Free Octavia's War by Beryl Kingston

and sat down in her chair rather heavily. ‘It’s been a day for disappointments,’ she said and told him about the hutted school.
    He listened with his usual quiet attention but without the concern he’d been feeling for poor Emmeline. The one thing he could be sure of with Octavia was that, however hard the difficulties she might have to face, she would press on until she found an answer to them. It was a great source of pride to him. ‘So what will you do?’ he asked.
    She put her bundle of specifications on the coffee table between them. ‘Get the LCC to rent one of these,’ she said.
    He smiled at her. ‘Of course,’ he said and leant forward to pick them up and look at them.
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    By the time she held her next staff meeting, Octavia had her plans in order. She plunged straight into them as soon as the more mundane matters had been dealt with.
    â€˜Since the bombing of Guernica,’ she said, ‘I don’t think there’s much doubt that we are heading for a war with Germany. I wish I could say otherwise but I’m afraid I can’t. Mr Chamberlain may speak of appeasement but behind the scenes the fact is we are preparing for war. Plans are already drawn up to evacuate the children from London, as I daresay several of you know.’ Many of her colleagues nodded at that, for they were following events as closely as she was. ‘Very well then. You won’t be surprised to know that I spent Saturday in the town that our school will be evacuated to. I can’t tell you where it is because it’s all very hush-hush, as they say, but as soon as I’m officially notified you will know too. For the moment, all I can tell you is that it’s a small, quiet town not really all that far from London and the schoolwhose premises we shall be expected to share is extremely small. So we have some detailed planning to do. We shall all need to know exactly which books in our subject libraries are essential and which could be temporarily left behind, we shall need to have syllabuses for the next year written and run off and stored because we could find printing them difficult – at least for the first term or so – and we shall need to choose our prefects with particular care. They will have a considerable burden to carry.’
    The staff were nodding at that too, for the house officers and prefects ran the school house system and that could be a cohesive force if the girls were going to be dispersed in strange homes all over a strange town. But their newest entrant, a quiet and rather diffident young woman called Mavis Brown, who taught History and Geography, was worried. She looked up at her headmistress, mutely requesting permission to speak.
    â€˜Mavis?’ Octavia encouraged.
    â€˜I realise I probably shouldn’t say this, being the newest – um – the most recently appointed…’ Mavis said, blushing, ‘but what I’m wondering is, are we going to continue with syllabuses? I mean it’s going to be very difficult, isn’t it? Maybe we should try something a bit easier. I mean with a war coming and evacuation and everything.’ She was finding the famous Dalton system very hard going, much worse than she’d expected and, from what Miss Smith had just said, it looked as if being evacuated was going to make it ten times harder.
    Octavia was rather taken aback. She knew there were bound to be reservations and worries and that some of the staff would find it hard to produce a year’s worth of syllabuses because they were used to working a term at a time but she hadn’t expected the system to be questioned. ‘What do the rest of you think?’ she asked, looking round at her team. Shecould have answered Mavis herself but it would come better from her colleagues.
    Morag Gordon spoke first, after adjusting her long cardigan and pushing her glasses up her nose while she got her thoughts into order.