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that the appropriate authorities must be informed and summoned; that, once again, Trouble was invading his quiet riverside life.
    For when a body floats into a lock kept by a lock-keeper of my father’s disposition, it is not an accident but a curse.
    More water flowed from Freddie Parr’s mouth, but no blood flowed from the mulberry gash in his temple. Water flowed from Freddie Parr’s mouth in rhythmic spurts according to the pressure of the persevering hands between his shoulders. For there is such a thing as human drainage too, such a thing as human pumping. And what else was my father doing on that July morning than whathis forebears had been doing for generations: expelling water? But whereas they reclaimed land, my father could not reclaim a life …
    Thus I see us, grouped silently on the concrete tow-path, while Dad labours to refute reality, labours against the law of nature, that a dead thing does not live again; and larks twitter in the buttery haze of the morning sky, and the sun, shining along the Leem, catches the yellow-brick frontage of our cottage, on which can be observed, above the porch, a stone inset bearing the date 1875, and, above the date, in relief, the motif of two crossed ears of corn which, on close inspection, can be seen to be not any old ears of corn but the whiskered ears of barley.
    The water slops out, in astonishing quantities. And no amount of rhythmic pressing and pulling on Dad’s part, no amount of dogged application of the Holger-Nielsen Method can hide the fact that he is desperate. That though his lips do not move he is praying, that he is thinking of Jack and Flora Parr who do not know, at this moment, that their son is dead. And I too am praying and hoping – I do not know if it is for Freddie Parr’s sake or for my father’s – that Freddie Parr will miraculously revive. Because it seems to me that in his futile pumping at Freddie’s body, Dad is trying to pump away not just this added curse, but all the ill luck of his life: the ill luck that took away, six years ago, his wife; the ill luck that had his first son born a freak, a potato-head (for that’s what Dick is). And more curses, more curses perhaps, as yet unknown.
    Only Dick, of the three of us, shows no dismay (but what can you tell of the feelings of a potato-head?). For him, this removal of a body – even a familiar body – from the river is perhaps not essentially different from his daily task (for which he will be late today) of removing silt, by means of bucket-dredging apparatus from the bottom of the Ouse. For Dick is a good worker, potato-head though he is, there is no doubt about that. There is no doubting his manual strength, his stamina, his sullen willingness toget on with the chores he is set. Dick smells of silt. He goes now to the edge of the tow-path. He is holding the boat-hook. He leans on it and spits – a great gob of the old Crick phlegm which, though thick and in good supply, has momentarily failed to quell my father’s inner agitation – into the lock-pen. He watches it float, bubble, sink. His cow-lashes flutter over his fish-eyes.
    And only Dick sees, through blinking eyes, as we try to raise the dead, that two lighters are approaching in the distance, upriver, from the Ouse, and will require passage through the lock. Drowned body or not, the lock-gates must be opened and closed. And soon this riverside calamity which is known only to us will be known to others too, the news carried up the Leem by the lightermen of the Gildsey Fertilizer Company. Soon the desperate silence on the tow-path will be broken by the voices of those for whom this drowned boy is only something on the periphery, not at the hub of their concern. ‘Ent much sense squeezin’ the water outa dead body’ (first lighterman). ‘Boat-’ook? What d’you use a boat-’ook for? Coulden you dive in an’ pull the bugger out?’ (Why not indeed? Because it’s bad luck to swim in the same water as a drowned body.)