Signature Books
9780704371439 £15.00 Quartet HB Publ 30th Oct
Rites of passage seen through the eyes of an english public schoolboy.
England in the mid 1970s and young Samuel Alexander is reluctantly starting at his father's old public school, one of the finest in the whole of England.
Everything on the surface is as it has long been in this harsh and lonely but supremely privileged environment.
As they have done for generations, new boys have to serve their Seniors as part of the belittling 'fag' system. All the boys wear morning suit with tails on Sundays to the school chapel and a black tie with their uniform during the week to mourn the death of Queen Victoria's long-dead husband. They are shepherded by elite Prefects in fancy waistcoats along chilly school corridors to their Latin, Maths and History lessons with old-fashioned Masters.
But the certainty of a closed world that Sam's father once sang of in the old school anthem is crumbling away. There are new seismic forces at work such as drugs and football hooliganism and these are no longer confined to the external world.