‘No, t’won’t, then.’

‘Show me.’

He withdrew them. Between clusters of warts his skin had puckered and turned the colour of dead fish. He broke into a loud wail. His nose and eyes ran salt into his open mouth.

From down below a voice, small and distant, halfheartedly chanted: ‘Warty Walter. Warty Walter. Stick your warties in the water.’ Somebody shouted: ‘Aw come on.’ They were going away.

He held out his desecrated hands towards her as if in explanation. Her voice floated down on the sound of the waterfall.

‘Put them under again. If you believe: they will be clean.’

‘Uh?’

‘They will be clean. Say it. Say ‘Please take away my warts.’ Shut your eyes and do as I tell you. Say it again when you go to bed. Remember. Do it.’

He did as she told him. The sound of the cascade grew very loud in his ears. Blobs of light swam across his eyeballs. He heard his own voice very far away, and then nothing. Ice-cold water was bumping his face on drowned pebbles.

When he lifted his head up there was no one between him and the sun.

He sat there letting himself dry and thinking of nothing in particular until the sun went down behind the hill. Then, feeling cold, he returned to the waterfront and his home in the bay.

II

For about twenty-four hours after the event, the affair of Wally Trehern’s warts made very little impression on the Island. His parents were slugabeds: the father under the excuse that he was engaged in night-fishing and the mother without any excuse at all unless it could be found in the gin bottle. They were not a credit to the Island. Wally, who slept in his clothes, got up at his usual time, and went out to the pump for a wash. He did this because somehow or another his new teacher had fixed the idea in his head and he followed it out with the sort of behaviourism that can be established in a domestic animal. He was still little better than half-awake when he saw what had happened.

Nobody knows what goes on in the mind of a child: least of all in a mind like Wally Trehern’s where the process of thought was so sluggish as to be no more than a reflex of simple emotions: pleasure, fear or pride.

He seemed to be feeling proud when he shambled up to his teacher and, before all the school, held out his hands.

‘Why – !’ she said. ‘Why – why – Wally!’ She took both his hands in hers and looked and pressed and looked again. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘It’s not true.’

‘Be’ant mucky,’ he said. ‘All gone,’ and burst out laughing.