There are no telephones at Silver Creek, or laptops or internet or television, so I’ll have to write letters to stay in touch with Mum and Dad and my brother Archie. For the next year I’ll be living in a wooden house with fifteen other girls. The boys live on the other side of the campus. We’ll have regular school each day, just like every other fourteen-year-old, but we’ll spend the rest of our free time outdoors, running and hiking, building huts and cultivating the vineyard, and in the winter we’ll ski and take part in community service.
I learnt all this from the information session last year… It had sounded quaint at the time, like something out of Enid Blyton, but now I’m not so sure.
Young Rebecca was right; Enid Blyton it aint. More like Lord of the Flies.
Rebecca Starford was a scholarship girl at an elite private school, and Bad Behaviour is about the year the author spent at the school’s remote bush campus, here called ‘Silver Creek’ (which bears more than a passing resemblance to Geelong Grammar’s Timbertop).
Rebecca lives in the spartan ‘Red House’, sleeping in a dormitory, sharing common rooms and study areas, and performing rostered daily tasks with the other girls. The emphasis is firmly on physical, mental and emotional challenge; the activities are presumably intended to build strength, capacity, resilience and self-reliance. But the lack of supervision, the failure to provide real support and guidance means that quickly a pecking order evolves. Homesick and lonely, trying hard to fit in, she falls under the spell of powerful ‘top girl’, Portia, and Rebecca, formerly a well-behaved and studious teenager, becomes one of the naughtiest girls in the school. Which sounds Blytonesque, but the bullying meted out to the most vulnerable girls is unremitting and vicious; the power clique is amoral and toxic.
It’s not all hell. There is friendship, and growth. Rebecca finds solace in the natural world. But the Silver Creek year left marks on her future adult self, as she so painfully describes. My heart ached for this good girl irresistably drawn to the dark side. As one of the bullied, and once (to my lasting shame) a bully myself, Starford’s struggles made a difficult, even gruelling read for me. Adolescence is a rotten time, really.