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being.’
    ‘They’re rather fierce,’ said I.
    ‘Well, you need to be fierce when you go into battle.’
    ‘Cubs,’ said the Doveston. ‘Time for the Cubs.’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘What battle, sir?’
    ‘The final conflict,’ said the uncle, rising on his toes. ‘The battle of good against evil, as foretold in the Book of Revelation. This will come in the year two thousand and I shall be ready for it.’
    ‘Are you digging a fallout shelter then?’
    ‘No fallout shelter for me, lad. I shall be leading the charge. I intend to seed the entire globe with my chimeras. They will grow in any climate. They will grow big and fierce and when the call to arms comes, I shall give the signal and they will rise up in their millions, their hundreds of millions, and slay the oppressors. They will march across the lands, a mighty mutant army, destroying all before them, answering to only me. Only
me,
do you hear,
only me!’
    That was the last time I saw the uncle. I didn’t go calling on him again. About a month after that some other folk came knocking at his door. Policemen they were, accompanied by others in white coats. There had been some complaints about missing cats and dogs and apparently a number of blood-stained collars were found in a bag beneath his sink.
    My friend Billy, who was leading a party of American tourists around the Butts, said that he saw the uncle being hauled away, dressed in a long-sleeved jacket that buckled down the back. There was foam coming out of his mouth and the tourists stopped to take pictures.
    On the following day a fire broke out. The house itself was hardly touched, but the beautiful conservatory burned to the ground.
    Nobody knew how the fire had started.
    Nobody seemed to care.
    Nobody but for the Doveston. And he was clearly upset. He had been very fond of his ‘adopted’ uncle and was greatly miffed at his hauling away. I did what I could to console him, of course, such as buying him sweeties and sharing my fags. I think that we must have grown rather close, because he began to call me Edwin and I began to understand that he had ‘adopted’ me also.
    One lunchtime during the following school term he took me aside in the playground.
    ‘I believe that I have it in me to make my name famous,’ he said.
    ‘And I wish you to become my amanuensis and biographer. You will be a Boswell to my Johnson, a Watson to my Sherlock Holmes. It will be your job to chronicle my words and deeds for posterity. What say you to this offer?’
    I pondered upon the Doveston’s words. ‘Will there be money and long-legged women?’ ‘Plenty of both,’ he replied.
    ‘Then count me in,’ I said and we shook hands.
    And there have indeed been plenty of both. Plenty of both and then some. But before we close the page upon Uncle Jon Peru Joans, one thing remains to be mentioned.
    And that is the matter of his ‘beautiful boys’.
    With the destruction of his conservatory, it was my conviction that I had seen the last of those fierce fellows and so it came as a horrid surprise when four decades later I saw them again. No longer small and enclosed by glass, but wandering large on a country estate.
    Called Castle Doveston.

4
    Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all their panaceas, potable gold and philosophers’ stones, a sovereign remedy for all diseases.
    Richard Burton (1577—1640)
    We were rarely afraid of anything much—although there was plenty to fear. These were, after all, the 1950s and we were living in the shadow of
the Bomb.
    Our parents worried a lot about
the Bomb,
but we had been given our pamphlets at school and knew that as long as you shielded your eyes from the big flash with a sweet wrapper and remembered to ‘duck and cover’, you’d come out of the holocaust unscathed. What fears we had, we saved for more tangible dangers. There were things you had to know in order to survive childhood and we were pretty sure we knew them all.
    Snakes you