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of the pier.
    The combined effect of all these movements and counter-movements was that the twist in Freddie’s collar by which he was attached to the boat-hook, twisted still further, to the point where it could twist no more without Freddie twisting with it. All at once, the body, left leg and shoulder first, turned face upwards, and this, unlike the unconvincing imitation of swimming, gave every appearance that Freddie Parr had suddenly woken from his nose-down slumber and, annoyed by the boat-hook that was both probing his neck and threatening to throttle him, was angrily alive.
    Whether it was in frantic response to this illusion or whether he had decided anyway to abandon his plan and haul the body out of the water there and then, Dad began to pull mightily on the boat-hook. Freddie reared out of the water, as far as his waist, and hung, elbows out, wrists raised in a gesture of surrender, still several feet below Dad. The head fell back and hit the brickwork of the pier. Water flowed out of the mouth. The twisted shirt-collar which could not support the weight of the hanging body, tore apart. The boat-hook caught first under Freddie’s jaw, then, as the body fell back into the water, gouged upwards through cheek, eye-socket and temple.
    And it was then, children – as Freddie Parr plunged but bobbed up again, and as it became clear that the inadvertent wound to his head had drawn blood, but not blood of the usual kind, vivid red and readily mingling with water, but a dark, sticky, reluctant substance, the colour of black-currants – that I came out of a dream. That I realized. I realized I was looking at a dead body. Something I had never seen before. (For I had seen Mother dying but not dead.) And not just any dead body, but the dead body of my friend (true, a devious friend, a friend to be suspected on more than one count – but a friend). Freddie Parr. Whom I had talked to the day before yesterday. With whom, not so long ago, I used to sit and joke and banter on the high banks of the Hockwell Lode where it joins the Leem, not far from where the Leem meets the Ouse. Along with Dick, and Mary Metcalf and Shirley Alford and Peter Baine and David Coe, most of us half-naked and muddy-limbed, because this was our favourite spot for swimming.
    Save that Freddie Parr couldn’t.
    Dick’s eyelashes whirred. Dad swore – the soft oath of a God-fearing man who swears never in anger but only in distress – and fished once more with his boat-hook amongst Freddie’s clothes.
    We got Freddie Parr out of the water. Between us, welifted him up the landing-steps – a water-logged body is not light – and carried him on to the concrete stretch of tow-path in front of the cottage. There, because it is the recommended position for the resuscitation of the not-quite-drowned, Dad had him placed chest-down on the ground. And there, because Dad had at one time under the auspices of the Great Ouse Catchment Board (which subsumed the Leem Drainage and Navigation Board) been given token instruction in the Holger-Nielsen Method of Artificial Respiration, he began to press between Freddie’s prominent shoulder-blades, to raise and lower his stiffened arms and to continue to do so for a full quarter of an hour. Not because he did not know, any less than Dick and I knew, that Freddie was dead, but because Dad, being superstitious, would never exclude the possibility of a miracle, and because this ritual pretence at resuscitation staved off the moment when he must face the indictment of truth. That the corpse of a boy had been found in his lock, a boy who – had his lock-keeper’s vigilance not failed him that night – might have been saved; that because it was his lock, it was his responsibility; that it was the corpse of the son of a known neighbour of his; that in retrieving this corpse he had cack-handedly wounded it about the head with a boat-hook, and to wound the dead was perhaps a sin more heinous than to wound the living;