It had all happened during a family holiday far up in northern Germany: a shoulder of land near Stufhusen separated the exposed western shore from the Wattenmeer mudflats and a broad, sweep of golden sand scythed into the North Sea and sparkled under a cloudless sky. It was an idyll for a child: an environment almost empty of people and consequently without the interference of grown-ups, the houses scattered across the low, flat landscape.

There was, perfectly for children hungry for adventure, one source of menace. At the far end of the beach an old house with a vast thatched roof stood elevated on the dyke. This was where the ‘Old Nazi’ lived: a cantankerous old man whose rejection of contact with his neighbours bordered on being a hermit. He was certainly old enough to have been in the war – and in the Nazi Party – but the epithet of ‘the Old Nazi’ had been given him by one of Sylvia’s younger sisters after overhearing her parents describing the recluse as such. From this unsubstantiated snippet, the children had built an entire history for the old man, including a rationale for his anti-social attitude: he was, they had worked out, hiding from Nazi-hunters who had scoured the globe for him, from Sweden to Brazil. He sat sullenly, they had decided, under a tattered and dusty photograph of Adolf Hitler and waited for the Israeli snatch-squad to break down his door and whisk him off, drugged and in a cargo crate with a Tel-Aviv dispatch note on it. The old man himself did not seem to represent that much of a threat, but the danger lay in his dogs: two snarling, barking beasts, one an Alsatian, the other a Dobermann, who kept anyone who wandered too close to the house at bay.

All this mystery and menace, of course, gave the old house at the far end of the beach an irresistible attraction for the children, who would taunt ‘the Old Nazi’ and his dogs with their presence. After the incident on the beach, there had been accusations that ‘the Old Nazi’ had deliberately let his dogs loose, commanding them to attack, probably in the same way he had ordered his men on the Russian Front. The truth was a little more prosaic.

There was a small nick in the dyke, where a finger of sand penetrated the rough reeds and grass and offered a little shelter from the brisk sea breeze. The smaller children had been playing down by the water, building sandcastles. Sylvia’s nascent feminine intuition had clearly picked up on Oliver’s interest in her body, and she had been doing her best to taunt him with it. She had encouraged him to come and splash around in the water. He had been reluctant at first but she had made a pout that had given him a tingle down below. The water made Sylvia’s T-shirt cling revealingly to her breasts and the white cotton shorts cleaved to her ample backside. After a few minutes she complained that it was too cold and ran back to the nick in the dyke. It had taken Oliver a while to follow as he waited for his erection to subside even a little. In the end he had walked, his hands clasped in front of his groin as casually as he could manage, to join Sylvia. She was sitting, leaning back on her elbows and arching her back as she let the sun play on her face. Oliver looked at her, savouring every curve, every swell of firm flesh. She turned to him and looked down at his groin. Wordlessly, she placed her hand on where his erection protested against its confinement by his shorts.