bully by name

"What a coincidence," my mother-in-law laughs. But I think I detect unease in her voice.

We've just pointed out to her that the bullying protagonist in the Costa Children's Award-winning Out of Shadows is called Ivan Hascott. His name is one syllable different to my brother-in-law's, my mother-in-law's second child.

Reports say author Jason Wallace attended the same boarding school at the same time as my brother-in-law: Peterhouse, in Marondera, Zimbabwe. Wallace -- who set his story in a post-independence Zimbabwean boarding school -- looks to have been a couple of years younger than my brother-in-law.

Who was a well-known bully.

Often, when I reveal my married name in a social gathering, someone will come up to me and ask hesitantly: "You're not related to --" and I steel myself. Some former schoolmates laugh when they recount his exploits. But we've met at least two men aged around 40 who I'd say were still psychologically scarred.

His parents knew little about his bullying: how would you, when you saw your child only in the holidays and at the most twice a term? Boarding school is a big thing here, something I find -- with my English day Grammar School background -- totally foreign. As I write, a friend's just dropped off her seven-year old for the first time. ("Not a tear shed by any of us," she texts me).

Bullying was and is a problem. An 80-something friend of ours remembers when she had to take her son out of a school because a classmate died in a bullying incident (he was locked into a tin trunk). In one of the worst cases a couple of months ago, a 19-year-old prefect was arrested for sodomising 10 younger boys in their dormitory (actually, he wasn't arrested straight away: they let him sit his exams).

My brother-in-law was, I think, pretty scarred himself at the time, as many white and black kids were in the early 1980s. He'd had an absent father for much of the previous decade (my father-in-law had to perform six-week blocks of military service, so he'd spend six weeks at home and six weeks away in the bush, and the family never knew whether he'd come back). The three brothers returned to school after independence to find other whites overnight had either fled the country or yanked their kids out of now racially-integrated local government schools. Rightly or wrongly, my parents-in-law followed suit, scrabbling around to mop up the remaining places in exclusive boarding schools. Each child ended up in a different school.

That's not to excuse what happened, but it may go someway towards explaining it.

"Who'd have thought our sweet little darling was getting up to all that?" my mother-in-law tinkles. She is, as always, nothing but brave.