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his face to me; a long potato-coloured face, with a heavy jaw and a slack mouth which hung invariably open, emitting a thin, unconscious wheeze. His eyelids flickered. When Dick was moved, only his eyelids showed it. The muddy complexion neither flushed nor paled; the mouth remained limp; the eyes themselves stared. The eyelids alone registered emotion. But although they registered emotion it was impossible to tell merely from their movement what emotion was being signalled.
    ‘F-Freddie Parr. Dead. D-dead Freddie. Deddie Freddie.’
    He stirred the body with the boat-hook. He was trying to get it to float face upwards.
    Dad had disappeared into the lean-to shed abutting the cottage. Here were kept more boat-hooks, ropes, life-belts and the rakes and grappling hooks he used for clearing debris from the river. Our punt, which would have been the most serviceable piece of equipment at this moment, was lying upturned on a pair of trestles by the tow-path, a section of its bottom removed for repair.
    He emerged again, empty-handed. It was clear that he had given thought to the ropes and hooks, but though they were effective for tree branches and the carcasses of sheep, he baulked at using them on the raw flesh of a dead boy.
    He stood, facing us, on the tow-path. Then quite deliberately, for a matter of several seconds, he turned to look the other way. I know what he was doing. He was hoping that all this was not happening. He was hoping that no drowned body had floated one bright summer’s morning against his sluice-gate. He was hoping that if he turned his back, counted ten, whispered a covert entreaty, it would go away. But it didn’t.
    The sun was still low, glinting on the river. Above the fields, larks were twittering in a milky-blue sky. All over the globe, at this very hour, a war was being fought. Our troops were pushing hard, so we were told, in Sicily; the Russians, also, were pushing. Meanwhile, in the Atlantic … But except for the Lancasters and B24s which favoured for their roosts the flat and strategic country of East Anglia, no hint of this universal strife reached us in our Fenland backwater.
    Dad hobbled back over lock and cat-walk and took the boat-hook from Dick’s hands. There was nothing for it but, by means of this boat-hook, to steer the body through the water to a point where it could be manhandled on to dry land. This meant manoeuvring it around the central pier, across the headgate of the lock, then upstream a few yards along the tow-path to where landing-steps led down to the water and where, had it not been upturned witha hole in its bottom, our punt would have been moored.
    I watched Dad decide between the collar of Freddie’s shirt and the belt of his trousers. He settled for the collar. It would have been better, in the long run, if he had chosen the belt. Slipping the end of the boat-hook between the shirt-collar and the white nape of Freddie’s neck, he gave a twist and succeeded in getting a hold. He began to walk, slowly, holding the boat-hook with great, indeed trembling, concentration, along the cat-walk and up the central pier. We followed him.
    The position of Freddie’s outward-bent arms did not facilitate this journey through the water. It also gave the illusion that he was propelling himself in some crude, floundering way over the surface – a semblance counter-acted by the evident stiffness of both arms and legs, and by the well-known fact, only confirmed by this morning’s discovery, that Freddie Parr could not swim.
    As Dad tried to guide the body round the upstream end of the central pier he ran into difficulties. When he pulled the body across-stream the legs swung out into the current. The right hand and forearm, at the same time, caught against the brickwork, increasing the feet-first swing. By applying sideways pressure with the boat-hook, Dad attempted to correct this tendency and to disengage Freddie’s hand – which none the less remained caught – from the wall