Early last August, just as Edinburgh began to buzz with the noise and colour of the arts festival, another drama began to play out in a nondescript office block off the city’s St Andrew Square. Here the Scottish child abuse inquiry (SCAI) began a three-week special hearing into a historic scandal at one of the city’s elite schools, Edinburgh Academy. Three weeks seemed hardly enough for a story spanning decades, a tale of terrible cruelty and extraordinary institutional failures that has affected the lives of hundreds of people in Britain and South Africa.
“I’ve been waiting 52 years for this moment: it wasn’t till this morning that I really believed it would happen,” said one of the crowd of witnesses gathered for the first day of hearings. Old schoolmates hugged and greeted each other: for some, this was their first meeting since the 1970s. Schoolboy humour resurfaced among the cluster of middle-aged men: “This looks like a busy day at the prostate clinic.” One ran outside for a last cigarette, another to get a packet of tissues for the tears he knew were coming.
