As long as he merely roamed the cliffs, in his earrings and his bright orange wig, with his ornithologist’s binoculars strapped around his neck and his cock hanging out of his trousers, nobody gave him any trouble. If you came upon him unexpectedly he would immediately put his glasses to his eye. Whether this was exquisite tact or complete confusion as to his role – an inability to make up his mind whether he was a shower-off or a looker-on – who could say? For my part I was never very interested in him. But Camilla – there! I’ve named her at last, my beloved and much-missed Camilla, whose spirit fills and frets this place for me – Camilla was, in that perverse way of hers, entirely sympathetic to him. Unforgiving of just about everybody, enraged by the smallest omissions of her friends, she was massively tolerant of aberrations. And according to her, this was an aberration every bit as massive as her tolerance. He had shown it to her in a queue at the post office once, and she had understood immediately how tragically limited were his options. ‘You’ve no idea what an enormous size it is,’ she tried to explain to me. ‘I can see why he has to show it, the poor bugger. There’s absolutely nothing else he could possibly do with it.’

Well, she was wrong there. One thing he could do with it was to trundle it up the hill to the village school, poke it through the protective railings, and get the children – girls or boys, he didn’t much care which – to measure it. And that was how, one afternoon, the village parents found him: standing on the old slate wall, one arm hooked around a cast iron railing, his binoculars pointing out to sea, his trousers open, and all their pretty ones gathered round him with their tiny rulers and protractors.

Camilla was a Parish Councillor again that year, but although she liked to make matters of public morality her own there was nothing she could do, even in her official capacity, to soothe parental wrath. This was not the sort of subject, either, that she was likely to be at her most understanding about. She didn’t throb parentally herself. She didn’t much care for children. And she certainly didn’t believe they were in possession of any innocence worth troubling oneself to protect.

‘The only thing you’ve got to worry about,’ she told the near murderous mother of one little girl, ‘is what this has done to her expectations. I myself don’t see how men can be anything but one big disappointment to her after this.’

‘I very much doubt that the experience will turn Colin into a homosexual,’ she assured the harbour master’s wife. ‘But if it does, look on the bright side – one more homosexual in the world means one less compliant wife and mother.’