Nobody knows what goes on in the mind of a child: least of all in a mind like Wally Trehern’s, where the process of thought is so sluggish as to be no more than a reflex of simple emotions — pleasure, fear or pride.

He seemed to be feeling proud when he shambled up to his teacher and, before all the school, held out his hands.

“Why…” she said. “Why…why, Wally!” She took both his hand in hers and looked and pressed and looked again. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “It’s not true.”

“Bean’t mucky,” he said—“all gone.” And burst out laughing.

The school was on the mainland, but the news about Wally Trehern’s warts returned with him and his teacher to the Island. The Island was incorrectly named: it was merely a rocky blob of land at the end of an extremely brief, narrow and low-lying causeway which disappeared at full tide and whenever the seas along that coast ran high. The Island was thus no more than an extension of the tiny fishing village of Portcarrow, and yet the handful of people who lived on it were accorded a separate identity as if centuries of tidal gestures had given them a definable status. In those parts they talked of “Islanders” and “villagers,” making a distinction where none really existed.

The Portcarrow schoolmistress was Miss Jenny Williams, a young New Zealander who was doing postgraduate research in England, and had taken this temporary job to enrich her experience and augment her scholarship grant. She lodged on the Island at the Boy-and-Lobster, a small Jacobean pub, and wrote home enthusiastically about its inconveniences.

She was a glowing, russet-coloured girl, and looked her best that afternoon, striding across the causeway with the wind snapping at her hair and moulding her summer dress into the explicit of a shift. Behind her ran, stumbled and tacked poor Wally, who gave from time to time a squawking cry not unlike that of a sea gull.