Chapter One Summary

The story is told from the point of view of a single person, and the first chapter does not reveal the name of this young boy. What the reader does know is that he is born of parents of English ancestry into the culturally diverse world of South Africa three generations after the Boer Wars.

This young boy is raised for the most part by his Zulu wet nurse, who later also becomes his nanny. When the boy turns five, he is sent away to boarding school as his mother has had a nervous breakdown. This move is an incredible alteration to the way that the young man has lived his life up until this point.

Everything that he has known is now gone, and even the food at the boarding school is different and plain compared to what he has...