The School in the Woods by Dorita Fairlie Bruce was first published in 1940, but my copy is a reprint from Girls Gone By Publishers.

Tabitha (Toby) Barrett’s mother is dead and her father, who is a famous artist, gets a commission which is going to take him to Ireland for six months. Toby had been a day girl at St Githa’s but that school is closing, and the boarders are being transferred to a school called Thatches. Obviously Toby will have to be a boarder too.

The girls settle in to the new school and make new friends, and enjoy the new setting of a woodland area, but Toby gets into trouble when she stumbles across a shed in the woodland which is being used as a laboratory. It’s off limits to the girls and Dick Trevor who is doing chemical experiments in it isn’t happy about her being there. His father is a well-known scientist and they live nearby, and with the country being on the cusp of World War 2 Dick is worried about his work being stolen by spies.

Toby knows she’s not a spy, but she suspects that there’s something nefarious going on within the school, she’s just not sure what.

I enjoyed this one which is interesting from a social history point of view with the girls thinking about their futures although in general it’s a ‘training’ in something that they’re thinking about.

As often happens there’s a radical shift in the behaviour and attitude of the most annoying girl – if only that were true in real life!