Quote: Set shortly after the Second World War, narrator Alan Carey tells of the year when he was eleven years old going on twelve. Living in London, he had earlier lost his parents and older brother in an air raid, and lives with his grandmother, but she dies just before he is due to start his senior education at the local grammar school, a school for brighter students. As an orphan he is sent to Barton House, a forbidding Victorian children's home. His fellow inmates are a rough and seasoned bunch that have developed their own strategies for survival, and the staff are at best indifferent and unsympathetic, at worst hostile or even malicious.
Alan is out of place at Barton House as a "grammar school snob"; at school he is out of place as deprived and coming from a rough children's home. But Alan is no easy push-over, and he is well able to hold his own in both environments. What he is less well equipped to handle is the continued brutal physical and sexual abuse, and the accompanying shame, at the hands of the sadistic Barton House staff member Jacko.
Alan is frequently encouraged by others who tell him "a lad like you" will survive, but he is never able to discern quite what is meant by that. There is certainly something about him that endears him to some, he is bright and affable, and he certainly proves himself capable at his Saturday job at a light engineering workshop. He is briefly befriended by a boy from a nearby private school, the students of which are sworn enemies of the Barton House boys. But he eventually finds true solace in the arms of Mike, the older brother of one of his classmates and friend Toddy. However the intervention of the Mike's parents brings the relationship to a swift and abrupt end, casting Alan as the villain.
This is a captivating but disturbing story, the horrors of Barton House are appalling, especially the sinister Jacko. The short idyllic period when Alan is invited by Mike and Toddy's parents to join them all on holiday in Cornwall offers a marked contrast, and provides for some very tender moments. But overall the predominant feeling of the account is the desperation and frustration that Alan suffers virtually defenseless against an adult world that is unprepared to give him a chance. While one hopes for an ending in which the guilty get there comeuppance, and Alan benefits from true justice, the conclusion is in rather depressingly true to life, and while Alan comes through it all showing the makings of a man, he is not unscathed by the events of the traumatic year of 1946/47. Having said that however, I absolutely loved this book, and highly recommend it.