3 hours ago
5
Even if it wasn’t perched on a cliff on the south coast, the position of St Anne’s, Eastbourne – the decaying girls’ school that is the setting for Rebecca Wait’s gleefully macabre new novel, Havoc – might reasonably be described as precarious. Deeply eccentric, staffed by the barely employable, and permanently teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, St Anne’s hangs on, against all the odds. And then, in 1984, Ida Campbell turns up on the doorstep, in possession of a full scholarship and rather a lot of baggage.
Sixteen years old and already an outcast, Ida is in flight from her hapless mother, her foul-tempered sister, the small community in the Western Isles to which they have been transplanted, and the nameless scandal that has ruined their lives. St Anne’s is to be Ida’s salvation, but it soon dawns on her that the school might not be quite the refuge she had hoped for.
The school’s buildings were constructed by a Victorian lunatic. Its principal, Miss Christie, is a dusty combination of cold war paranoiac and Edwardian governess, insisting both on regular drills in preparation for nuclear attack and the importance of girls wearing their hair up. The rest of the staff, from lugubrious bluestocking teacher Vera Clarke (Classics) to “Loopy Linda” the English mistress, are antique, creepy, despairing or all three.
The exception – and one of our narrative guides through the mayhem – is geography teacher Eleanor Alston, clinging to hope and sanity as she approaches 40 in the aftermath of a failed love affair. Into this stagnant pool of scholarship is dropped the replacement for the late Miss Hamilton (history, ancient), the meek but regrettably presentable Matthew Langfield, an improbable ex-Westminster schoolmaster and St Anne’s first and only male teacher, and ripples ensue.
Ida’s fellow students, having largely been deposited by parents indifferent to the school’s underwhelming reputation and keen only not to be bothered with details, are a restless bunch, prone to smooches, cliques, gossip (Cindy Riley, in the works shed, with the groundsman?) and outbreaks of insubordination. They have their queen bee, Diane Fulbrook, the dazzling head girl with ambitions to be a police officer; and their bad fairy, Louise Adler (almost certainly some relation to Irene, Sherlock Holmes’s rival). Louise is the school’s only Jewish pupil and spoken of in whispers; she has pushed one girl out of a window and set another on fire at the Tea Cosy cafe, and Ida has barely learned of her existence when she is told that they will be roommates. Then Diane is taken ill with a progressive neurological disorder that defies medical investigation. When, one by one, her fellow students develop similar symptoms, and diagnoses from demonic possession and Soviet poisonings to mass hysteria begin to circulate, inevitably suspicion falls on the newest arrivals.
In Havoc, Waits mines the rich seam of girls’ school fiction to delirious and rewarding effect. There are welcome echoes of St Trinian’s – the shade of Alastair Sim hovers over the staffroom, comforting and anarchic at once – and there is abundant Ealing comedy in the madcap chases through school corridors and machinations in the lighting gallery during the school play. Yet beneath the comedy lies a distinctly unsettling undertone: the girls experience a convincingly visceral terror that edges towards Shirley Jackson territory and gives their hysteria an extra dimension. This, along with a genuine unexpectedness in the characterisation and a lot of very funny dialogue, loosens things up and brings real originality to the game. Combined with excellent pacing, a plot so deliciously thick you could stand a spoon up in it, and the boldness required to splice a darker thread into the narrative, it all adds up to a thoroughly satisfying contribution to a happily capacious genre.
