The Monkey Puzzle Tree by Sonia Tilson

red-room.
    The door opened with a bang against the head of her bed, jolting her back into her strange new world. Camilla Worthington appeared in the doorway, with what was obviously another new girl cowering behind her.
    “You still here?” She looked at Gillian coldly. “You should be in the assembly hall. Miss Campbell expects all the new girls to wait for her there.”
    “How was I supposed to know that?”
    “Once again, Gillian Davies, that’s no way to speak to a prefect. What’s more, you’re not allowed to lie on your bed in the daytime.”
    The other girl, a dark, sallow little thing in a straight navy dress with white collar and cuffs, began to cry.
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Camilla Worthington turned on her heel and banged the door shut on them.
    The girl threw herself face-down, sobbing, on the last unclaimed bed, clutching the bedspread in her fists. “Oh, Mummy, Mummy! Why did you leave me?”
    Reluctantly abandoning Jane in the red-room, Gillian sat up and studied this real-life girl. “What’s your name?”
    “Fiona.” The girl looked up for a moment, blotched and red-eyed.
    “Come on, Fiona, buck up. Let’s go and find the assembly hall.”
    “I don’t want to.” She was face-down, sobbing again. “I want my Mummy!”
    Gillian thought that rather childish. The last time she had cried for her mummy, she had been six years old, and a fat lot of use that had been.
    “But you’ll see her at half-term, won’t you?” she said.
    The girl wept even harder. “I won’t see her for a whole year. She’s going back again to India tomorrow on the boat. Now I’m all alone.” She buried her face in the pillow, hiccupping with sobs, “Oh, Mummy, come back! Don’t leave me!”
    “What about your father?”
    She looked up at Gillian, her eyes brimming. “He died.” The tears rolled down. “Last Christmas. There’s only me and Mummy now,” she sobbed. “I want to go home!”
    Well that was tough, Gillian thought, but she would just have to get on with it, like the rest of them. “Look here, Fiona.” She stood up and straightened her skirt. “I really think we’d better go to the assembly hall. The headmistress probably wants to tell us all the rules. Maybe take attendance. You’d better come, or you might get into trouble.”
    Blowing her nose and catching her breath in little sobs, Fiona followed like a new-hatched chick as Gillian went down to look for the hall.
     
    Miss Campbell looked down from the podium at the new girls gathered before her. She welcomed them all and spoke in a generally encouraging sort of way before going on to explain not only the rules, but also the reasons for the rules. She followed that with a description of the boarders’ daily and weekly schedules.
    With Fiona sniffling beside her, Gillian listened carefully, her head sinking lower and lower. When the headmistress came to the weekend routine, Gillian realized the problem: there was no spare time. Not anywhere. Not in the day, not in the week, not even at the weekend. There would be no time in which to read Jane Eyre . As long as she could read, she had told herself, she could get through anything, but evidently it was not going to be so easy.
    When she tuned back into the talk, she heard Miss Campbell explaining the significance of the school motto: Servate Honorem , ‘Preserve your Honour’. Apparently it meant that all of them should, and could, live their lives so that they need never, ever, feel ashamed of themselves in any way. Gillian glanced furtively around at all the open faces staring up innocently at the headmistress. She looked down at the laces coming undone in her stiff new black shoes, a hard ache in her stomach.
     
    “Stone walls do not a prison make,” her grandmother would say, quoting as usual, “Nor iron bars, a cage.” Gillian had not seen any iron bars during her first week, apart from the entrance gates, but there were plenty of stone walls, and as far as she was