The writer was two years old when he and his mother were captured by Japanese soldiers. For the next three years, he was imprisoned in a concentration camp near Shanghai, China. After repatriation to Britain in 1945, he lived with a variety of relatives. At age nine, he moved to South Africa and, for the next eight years, was educated at boarding schools. The regime at one particular school was harsh; he had to elude the attentions of predatory, cruel teachers. The country was then ruled by a Calvinist Afrikaner elite who embraced the concept of white supremacy; they believed 'non-whites' would always be 'hewers of wood and carriers of water' (as their Bible foretold). The world knew this system of government as apartheid, and it persisted for 45 years, until Nelson Mandela was freed. This memoir draws a picture of what it was like to live as a boy in that era. And how the experience shaped the writer as a young adult.