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“ ‘CLOUD RIDGE HOUSE — Co-Educational Boarding School’,” read Kerridwen Osborne aloud, as the new cream-coloured board with its black lettering swung into place beside the scrolled ironwork gates. The two workmen, absorbed in their task, took no notice of her, and she continued to sit happily on the wall on the opposite side of the steep lane.

The wall, which followed the lane to the top of the ridge, was of the golden-grey Cotswold stone that Kerridwen loved, and just now it was warm after a day of April sunshine. She turned her back on the operations by the gate and stared thoughtfully down into the valley. All about her and above her the wolds stretched away, the bright brown earth sweeping in long curves between the enclosing walls.

“It’s a simply perfect place to start a school,” she mused, her eyes on the village in the valley below, some distance away across the fields and beyond a little river. Wyndstane-by-the-Water it was called, boasting one long street of beautiful little stone houses and a church that was one of the oldest in the district. Up on the ridge there were other villages, tinier, more remote. Monks’ Cloud was no more than half a mile away up the climbing road, and there was Wyndstane-on-the-Hill, and Wyndstane Cloud, too, all tiny, and all as perfect as only Cotswold villages can be.

Kerridwen had been living on Cloud Ridge for more than two months now, helping with the stupendous task of making the new school ready for the opening day on April 22nd, but she had not grown in any way used to the broad, satisfying sweeps of the wolds and all the beauty about her.

She was twenty-two, small and dark like her Welsh mother, and she had left London University the previous year, with a good degree in English and a desire for adventure and new experiences rather than any wish to settle down in some dull, stereotyped teaching job. So she had jumped at the suggestion of her father’s brother, Jeremy Osborne, that she should have a hand in the forming of the new school — a school that was to embody all his ideas of what a boarding-school should be.

It was going to be exciting, and perhaps rather frightening. In the first place the school had to be a success and there were sure to be difficulties and setbacks, and in the second place Kerridwen was rather dreading her initial entry into teaching. Fifty-two strange boys and girls, with a prospect of forty-eight more, for the school was planned to accommodate a hundred! It was an alarming thought, for Kerridwen’s own school-days were sufficiently far behind her for her to feel surprisingly distant from very young people. She was not shy, nor particularly lacking in confidence, but it was going to be a stupendous task, this getting to know fifty-two boys and girls. They would none of them be older than fifteen, nor younger than nine.

“In time they’ll grow up,” Jeremy Osborne had said, when planning the school. “Then we’ll have a group of real Seniors who have been in the school a couple of years. I don’t want to take anyone older than fifteen at first because they would be set in their ways, and, though they might be excellent ways, the chances are they wouldn’t correspond with what I’d like for Cloud Ridge. No, we’ll start them all fairly young and make as careful a choice as possible during the first year or two. With an established co-educational school run on modern lines a few difficult boys and girls wouldn’t matter much. But when they’re all new and strange — I want to be as nearly sure as it’s possible to be that they’re the type of child I want, preferably those who have been at progressive schools before, or else with particularly tolerant, thinking parents. It’s going to be a hard task — a ghastly task, in some ways — and the kids must help not hinder.”

Kerridwen remembered his words as she sunned herself on the wall. Cloud Ridge was to be for children of all types and all nationalities, but they must be boys and girls capable of learning to think for themselves. She was well-versed with her uncle’s views, for she had read all his books on progressive education and admired them exceedingly. He was no crank; she had always thought him the sanest, wisest person of her acquaintance, and his Swiss wife, Gretli, came a very close second in Kerridwen’s affections. Gretli was wise, too, and motherly as well as brilliantly clever. Cloud Ridge House would have a good start, whatever its adventures and set-backs during the first year. She thought of the great day — only a fortnight away — with a little shiver of excitement, and then shot off the wall so suddenly that the workmen looked at her in surprise and remarked that the wind was blowing cold, as might be expected so early in the year.

But it was not the undoubted chill in the hill wind that had made Kerridwen leap so suddenly off her perch, it was the sudden remembrance of all that was waiting to be done up at the school. Sheets to mark, curtains to finish, lists to type, endless correspondence to be dealt with, equipment of all kinds to be checked.

“And I’ve been dreaming here for at least half an hour!” she thought, opening the gate a foot or two and slipping through into the drive. The heavy old iron clanged shut behind her and she glanced over her shoulder with satisfaction. The graceful iron gates of Cloud Ridge House gave her much pleasure, for up on the crest of the ridge was a great deal that was aggressively new, though it would mellow in time.

She ran up the drive and emerged on the lawns at the front of the school buildings. The windows on this side were all open to the sun and wind. It was a big building, built in the golden local stone only the previous year, but no more than the long south front could be seen from the top of the drive. Away to the left, quite close to the house, was the second thing that gave Kerridwen particular pleasure — an orchard filled with old, gnarled fruit trees. Just now the cherry blossom was surging in a white froth over the trees nearest the house, and only that morning she had wasted a further twenty minutes sitting perched up on a strong bough, with the waxen flowers all about her.

“Oh, come on, do!” she urged herself, and made for the open main door. The old gates and the orchard had belonged to the manor-house that had stood on the crest of the ridge until two years before. She had never seen it, but it had been empty for many years and had finally been burnt down. The evidence of the earlier house, which she imagined with old, twisted chimneys and soaring gables, seemed to mitigate the extreme newness of the school buildings.

