Riding Star. Stacy Gregg

filled with rows of bound volumes.

      “This is where we keep student records, school information and rare books,” Mr Wainwright explained, pulling a book off the shelf and blowing the dust off the cover before he opened it up.

      “These are the Blainford yearbooks,” he said. “They date back almost eighty years to when the academy first opened its doors.”

      Mr Wainwright looked up at the shelves. “These books record our school’s history – and those records would all be lost if anything happened to the library.”

      He plonked the heavy volume he had been holding into Georgie’s hands.

      “Which is why I am assigning you the task of digitising it. I need these books scanned for storage.”

      “All of them?” Georgie squeaked.

      “Oh, there’s no way you’ll get through more than a few volumes today,” Mr Wainwright said. “If you got Fatigues every week for the rest of the year then you could finish the job!”

      He smiled at Georgie. “That’s a joke, Parker.”

      “Very funny, sir,” Georgie said. Wainwright didn’t realise that at the rate she was going with Conrad she would single-handedly have the whole library on a hard drive in no time.

      Digitising the archives sounded complicated, but in fact it was really just a matter of turning the pages of the book one at a time and scanning each side as you went. In half an hour Georgie had worked her way through the first volume of the Blainford yearbook from 1930-1940. She was about to attack the next volume from 1940-1950 when she thought better of it and pushed the book back on to the shelf. It didn’t matter what order she scanned the books in – so why not choose the era that actually interested her? Her eyes skimmed the spines of the volumes until she found the yearbook from 1980-1990. She opened the book and skipped forward to 1986 – the year that her mother had been a senior at the school. She scanned the student list, looking under ‘P’ for Parker and then suddenly realised that her mother would have been called by her maiden name, Ginny Lang.