Whatever other advantages the 1950s enjoyed over the 1850s, they couldn’t offer you, not in North London anyway, a public execution. I knew that – I say I, but you must picture me as I was then: vilely pubescent, all wispy down and flaming pustule, though a prince compared to the other boy in Sharon’s frame – I knew about the lack of public executions not because I had enquired but because Monty Frankel told me. The date of the last open-air hanging in Great Britain, the name of the hangman, the age of the criminal, the nature of the crime – these were the sorts of facts that Monty had at the tips of his fingers. Whatever statistics of murder and destruction Monty didn’t possess could not have been worth possessing. He knew the precise day and hour of every battle in both World Wars, the exact numbers killed and maimed on each side, and how many more were wiped out on the roads; he knew the names of all the commandants of all the concentration camps in Europe, and which used gas and which used bullets, and how many tons of gold teeth were extracted from how many Jewish mouths, and where the deepest graves were dug and what their dimensions and capacities were. And he had countless tales to tell about women with names like Mad Olga who ripped open their uniforms and showed their breasts to their victims before castrating them. I dreamed about Mad Olga for years. Romantic dreams they were too, many of them. It was Monty Frankel, of course, who lent me his copy of The Scourge of the Swastika.