The Youngest Girl in the Fifth

Gwen Gascoyne is fourteen and a quarter when Miss Roscoe moves her mid-term out of the Upper Fourth and into the Fifth at Rodenhurst, breaking a rule the older girls had thought unbreakable. They make her pay for it. Home is a crowded curate’s house at Skelwick Bay: seven children, a mother dead four years, never quite enough money. School means a two mile walk and then the motor bus into Stedburgh. Then Gwen breaks the headmistress’s china tea service, hides the accident instead of owning up, and borrows money to replace it. That small secret debt goes on to run her life. Angela Brazil wrote for schoolgirls rather than at them, trading moral instruction for slang, rivalries and wounded pride, which is why readers loved her and some headmistresses banned her.