I think I thought it was my fault, that I nearly drowned that day. Which is perhaps why I ‘forgot’ about it until fairly recently, over sixty years after the event. Most things were my fault in those days, and most things I kept to myself. I became a secretive child, haunted everywhere by unspoken guilt. Until I got into bed at night, and a certain type of uncosciousness blessed me with absence from my sins. 

Which is why the worst offence committed against me by my father was to waken me from sleep to hold me to account for some misdemeanour he thought in his cups crime enough to warrant a midnight hearing. But I know him now, and I waken him in my turn from the dead to confront him with the little boy who would have loved him had he not been terrified by him. 

In the event I took other fathers, as some women take lovers when their husbands prove abusive. Fortunately, in every case, bar one, none of my elective fathers took advantage emotionally or sexually, of my vulnerability. And many of those elective fathers were clergymen of one denomination or another. My favourite ‘father’ was Father Joseph Jackson, one of our local priests.