Stand Before Your God: An American Schoolboy in England Paperback - 1995

First line

I swear I thought I was going to a party.

From the jacket flap

At the age of seven, Paul Watkins was roughly transplanted from his home in Rhode Island to England's Dragon School. He was greeted by a delegation of bullies who, in time, would become his friends and whose rules would become his own. For at Dragon, and later at Eton, "there was no middle ground. You could not go here and come out not caring one way or the other. You had to stand before your God and commit."
In this enthralling and sometimes harrowing memoir, the acclaimed author of The Promise of Light gives us a masterly companion to such classics as Brideshead Revisited and A Separate Peace. Here are the masters who paddle boys for small infractions and then offer them sweets; the seniors who pamper pretty favorites and subject all others to humiliating servitude; the deep friendships and sudden, devastating betrayals. Above all, here is the exhilaration of a boy discovering own capacities for learning and creativity, in a book that conveys with astonishing insight the pangs of growing up.

Media reviews

"The literature of school includes such classics as Tom Brown's School Days and Goodbye, Mr. Chips. No one has ever told it so well from the student's point of view as Paul Watkins." -- Denver Post

"Strong and evocative. . . smoothly written. . . romantic."--The New York Times Book Review.