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happened all at once, or seemed to, though probably a few girls in the middle had begun it, but in an instant the whole troop of them, hand in hand to make a chain right across the lawn, were charging down the slope, long hair streaming; a wild whoop, wobbly with giggles, echoed between the garden walls.
    â€˜No! Girls! No!’ shrieked the dreadful-war woman.
    They swooped across the next level and on to the second slope. The yell changed note, the line wavered. Some of the girls were trying to stop, but the slope was too steep and the impetus carried them down, while the girls on either side of them, apparently blind to what was about to happen, gripped their hands and rushed them on. The green of the third level was not that of grass, but of duckweed. And, of course, water, as the woman had said. The same was true of the level two beyond. It was obvious the moment you realised what you were looking at. The paired statues on each of those levels were in fact fountains which, because of this dreadful war, had not played all summer and so had allowed the duckweed to accumulate into its perfect, lawn-imitating smoothness. All but two or three girls went straight in.
    The boys stood appalled. Later they would recount the adventure, much embroidered, with laughter that almost prevented them getting the words out, but at the time it seemed to them a perfectly appalling thing to happen. Shame at such an exhibition, so unspeakably punished, held them stock still. The girls floundered in the mucky water, some still laughing, some screaming. Pretty or plain, shy or bouncy, they had become weed-bedraggled pond-monsters. The water must have been less than four feet deep and most of them seemed to be standing. The first to recover was a tallish girl, over on the right. She put her hands on the stone kerb of the pond, straightened her arms to heave her body up, got a knee on the kerb, crawled out, rose and stood dripping while she pushed her weed-streaked hair out of her eyes with a furious, proud gesture.
    The two women Paul had seen on the path had been passing the pond while the charge and plunge took place, and now the taller of them came gently up to this girl as if to comfort her but at the last moment took her by the shoulders and shoved her back into the water, laughing. (In the boys’ embroidered versions of the incident the woman’s laugh was usually described as ‘like a silver tea-bell’, but it is unlikely that any of them could have heard it at the time. It seemed right to them, though in fact, as Paul found later, nothing like a proper description of Molly’s bubbling tenor chuckle.) The woman did the same to three other girls before Mr Floyd and the second school-mistress got down and stopped her. The moment they came on the scene she faced them, head thrown back, her face pale and smooth and her blue eyes looking them up and down with calm scorn; then without a word she walked back to her friend who had been waiting by the end of the pond, leaning on her walking-stick and nodding solemnly to herself.
    It was thus that Paul saw within a few seconds of each other two apparently contradictory aspects of the famous Molly Benison, her readiness to demean herself and others almost limitlessly for the sake of what she decided was ‘fun’, and her ability to confront worldly powers with an indifference and dignity that seemed to derive from other and more mysterious sources of authority. It was thus too that the boys of St Aidan’s, as well as most of the staff, came to refer to her as Mad Molly.

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    A s may be imagined, it took me several drafts to compose a suitable covering letter with which to send this material off to Dobbs. It is difficult to convey (I won’t even attempt it now) the sense of urgent excitement, of compulsion, which can be quite unpredictably triggered off in a writer by a sudden idea. I certainly didn’t want to present myself to Dobbs as being that sort of