Seven apprehensive thirteen-year-olds enter a famous Public School as members of Ansell's, the most prestigious House. The reader is inducted with them into claustrophobic, arcane, degenerated traditions which educate them intellectually, morally and sexually into ruined senior boys who precipitate the shocking tragedy and its shameful aftermath which still haunts the narrator.
Frighteningly convincing, uncompromisingly explicit, this portrayal of an outwardly revered institution inwardly corrupt with misplaced loyalty, complacency and arrogance, makes us ponder the integrity of those who, educated like these boys, dominated Government and the Establishment during the last decades of the twentieth century
The seeds were sown. What followed was therefore so inevitable that I can now put my pen down. Nothing more than your imagination is required to project forward and to predict how it must surely end.
"This was the reason for your fears? Your guilt? Ridiculous! Granted, it is hardly an elevating tale ? not the jolly world of Billy Bunter's Greyfriars' chums. However, you tell us nothing new. We've all been through it. Or read about it. Furtive (and not so furtive) grubby experimental sex amongst adolescent boys cooped up together is nothing unusual. Come on! Initiation, hero-worship, 'beating and buggery': in the cold perspective of time, it's not so very shocking... What are you hiding?... What really happened?"
