My mother was fond of Guy. She had that peculiar respect for him women in her situation—suburban-type house outside a country village, professional but underpaid husband, no career of her own, no status in the country—have for a young man whom they’ve known since he was a child and who is educated, well-off, and the heir to landed property. Guy was all those things. He was also the man who, if he hadn’t been able to save Daniel’s life, had tried to do so and could tell himself he had saved mine. At any rate, I don’t know if I’d have acted as I did if he hadn’t come up the field from the river at that crucial time.

If he had come ten minutes earlier, as he almost did, I wouldn’t be writing this story at all.

Chapter 5

5

THE FIRST THING I ever climbed was a tree. Elms are the best for climbing, an old man in our village told me, since they have footholds, branches, and twigs growing out of their trunks at intervals from the bole all the way up. But the elms began dying before I was born and Dutch elm disease had killed them all by the time I was ten. The first tree I climbed was an oak, and after that horse chestnuts and limes and more oaks. Ash trees are hard to climb because they are at the other extreme from the elm and have no small branches or twigs growing out of their trunks. Much the same goes for beeches and planes, which I called camouflage trees when I first came to London.

I was about twelve when I first climbed a pylon.

I didn’t go far up, only as high as the first crossbar that time. The guard on the uprights a little way above daunted me. That was in the days before I carried wire cutters as a matter of course. I stood on the bar and read the small yellow rectangular notice on which was printed in black: DANGER OF DEATH. KEEP OFF. When you’re twelve you don’t believe there’s such a thing as death or you believe it’s for old people, not for you and your friends.

It occurs to me that though you’ve seen pylons, you may not have looked at them too closely. You may find them an eyesore. Most people do, and quite a lot are adept at “not seeing” them, in other words pretending they’re not there. So I’ll describe a typical one and give you, if you’ll bear with me, a bit of pylon history. And I’ll try not to be too technical. But, after all, I am an electrician.