The Ashenden Story

Kit Aldren is not a good kid.

He knows it. His parents know it. Two schools have already put it in writing.

So when the car comes up the long road to Ashenden Hall - grey stone, a hundred windows, a clock tower with a face on all four sides, standing alone on a bare hill with nothing else in any direction - nobody in that car thinks he doesn't deserve it.

Ashenden is a very good school.

The lawns are kept. The results are excellent. There is a waiting list, and parents cry in the car park out of gratitude, and every boy who leaves goes home polite, and quiet, and easy to live with.

On the afternoon Kit arrives, two hundred boys are standing in rows on the front lawn, watching a man in a black coat beat a boy with a stick.

The man is not hurrying.

The boy is not crying.

He is looking, across four hundred yards of grass, straight at Kit's car.

Nothing at Ashenden is locked.

There are no fences and no bars and no dogs. The front door stands open all day. Kit can walk out of it whenever he likes, down the long road with grass growing up the middle of it, and nobody will stop him or shout after him or even watch him go.

Nobody has ever got anywhere.

Every morning before the first lesson, two hundred boys sing the school song.

Nobody has ever listened to the words.

Kit is clever, and he is a liar, and he has never once in his life met a rule he couldn't get out from under.

He has one year.

And Ashenden has done this before.

Ashenden, Ashenden, take us in,
wash the wildness from the skin.
Leave your shoes beside the door -
you shall want for them no more.