Glen Retief's childhood was at once recognizably ordinary and brutally unusual. Raised in the middle of a game preserve where his father worked, Retief's warm nuclear family was a preserve of its own, against chaotic forces just outside its borders: a childhood friend's uncle was also the leader of a death squad, while his cultured grandfather quoted Shakespeare over sodas and abused Glen's sister in his antique Victorian living room. But it was when Retief was sent to boarding school, at age twelve, that he was truly exposed to human cruelty and frailty. When the prefects were caught torturing younger boys, they invented "the jack bank," where underclassmen could save beatings and draw on them later to atone for their supposed infractions.