‘The rest of you will go outside as usual.’It was the end of July, school had broken up for the summer holidays just the day before, no one had had any time yet to do anything wrong. The named girls all looked at each other in consternation, but they didn’t dare speak, Sister Teresa was standing in the doorway just waiting to pounce.Once all the other girls had gone upstairs, Sister Margaret told them they were to follow her up to Mother Superior’s room. ‘It’s about Australia,’ she said crisply, but whether this was intended to cheer or dismay them they couldn’t tell, for her face was as blank as Sister Teresa’s book of kindnesses.Back at the end of January twelve girls had been selected by Mother Superior to go to Australia, including these six. In February they were all taken to Australia House in the Strand for an intelligence test and a medical. But since then they had been told nothing more, not even whether they’d passed the tests.As they made their way up the stairs, Dulcie decided to herself that this group consisted of all the failures, for aside from her and May having a father, Pauline Dwight had a mother and Alice Field had a grandmother who visited her.
