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made of him because of his part in that incident. Children who got someone hanged were rare, even though hanging itself then was not.
    But at other times in this period, it would be his father who captured the spotlight. Mr Charteris liked best to talk of those episodes. What Ian’s father loved speaking to him about as a boy was ships. Mr Charteris described very exciting moments, and Ian knew some of them must be true. Ian used to listen and didn’t get completely fed up, even though he had heard these memories before, especially that terrible sad stuff starting when the weight of the young woman’s wet clothes pulled her under in dark water close to the pier. This tragedy happened a long time before the war and that air-raid shelter murder mentioned by the angry hospital sister. Ian’s father was definitely the one who figured big in the pier event, but it would have mighty effects on Ian’s life also, although he didn’t realize it while only a youngster. It affected his mother’s life too, as could be seen outside the prison that day following the execution in 1941, but he didn’t understand this either at the time. Just after they’d read the door notice saying everything had been as it should be, his mother suddenly wanted to leave and go home. Eventually, he was able to guess at why his mother refused to linger in that crowd at the gates. He came to realize she had glimpsed a woman she loathed and feared and wanted no contact with.
    As a boy, Ian would never show by making a face or yawning that he’d like a change from his father’s ship stories, please. He believed he should be good to his father and try to enjoy the yarns about tides and spray from the bow so high it hit the wheelhouse. Every boy should be good to his father because fathers were so much older and really thought they were interesting when they talked about the same past things nearly every time they opened their gob. Ian felt certain his father did not deliberately try to bore Ian as a punishment for something, although he did bore Ian. His father thought he had to go over and over this stuff because Ian found it really thrilling, and he did, first time he heard it.
    Ian realized he might be lucky in some ways. Not many boys had fathers who’d been in sea adventures and could talk about tides and spray from the bow so high it hit the wheelhouse, or a woman struggling in the sea where her soaked clothes dragged her down and down under the hull of the ship. When Ian thought of this he was reminded of something in a film called
Mutiny on the Bounty
, which he had seen in the Bug and Scratch, where the cruel Captain Bligh could punish men by having them thrown over one side of a ship and pulled on a rope under the vessel and out the other side. This was called keelhauling. Or if the captain thought someone had been really bad they would be pulled under the whole length of the ship, not just the width. The men on deck tugging the rope would try to get the man on the other end out from under the ship as fast as they could or he would drown. Captain Bligh didn’t care. He had a lot of breadfruit to take somewhere and plant, and so he thought the crew should behave themselves. Even if the men did not drown they would be cut all over their bodies by being banged against the hull as they were pulled. Ian’s father could tell a tale which was nearly as good as a film, Ian had to admit this.
    His father worked on a sand dredger in the Channel because of the war. But before it started he had a job on a pleasure paddle steamer. Those ships stopped sailing after 1939. They would have used coal needed for the war effort, and, in any case, there might be dangerous magnetic mines dropped by German aircraft in the Channel. Instead, Mr Charteris had joined the crew of the dredger. It brought sand from near Flat Holm island, needed to make new airfields and shelters and defence posts. Of course, the dredger might