Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea

A band of savage thirteenyearold boys reject the adult world as illusory hypocritical and sentimental and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call objectivity. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ships officer he and his friends idealise the man at first but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard this disallusionment as an act of betrayal on his part and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying.