When Rosemerryn Arundel - known as Merry - comes to Tremayne, a private girls' school near the New Zealand city of Dunedin, she longs with all of her heart to become a boarder, rather than a day girl, and to belong to Sennen House, where her own mother - missing and presumed dead in a plane crash - once belonged. With the help of Sennen Captain, Pauline Templeton, Merry does just that, and is soon thick as thieves with the other IIIA girls in Dormitory Ten. Making friends - particularly with Hildreth Ballantyne - Merry soon finds herself a 'BUP' - part of her dormitory's campaign to 'back up Pauline' in the face of trouble being stirred up in Sennen House by a popularity-mad Senior student. In addition to doing their best to get marks for their house, the BUPs also form the Torchlight Club, a secret society that holds midnight feasts and reads plays together. This clandestine activity has unexpectedly positive results, when a crisis is reached in the conflict between Pauline and the cadre of 'sentimental' girls who oppose her...

Published in 1947, Merry Begins is the first volume of a trilogy devoted to its eponymous heroine's school adventures, and is followed by Merry Again and Merry Marches On. It is quite unusual, in that it has a New Zealand setting, something not often seen in vintage girls' school stories. The author, Clare Mallory (real name: Winifred Constance McQuilkan Hall), worked for a number of years as a teacher and then as a headmistress of a girls' school, which no doubt explains the convincing atmosphere of her tale. I enjoyed this book immensely, appreciating the fact that a number of different perspectives were explored - that of Merry, but also that of Pauline - and that the schoolgirl conflicts were treated realistically, rather than as melodrama. Although the book is named for Merry, I often found the other characters, particularly Pauline and Hildreth, more interesting. That said, I enjoyed pretty much everything about the book, from the writing to the story to the characters, and I finished it with a desire to pick up the sequels.

Two things that particularly struck me, as I was reading, were the Cornish place-names used throughout - Tremayne was founded by an immigrant from Cornwall, and had house names such as Sennen, Constantine, Lamorna and Tintagel - and the casual (and brief) mention of Madchen in Uniform and Regiment of Women. Both of these works, which are written for adults but set at girls' schools, address lesbian relations between the characters, something that is clearly hinted at, when Georgie (prefect and schoolgirl librarian) declares: "Thank goodness we go to a school without obvious peculiarities." This oblique reference to lesbianism seems relevant to the story, as Pauline immediately afterward thinks of Nora, the Senior attempting to charm the impressionable younger girls in order to win popularity. Was Clare Mallory implying that the sort of silly 'sentimentalism' her main characters opposed was actually some kind of same-sex romanticism? Or is this brief passage a reference to the growing concerns about girls' only education, at least in the UK, during the mid-20th-century, driven by fears that it were encouraging homosexuality? It's impossible to say, but it certainly is fascinating!

Leaving these issues aside - and the passage in question is easily missed - Merry Begins is an engaging, entertaining, and wholly satisfying school story, one I would recommend to fans of the genre, as well as to those seeking vintage New Zealand children's novels. ( )