13 Steps -- Book 11

the first school story

I am often asked how I came to write a particular book and I’m afraid my answers often disappoint. It’s not always easy to explain the urge to write this story, set in that year and place, about this kind of character.

But with First Term at Fernside, my tenth novel, there’s a very neat, jolly origin story, and it’s closely connected to Mrs Hart and therefore to Miss McVey.

In April 2023, just as Mrs Harts’ Marriage Bureau was published, I was interviewed by the Irish Times.

Now, I’m not an expert on much, but I have PhD-level expertise on the girls’ school story, so this question did make me think: why had I not ventured into this beloved domain? The answer is that I assumed publishers wouldn’t be interested in something so old-fashioned. I was wrong. The demise of the school story — rather like the death of the novel itself has been proclaimed for decades, but the school story keeps on reinventing itself.

A few weeks later I had an email from Kunak McGann, rights manager at O’Brien Press, a very well-established and respected Dublin publisher. We really enjoyed your interview in the Irish Times and were intrigued by your mention of school stories. We … would be very interested in to explore what you might do with a novel (or series, even?) set in a girls’ school. Is this something which might be of interest to you?

My response came so quickly that Kunak and I joke that she must have assumed it was an out-of-office. Of course the answer was YES! My only slight concern was that, with Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau, I had only just published my adult debut. Did I want to risk a publishing step that might reinforce people’s ideas that I was a children’s writer? I got over this in a few minutes — after all, my books have always been read by all ages. Besides, this wasn’t just any book: this was, at last, my chance to write my own school story!

First Term at Fernside was the most joyful writing experience I have ever had, eclipsing even Star by Star. Characters, setting and story all came easily, and making up my own school — a small Belfast girls’ school in the 1920s — was great fun. It really did feel like a book that had been inside me forever, just waiting to be released.

But Fernside isn’t all gym frocks and hockey sticks; I always knew that the challenge would be to write a story absolutely true to its 1920s setting, and yet both accessible and acceptable to a modern reader — especially a young modern reader. How could I ensure, for example, that my cast of schoolgirl characters was diverse without anachronistically populating 1920s Belfast with communities who weren’t actually there, or who wouldn’t have been pupils at a boarding school?

Finding solutions was challenging but very satisfying, and when the reviews — and it was very well received — singled out this aspect for praise, I was delighted.

As for its relationship with Miss McVey Takes Charge? Well, First Term at Fernside was commissioned when I was in the middle of the first draft of Miss McVey, so I had to take a break for several months. The enforced rest, and the time spent in the nurturing space of Fernside helped make Miss McVey a warmer, kinder, better book.

Also, some of the most important characters in Fernside are animals. My first novels were of course pony books, and Fernside’s empathise on caring for animals reminded me of how much I love writing about animals. Miss McVey Takes Charge is full of horses and dogs!