Friends and Traitors

Helen Peters's Friends and Traitors is a gripping wartime mystery for 10 year olds set in an enormous country house where somebody is clearly up to something.

What happens

It's May 1940 and Hitler has reached the French coast. A girls' boarding school has been moved to Stanbrook, a grand stately home that belongs to an earl, in case of invasion.

The story is told by two girls who'd never normally meet. Nancy is the new housemaid. She had to leave school on her fourteenth birthday, even though she'd won a scholarship. Sidney is a new pupil, stuck in a dormitory with the meanest girl in her year. (Her letters to her big brother George, a Spitfire pilot, are some of the funniest bits.)

On her very first day Nancy overhears the earl and a famous racing driver talking in low voices about Saturday and a side gate nobody guards. It all sounds very hush-hush. Then, on Saturday night, a Spitfire factory nearby goes up in flames, and there weren't any German planes overhead.

Reading it feels like being dropped right into 1940. There's rationing, blackout fabric, a very strict headmistress and an old countess who says she can feel the spirits. Nancy and Sidney see the same house from opposite ends (one carries the tables, one sits at them), and it's great fun watching them judge each other before they've properly spoken.

Secret meetings, creaky old houses, an earl nobody quite trusts. For a young mystery fan it's a real treat. It's also a lovely way to show what the war felt like for children at home.

It's more thrilling than scary. The old countess does tell the girls a ghost story about a young wife found dead on the lawn below the roof, and the word suicide comes up. And there's a steady worry running through it about brothers away fighting.

What to read next

For more of the war seen through a child's eyes, try Anna at War, also by Helen Peters. A boy called Daniel asks his granny about coming to England from Germany as a girl, and finds out MI5 has been keeping files on her.