Drift

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.DRIFTAngus? Baker? Dermott-Powell? Ellerman? Mawsom? Notting? Snider? Almost without realising it, I have begun to tell the story I vowed I would never tell at all; a story I have avoided telling for a lifetime. It has always lain there waiting - lurking; during the past months it has thrust itself forward, at first merely nagging, but now insistent.Perhaps you will not be able to believe what I have to say, holding it instead to be mere fiction…I would prefer that, because if you cannot believe it then maybe I shall be able to persuade myself it never really happened at all….The photograph is real enough. It shows our 'Election' - the seven of us who were shepherded in Great Quad that autumn afternoon.