1936: After twelve-year-old Graeme Moodie recovers from polio, he's left with a pronounced limp. Unable to handle a 'normal' boarding school with its beatings and bullying, he goes to Maiden Erlegh School for Boys which, Moodie later claimed, changed his life. The story is largely true. Whispered by locals to take all sorts of misfits and oddballs, the school is the brainchild of Captain TS Waterlow Fox, an ex-Army captain who rules with an iron fist in a velvet glove. 'We're all different, we're all the same,' is his message. Graeme's intelligence shines. His roommates are Paul Caspari, a Jewish refugee from Germany, and Charlie Marshall, a stutterer, badly damaged by his parents' nasty divorce. Graeme feels at home, and for the first time in years, happy. Now if only he could find a girlfriend - that would be heaven. But by 1939, as storm clouds of war grow ever closer, a German student joins the Nazi party, which threatens to shatter Maiden Erlegh's bubble of sanity.