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By the voices of policemen and ambulancemen, with questions and note-books, for whom this sort of thing is not exactly everyday, but not unusual.
    And why make a fuss about one drowned boy when over the far horizon and in the sky a war is being fought; when mothers are losing their sons every day and every night the bombers are taking off and don’t all return? The wide world takes priority. And even Dad, who once watched the wide world drowning in Flanders yet lived to tell the tale, will one day tell perhaps, with a flick of cigarette ash and a shake of his head, how he fished that poor drowned lad out of the New Atkinson.
    For the reality of things – be thankful – only visits us for a brief while.
    But – for a brief while – the scene which seems endless:the tow-path; the glinting Leem; lighters approaching downstream; Dick by the lock-pen; Dad labouring in vain, but not knowing how to stop, at the water-filled body of Freddie Parr.
    And Dad does not see, in his agitation, something to make this scene even more endless and indelible. For under and around the gash on Freddie Parr’s right temple is a dark, oval bruise. Or perhaps Dad does see it, which is why he goes on levering Freddie’s arms, not wanting more Trouble. And perhaps Dick sees it, which is why he turns away and spits in the lock-pen. Perhaps we all see it; but I am the only one to consider (notwithstanding my ignorance of how speedily a corpse bruises) that the bruise on Freddie’s right temple, which is a dull yellow at the edges, was not made by the boat-hook.
    But the lighters are approaching. Dick is opening the tail-gates and the lightermen at the same time are seeing something on the tow-path which will justify a break in their upstream journey. They clamber ashore to inform us of what we know already but do not want to know, that Jack Parr’s son is dead, sure as they’re alive; and to be the means at last of making Dad cease his relentless squeezing and pulling. The lightermen gabble. Dad is quiet; then suddenly remembers he is a lock-keeper, with official duties in cases of emergency.
    Twenty-five minutes have passed since Freddie was hoisted from the river (the perimeter of the puddle in which he lies is already beginning to dry). And it will be another thirty-five minutes before the policeman from Apton and the ambulance from Gildsey will arrive. By which time (because dead bodies, like picked fruit, do indeed bruise) a new bruise, caused by the boat-hook, will have begun to form over the old bruise which could not have been caused by the boat-hook, rendering the two bruises, in due course, to appear, to the casual eye, as one. And because of this; because in giving his account to the policeman Dad stressed more than once, with contriteinsistence, that the wounds to Freddie’s head were made by his own inexcusable clumsiness with a boat-hook (to which I and a grunting Dick bore witness); because the policeman was satisfied; because time elapsed while the unfortunate parents were informed and summoned (another endless, indelible scene) and the body was transported to the mortuary in Gildsey, and time blurs details; and because the examining pathologist, having been informed of the business of the boat-hook, did, indeed, have a casual eye and was concerned only to ascertain that Freddie’s lungs were water-logged, and to note the further conclusive fact that the subject’s congealing blood contained a substantial infusion of alcohol – the preliminary verdict on Freddie Parr was that he died (being a non-swimmer and also drunk at the time) by drowning, between the hours of 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. on the night of the twenty-fifth to the twenty-sixth of July, 1943.
    Why did fear transfix me at that moment when the boat-hook clawed at Freddie Parr’s half-slipping, half-suspended body? Because I saw death? Or the image of something worse? Because this wasn’t just plain, ordinary, terrible, unlooked-for death, but something