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get off the Moonbeam before there could be any discussion. He had a small mutiny on his hands by the time we were on dry land.
    ‘Listen,’ Dewi said, ‘he’s pinched our boat.’
    ‘He’s Ashton Vaughan…’
    ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ I said. ‘It isn’t his boat…’
    ‘Just climbed aboard and kicked us off. We ought to go back and have it out with him…’
    ‘It might be his boat,’ Gladstone said soothingly. ‘He’s Ashton Vaughan. They’re rich people…’
    ‘Not any more,’ Dewi said. ‘Used to be rich. Now they’re just as poor as we are…’
    ‘Shouldn’t have come off,’ Maxie said.
    ‘What should we have done, then?’ Gladstone asked, his temper rising. ‘Think we should have thrown him off, do you?’
    ‘Why not?’ Dewi said. ‘He’s just a bloody Vaughan…’
    ‘What are you talking about?’ Gladstone asked. ‘What do you know about the Vaughans, anyway?’ The afternoon degenerated into a long semi-quarrel all the way home. ‘He’s Marius Vaughan’s brother, come back,’ Gladstone kept on saying, as if it were a great event. ‘Put the bloody flags up, shall we?’ Dewi asked. And I was with Dewi all the way. We’d lost our boat – just walked off, quiet as mice – lost it to Ashton Vaughan of all people. I couldn’t understand Gladstone at all. I’d never heard anyone say a good word for the Vaughans in Porthmawr.

IV
    But it was an important thing, the return of Ashton Vaughan. I knew that as soon as I told Owen and Meira. They made mouths as big as sparrow chicks, although Owen had to spoil it by saying he had heard something…. That was one of the troubles with Owen – you couldn’t tell him anything, especially if you were in the County School.
    ‘Trade should be up in the pubs,’ Meira commented in her best acid-drop manner. ‘Should be some fighting too, I shouldn’t wonder.’
    We had the Vaughans all through tea. Owen said, ‘I wonder if that one on the Point knows?’ Marius Vaughan had his big house right at the tip of Graig Lwyd, with the ocean on his doorstep. ‘Bet the bastard hasn’t heard.’
    Meira gave him a row for using dirty language in front of me, but all the boys in Porthmawr called Marius Vaughan a bastard. A word with a lot of meaning, I thought.
    I took the news to Polly who lived next door, and by the time she had finished I knew that Ashton Vaughan’s return was one of the most interesting things that had happened all summer in Porthmawr.
    ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you do interest me, Lew. How terribly interesting. I wonder if brother Marius knows?’
    Polly always spoke English to me, and it was always high-class English for a few sentences at the beginning. Later on it became less so, more homely, more like the English everyone else spoke in Porthmawr. She had been my Auntie Polly when I was small, but now she insisted that I call her Polly, ‘Auntie is so old sounding,’ she’d say. ‘Call me Polly – not pretty Polly, of course.’ She said it without a laugh; she never went farther than a grin.
    Polly had her father living with her – the Captain – and he was stone deaf and silent as a planet and eighty odd, so she was always glad of a bit of company and someone to talk to. I always liked going there, too, because Polly’s special interest was murder. In her black dresses with her hair high in a bun and her pale, oval face with the great hooked nose in the middle, she had the look which spelt the law and courtrooms and cross-examinations for me. Besides, her living room was full of the sea – pictures of ships riding seasick storms, pieces of quartz from Brazil, the skin of an Indian snake in a glass jar, trim ships snug in green bottles, a dried fish big as a football from Madagascar, Chinese plates on the wall, and surf breaking in the big shells on either side of the blackleaded fireplace. It was fine there on winter nights with the old man snoring in the rocking chair and Polly talking about the