Crowds lined every inch of the funeral route, casting roses over the road before the funeral carriage. It was a very moving affair and I was very moved by it all.

Mr Penrose had sportingly written in his will that if his coffin should be preceded to the graveside by twenty proven virgins of the parish, then one thousand pounds would be given to the Mayor of Brentford to be used at his discretion.

As I was young and ignorant and all, I didn’t understand at that time the concept of virginity, and therefore I had no idea at all about the lather the Mayor got himself into regarding how he could get his hands on (so to speak) twenty proven virgins.

I learned later that he consulted an aged mystic, a certain Professor Slocombe, resident of Brentford, who was considered by many to be the borough’s patriarch.

Professor Slocombe whispered words into the Mayor’s ear and Mr Penrose’s coffin was preceded to the graveside by twenty five-year-old girls from the infant school.

The Mayor, apparently, took the thousand pounds and absconded with it. A thousand pounds was a lot of money in those days.

Dave and I got ahead of the procession and dug ourselves in beneath another hedge of the borough cemetery. We got a pretty good view of the burying.

“It was a very good do,” said Dave to me. “Very dignified. And I’ve heard that there’s to be an obelisk put up on his grave and also a special bench with a brass plaque on before the Memorial Library. That’s nice. Someone famous might one day sit on that bench and muse about things. It’s nice. All nice.”

I agreed that it was nice. Mr Penrose was resting in peace. With the respect of all those many people who had loved his books and thought that he was a great man. It was a good thing that we hadn’t managed to raise him from the dead. He was better at rest and at peace.

When the funeral service and the burying was over and the crowds had all gone away, Dave and I lazed upon the marble bed of Mr Doveston, smoked cigarettes and looked up at the sky and all the passing clouds.

“Nice,” said Dave. “All nice.”

“A pity there won’t be any more Lazlo Woodbine books, though,” I said.

“Yes,” said Dave. “A pity, but all good things must come to an end.”

“You are so wise,” I said to Dave. “So very, very wise.”

As it happened, there was just one more Lazlo Woodbine book. And a really good one at that. Death Wears a Grey School Jacket, it was called. It would never have been published at all if it hadn’t been for Mr Penrose’s wife.

Apparently the manuscript had been buried with Mr Penrose at his request. Unknown to Dave and me, when we had been trying to raise him from the dead that manuscript had been sitting there in the coffin under his bum. If Dave had known that, he would certainly have nicked it.

Mr Penrose’s widow contested her husband’s will, had his body exhumed and the manuscript retrieved and published.

It made the papers at the time. But not because of the manuscript.

It was because of something else entirely.

Apparently, when they opened his coffin to take out the manuscript, the cemetery workers got a bit of a shock.

The body was all twisted up. The face was contorted, the hands crooked into claws with broken, bloody fingernails. The underside of the coffin lid was covered in terrible scratches. It appeared that Mr Penrose had awoken in his coffin only hours after he’d been buried and he’d tried to fight his way out. Mr Timms the undertaker gave evidence in court. He swore that Mr Penrose was definitely dead when he was buried, that he had been drained of blood and embalmed and that there was no way on Earth that he could possibly have been buried alive.

Mr Timms said that it must have been post-mortem spasms and gaseous expansion and all kinds of stuff like that which had caused the semblance of reanimation. And he was acquitted of all charges of negligence.

Dave and I never got to sit on that bench in our old age and chat about our past. So we never got to discuss the time when, as children, we had tried to reanimate a dead man, not realizing when we performed the ritual how long it would take to work its terrible magic. In fact, we never spoke about that subject ever again.

Some things are better not spoken of.

Nor even thought about.

8

Everything changes. And the present soon becomes the past and is gone.

I awoke to find that there was silence in our house. It was Thursday, yet there was silence. I was seventeen years of age.

Uncle Jonny came no more to visit. My father had died the previous year. A trapdoor he was standing on gave way beneath his feet. Few men can predict with accuracy the day and the hour of their passing. My father did. He knew the exact minute when he would die.

The judge had told him.

I did not attend the Daddy’s trial. There were no spare seats in the public gallery. My mother had reserved them all for herself and her personal friends. They all had banners with them and specially printed badges that they wore. These appealed for justice to be done.

No clemency, they said. And Hang the blackguard high.

Whether the Daddy was really guilty of all the charges laid against him, I cannot say. Certainly he murdered the ice-cream man, but that fellow had it coming. The Daddy had warned him on numerous occasions not to park outside our door and ring his damnable bells. He had told him what he could do with his chocolate nut sundaes and where he could stick his Cadbury’s Flakes, and what would happen if he didn’t move his van to places far away. But the fellow persisted. It was a free country, he said. He had a special licence, he said. He could park wherever he pleased, he said. Move or die, the Daddy said. The ice-cream man stayed put.

In the months leading up to his murderous assault upon the vendor of iced sweeteries, the Daddy had, as they say, lived on his nerves. He was a troubled daddy. He eschewed good food and dined on drink alone. He developed strange compulsions. He would spend hour upon end sniffing swatches of tweed in the gents’ outfitters. He became prone to outbursts of uncontrollable laughter. He bethought himself a Zulu king and dressed in robes befitting. He became obsessed with the idea that an invisible Chinaman called Frank was broadcasting lines from Milton directly into his brain.

His plea of insanity was ignored by the court. And rightly too, in my opinion. I did not consider the Daddy to be mad. Perhaps a tad eccentric – but then, who isn’t?

Upon that fateful night, the ice-cream man was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is the story of most of our lives. My daddy had just too many things all preying on his mind. The ice-cream man’s bells pushed him over the edge. And if the bells weren’t bad enough, the fact that my daddy caught the icecream man sexing my mummy was.

The French have a special term for this kind of crime. And the perpetrator often gets off scot-free in their courts. But that’s just typical of the French. We’re far more civilized here.

So, I suppose, fair do’s, the Daddy got what he deserved. And I, for one, was glad to see the back of him. I really enjoyed the street party that was held to celebrate his hanging. But I do feel that the court should have left it at that. Punished him for the crime he had committed, without bringing in all that other stuff, which seemed to me to be done for no good reason other than spite.

The counsel for the prosecution called a special witness: a research scientist who worked for a government department, which didn’t have a name, or did, but it was a secret. This special witness gave evidence that my daddy had been directly responsible for all manner of terrible crimes against mankind and the planet in general. Climate changes; the extinction of a breed of rare miniature sheep; Third World famine. He even blamed my daddy for the rise of rock-’n’-roll.