His father, Desmond Hasson, had been a West Country village storekeeper driven by circumstances to work in the city, and had never even begun to adapt to his new surroundings. Naive, awkward, pathologically shy, he had lived out the life of a hopeless exile a mere two hundred kilometres from his birthplace, bound by the rigidity of his outlook, always whispering when in public lest the difference in his accent should draw curious glances. His marriage to a tough-minded city girl had served only to let the incomprehensible strangeness of the world of factories and office blocks invade his home, and he had become perpetually reserved and uncommunicative. It had come as a bitter disappointment to him to find that his son responded naturally and easily to an ur- ban environment, and for some years he had done his best to correct what he regarded as a serious character defect. There had been the long, uninformative walks in the country (Desmond Hasson knew surprisingly little about the world of nature he espoused); the futile hours of fishing in polluted streams; the boredom of enforced labour in a vegetable garden. Young Rob Hasson had disliked all of those things, but the real psychological marks had been caused by his father’s attempts to mould his essential nature.

He had been a gregarious boy, not averse to speaking his mind, and the worst personality conflicts had arisen from this fact. Time after time he had been quelled, humbled, desolated by the admonition — always delivered in a shocked and betrayed undertone — that a proposed course of action would cause people to look at him. He had grown up with the implanted conviction that the most scandalous thing he could ever do would be to draw the attention of others in public. There had been other strictures, notably those concerned with sex, but the principal one, the one which clung longest and made life most difficult, had been that concerning the need for self-effacement. Even as a young adult, at college and during a brief spell in the army, each time he had been called upon to get up on his feet and address any kind of assembly he had been plagued and undermined by visions of panic-stricken blue eyes and by the parental voice whispering, “Everybody will look at you!”