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


“Anyway, was not his stinging arse – and how he relished the coarseness on his tongue, as he consciously abandoned his fastidious refusal to use the word even in his imagination – proof enough that he was ‘in credit’ so to speak? It was, he intuitively perceived, much more than a receipt acknowledging punishment administered for an offence committed. Perhaps it was his perception of Maunder’s ambivalence which enabled him to divine with great inner certainty that it was not only the first instalment of his subscription as a fully paid-up Ansell’s Man; it was also, he realized with fearful but delightful anticipation, payment on account for pleasures yet to come. “

• Drift (School Story Book 1)
• Fall (School Story Book 3)
• The Dog In The Chapel
• Sandel
• Boarding School Boy: In the Days of the Raj