She could see Jeremy Osborne across the garden, deep in one of his endless discussions with the gardener and handyman, a Scot called Angus Bethune. Both men were gesticulating vigorously as they prowled round a neglected piece of ground.

Kerridwen chuckled and left them to it. She darted into the big, shining entrance hall, where primroses from the sheltered banks in the valley were massed in low bowls. On one side of the hall was the door to her uncle’s study and on the other Gretli Osborne’s sanctum, at the moment given over to some of the endless sewing, though there was a sewing-room upstairs, where the school-Matron had a vast collection of household linen in process of being marked. The telephone bell in Mrs. Osborne’s room was ringing violently and with a steady purpose that suggested it would wait until it was answered. Kerridwen rushed into the room, skirted the billowing train folds of the bedroom curtains, and spoke breathlessly into the mouthpiece:

“Monks’ Cloud 127.”

“Oh, hullo! Might I speak to Mrs. Osborne, please?” asked a very pleasant female voice, and Kerridwen answered:

“Mrs. Osborne has gone into Westringham and won’t be back till late. Shall I take a message, or perhaps I can help you? It’s Miss Osborne speaking.”

“Well, it’s about Pussy’s cat,” said the pleasant voice cheerfully.

“Pussy’s cat?” asked Kerridwen, much puzzled and trying not to sound it.

“I’m so sorry,” said the voice at once, apologetically. “We always call her Pussy. It’s Mrs. Alleyne speaking, and I mean Lulwyn’s cat. She’s insisting that she wants to bring Squibs with her to Cloud Ridge House, and she’s sure pets are allowed. There wasn’t anything said in the prospectus, but —”

“No, that was because Mr. Osborne thought there would be far too many pets arriving at once, but in actual fact each pupil can keep one pet — if it’s well behaved,” she added prudently.

“Oh, Squibs is very well behaved. At least, so Pussy would say. No, seriously, she’s a very little cat and won’t trouble anyone. Are you sure? Pussy will be so relieved. Thank you very much.”

“Isn’t there. . . Your son is coming, too, isn’t he?” asked Kerridwen, putting out her hand for a long list of names.

“Collie? Yes. But he hasn’t any pets. He’s never seemed to want any. Well, I’m sure you’re busy, and thank you very much. Pussy said” — a pause in which Mrs. Alleyne appeared to be considering the advisability of quoting her daughter — “she said, ‘What’s the use of going to an absolutely modern, do-as-you-please school and not even being allowed to take poor Squibs?’ And I explained, of course, that it was hardly a question of do as you please, but of learning self-discipline.”

Kerridwen hung up feeling that she would like Mrs. Alleyne and quite possibly the oddly named Pussy. Even her real name, Lulwyn, was odd. And the boy — Collie! The list told her, after a brief glance, that his name was Columb.

“Probably be rechristened Cabbage, or something of the sort,” she mused. She was busy collecting further lists, with a view to taking them up to Matron, when the telephone bell rang again. This time the operator said:

“There’s a call for you from Canterbury. Hold the line, please.”

Kerridwen held it, and after a moment or two a young but extremely self-assured voice demanded:

“Is that Cloud Ridge School? May I speak to Mrs. Osborne, please?”

Kerridwen once more explained that Mrs. Osborne was in Westringham, and the voice went on:

“Oh, well, perhaps you can tell me. You see, Aunt says —”

“Just a minute,” said Kerridwen, somewhat puzzled. “Who is speaking, please?”

“Helen Perrott,” said the youthful voice. “I’m coming to your school next term.”

“Oh yes,” said Kerridwen, juggling with the lists in an attempt to find the names and addresses of the future pupils. “How do you do, Helen? What is it you want to know?”

“It’s about my school uniform,” explained Helen, in clear and somewhat querulous tones. “My aunt says I’ll have to travel in it, and I said of course I shouldn’t, when I’ve got my new corduroy suit. So I thought I’d ring up and ask. It will be all right if I travel in my ordinary clothes and just wear the uniform when I get to school, won’t it?”

Kerridwen hesitated for a moment, slightly breathless at Helen’s temerity in putting through a trunk-call to ask such a question.

“I’m afraid not,” she said firmly and rather coldly at last. “Please wear your grey suit and a big coat if the day is cold. You won’t need the corduroy suit at all. You’ll have quite enough clothes with your yellow linen frocks, and shorts, and your gym tunic.”

“Oh!” Helen sounded aggrieved, but she appeared to recognize the note of authority. “What a shame! I really thought —”

“Keep the new suit for the holidays,” said Kerridwen, in the friendliest tones she could muster. “‘We’ll see you on the 22nd then, Helen. Good-bye!”

“Phew!” she added aloud, when Helen had said a glum good-bye and rung off. “I wonder what we’ve got there? As Uncle Jeremy says, it’s ‘touch and go’ in some cases! I hope the Helen child is all right. She sounded a precocious minx!”

She left the room hurriedly, clutching the roughly pencilled lists, and walked swiftly and with grace along the sunny corridor towards the main stairs. There were huge windows all along the corridor on her left and these showed the big quadrangle, with its smooth lawns and beds of bronze and gold wallflowers. The school was built round this central court, with long windows and many doors opening on to it on all four sides.

To order your copy of The School on Cloud Ridge see our online shop, visit our Edinburgh bookshop or one of our Stockists.