“Give me a moment—you are going to heaven…” Dick adjusted the tripod of his cine-camera, aiming its ferocious little lens at my face. Already I resented the camera, staring at me like a deformed robot. Summer light filled the garden, playing among the broken toys and the clothesline with its waving pyjamas—the usual cheerful mess that I had offered to clear away. But Dick had been adamant that I change nothing.

Sipping at the water, I noticed the collapsed wigwam which Alice and Henry had built from an old tartan blanket and the cucumber frame. Banished from its dark interior for some breach of childhood protocol, Lucy had demolished the wigwam with her pedal car. The others had threatened a terrible revenge, forgotten the moment that Cleo Churchill and her daughter Penny arrived at the front door. Friends of Dick, they would take the children down to the river while he and I embarked on a trip of our own, a short safari across the width of my skull.

“Dick, the garden’s a mess—I ought to clear it up. Let’s face it, your TV audience isn’t going to be on acid.”

“Just what the ratings need. I’ll suggest it to the BBC. They can put a gift pack in Radio Times.”

The four children were shouting in the hall, clamouring for ice cream, comics, and bubble-gum wrappers. Cleo Churchill put her head around the door and grimaced cheerfully.

“There’s a riot brewing. I’ll have to leave you to it.”

“That’s fine, Cleo. Jim’s eager to go. Give us a couple of hours.”

“Two hours? You ought to be filming me.” She frowned at the camera and microphone, the blood-pressure kit, and my straight-backed chair. “Jim, it looks genuinely weird—are you going to be all right?”

“Don’t worry. Dick’s monitored a lot of trips.”

“Even so. Never trust the ferryman.”

I could see that she disapproved, taking the view that there were more than enough adult excitements in the world; the experiment that Dick and I were about to make with my brain chemistry was a boy’s game scarcely different from those that Henry played in the garden, when he lit a cigarette stub inside the wigwam or exploded a box of matches. Cleo, with her quick smile and shy glamour, was an editor of children’s books whom I sometimes saw at Dick’s parties. Aware, a little uneasily, of her concern, I guessed that she was worried about more than Dick’s credentials. As she withdrew her hand reluctantly from my shoulder she glanced from the perspiration on my face to the untidy study and garden. Beyond any thoughts about the wisdom of experimenting with LSD was a thirty-second guess at my character and whatever flaws this potent hallucinogen might expose.

“Okay…” Dick set a dial on his aviator’s watch and started the tape recorder. “It’s 15:05 on June 17, 1967…”