of hallways that seemed to double back on themselves when she wasn’t looking. She had got lost twice. The first time she had turned a corner she was quite sure she recognised and found herself in a dim panelled passage she had never seen before, lined with faded photographs of old hockey teams and hung with a single stag’s head that regarded her with glassy solemnity. Two older girls were standing beneath it, heads close together, and they broke off whatever they were saying the moment Emily appeared. The taller of the two, dark-haired and handsome, with a cool, appraising sort of face, looked Emily slowly up and down, from her new shoes to her carefully brushed hair, and then, without a word, arched one eyebrow at her companion and smiled a small smile that was not friendly in the least. The other girl smothered a laugh. Neither said anything at all. They simply watched her, until Emily’s cheeks grew hot and she muttered an apology she did not owe and hurried on, feeling their eyes on her back the whole length of the passage. She did not yet know their names, Judith and Verity of the Upper Fourth, but she knew, with the certain instinct of a new girl, that she had somehow been weighed, and found wanting, and would do well to keep out of their way.
She was still flustered from it when a kindly older girl took pity and pointed her the right way. The second time she got lost, she opened what she hoped was the door to the Maths room and discovered instead a narrow stair spiralling up into shadow, which she resolved on the spot to explore properly one day, when she was braver and less likely to be late. Her shoes pinched a little, and her satchel dragged heavy on her shoulder, but there was a certain exhilaration in all of it, in belonging, however newly, to a place so large and so full of corners still to be discovered.
That evening, after supper, the girls gathered in the common room, a cosy space with armchairs, a fire in the grate, and shelves of well-thumbed books. Some played board games, others wrote letters home. It was here that Emily first fell in with the two Holly Dormitory girls who were to become such fixtures in their little company. The first she noticed because it was impossible not to: a sturdy, brown-armed girl came banging in through the garden door with leaves in her hair and mud to the elbows, entirely unbothered by either, and announced to the room at large that she had found a way onto the stable roof and that the view from up there was “simply the best thing in the whole school.”
“You’ll break your neck, Bea,” said a quiet voice from the window seat, without looking up.
“I shan’t. I’ve excellent balance.” The girl called Bea dropped into the nearest armchair, grinned round at the newcomers, and stuck out a grubby hand to Emily. “Beatrice Langley. Bea. Holly Dorm, next door but one to you lot. Do you climb? You look as though you might, if someone dared you.”
Emily laughed and shook the offered hand. “I might, if someone dared me.”
“There,” said Bea, satisfied, as though a great matter had been settled. “I knew I’d like you.”
The quiet voice belonged to the girl in the window seat, who had a book open on her knees and, balanced on the cushion beside her, a wooden puzzle of interlocking rings that she turned over and over as she read, quite without seeming to notice she was doing it. She was slight and neat, with dark plaits and watchful eyes behind her spectacles, and where Bea filled a room the moment she entered it, this girl seemed to fold quietly into the corners of one. “That’s Clem,” said Bea. “Clementine Stratford. She’s the cleverest person in the whole of Holly, only she won’t say so herself, so I say it for her. Show them the rings, Clem.”
Clem glanced up, went slightly pink, and held out the wooden puzzle. “It comes apart,” she said softly. “Everyone thinks it can’t, because there’s no join you can see. But there’s always a way in, if you turn a thing over enough times and don’t give up on it.” Her fingers moved, there was a small click, and the tangle of rings fell open into two neat halves in her palm. “You just have to be patient with it. Most people aren’t.”
“I should have thrown it on the fire an hour ago,” said Bea cheerfully.
“I know you would,” said Clem, and the two of them smiled at each other in the way of friends who are nothing whatever alike and all the better for it.
Emily thought she had never met two people so different in the same breath, the one all mud and daring, the other all quiet and cleverness, and she liked them both enormously at once. So, she could tell, did the others: Iris had drifted over to watch the puzzle with shining eyes, and Poppy was already deep in negotiations with Bea about the precise route onto the stable roof.
Presently the little knot of them settled by the fire, Holly and Elm together, and it did not feel at all as though they had met only that afternoon. Only Lucinda sat a little apart, by the hearth with her doll, looking rather tearful. Emily quietly slipped beside her.
“Would you like to borrow my pencil case?” Emily asked gently. “It’s got coloured pens, you could draw something.”
Lucinda sniffed and smiled faintly. “Thank you.” The gesture felt small, but Emily sensed it mattered. And when Clem, without a word, came and sat on Lucinda’s other side and began quietly showing her how the wooden rings came apart, Emily thought that perhaps the making of friends was rather like Clem’s puzzle: no visible join, no obvious way in, and yet a way in all the same, for anyone patient enough to keep turning things over.
At lights out, the dormitory was filled with whispers and giggles, the rustle of sheets, and the creak of bedsprings. Emily lay awake for a moment, listening to the comforting sounds around her. She thought of her parents and sister, of London far away, and of Bodiam Castle where they had stopped the day before.
But she also thought of St Elowen’s, the Great Hall, the dormitory, the Elm tree in the gardens, and the girls who were slowly becoming her friends. A smile touched her lips as sleep finally claimed her.
Tomorrow, there would be more lessons, more discoveries, and perhaps even the beginning of adventures she could not yet imagine.