In 1962, a 16-year-old boy is dropped off by his father at a boarding school on the windswept coast of East Anglia. It is a model of its kind–the rooms are freezing, the food is disgusting, the older boys are sadistic, and the masters are the ineffectual, damaged castoffs of a dying Empire. But the boy is used to the drill and well practiced at detached dreaming, imagining himself someone else, somewhere else. Until one day, falling behind one of the regular runs along the coast,