A Surprising Summer Term: Servants and Schoolgirls in Wartime

In World War Two Rhiannon is still a servant in a boarding school, but determined to get ahead, studies in every spare moment for the RSA exams leaving time only for her other passion - Girl Guides. She makes a wireless with her Guide friends and picks up a strange coded signal. Is it kids mucking around? Criminals? Or even Nazi agents?

Then some other working class girls - Alice and Josie - get scholarships to the school so Rhiannon must cope with her jealousy.

But it isn't all jam for Alice, one of the scholarship girls, as she struggles with a stammer. She is brutally teased and runs away. Then one of Alice's tormentors loses her beloved horse and Alice finds it. Rhiannon is on a Guide trek, hears the call for help and goes to help. A love of horses brings the girls together so they start to make friends.

At the same time some of Rhiannon's fellow domestics make it difficult for her to study as if the hours she has to spend cleaning and doing kitchen work weren't enough.

Then there's a possibility of a new opportunity for Rhiannon to work in a factory with day release classes. Should she take it or is the teaching she gets at the school better?