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
"We must destroy him."
... No hiss of indrawn breath, no bubble of subversive agreement, certainly no protest. It was as if he merely articulated something tacitly agreed already. ...There is only one word precise enough which comes to mind, but it is so unfashionable and prissy that perhaps you will smile. It does not make me smile...
Corruption?
Oh yes, certainly we were corrupt. We had been slowly, insidiously, subtly corrupted since the first minutes of the first hour we arrived in Ansell's. ...But it seems to me now, as an old man, that the only appropriate word for what we finally embraced that fading autumn afternoon is 'wickedness'.
