EDMUND HOOPER lives with his father at Warings, a large house in the country, and he is not pleased with CHARLES KINGSHAW and his mother arrive – Mrs. Kingshaw is to be their housekeeper and hopes that the eleven year old boys will be great friends. They become enemies on sight and the novel is about the struggle between them. Kingshaw is uncertain, sensitive, pleasant, weak – and on strange ground. Hooper is sly, manipulative, mean and a bully and he makes Charles’s life hell. The tables are turned as their roles are briefly reversed when they get lost in Hang Wood but the overall winner of the conflict is never in doubt. Meanwhile, the adults have their own agenda.