| Hailsham is a place of rigid and mysterious rules, and teachers constantly remind their charges just how special they are. When one of Kathy's donors, dying painfully, asks her to recount tales of her famous boarding school, Hailsham, she tells of a quite ordinary childhood--or a childhood that would seem ordinary were a reader not aware that Kathy's classmates, too, have gone on to become donors and carers, and that some of the childhood customs at Hailsham are distinctly puzzling. At what we later learn is the literally ripe old age of thirty-one, Kathy thinks back on her salad days at a strange kind of English public school called Hailsham (perhaps an ironic echo of halcyon). |
