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cigarettes merged with the chimney smoke. The tram was full and smelled of bodies. I was squeezed between large women, their rough coats pressed against mycheek. We changed, and when we boarded the second tram, I felt it at once – something was different, people were silent and still now, and I thought how big their eyes looked. We were all going to the prison. I was pushed up against more women, and stared at.
    ‘Queer place to bring a child,’ someone said.
    ‘I don’t see why. They have to learn there’s evil in this world.’
    People began to takesides across the tram, but myaunt crushed my hand in hers like a bone in a mincer and said nothing at all. I felt sick, or perhaps afraid. I did not know what might happen.
    The tram stopped and emptied out. I looked back at it, a fuzzily lit caterpillar. But again, what I was most aware of, what I remember most vividly, were the sounds … the footsteps of all the people walking up the black roadtowards the great dark hulk with sheer walls and turrets like a castle.
    ‘The prison,’ Aunt Elsie said, in the low, choked voice.
    Footsteps – one-two, one-two, one-two. The sky behind the prison was turning grey as the dawn started to come up. The smoky air felt damp, though it was not raining,
    One-two. One-two. One-two.
    Nobody spoke.
    We joined the crowd that was already there, ten-deep infront of the high iron gates.
    ‘There’s the clock. That’s how we’ll know.’
    I looked up, though I didn’t understand her, but all I could see were people’s backs, dark coats, scarves, felt hats.
    ‘Let’s have you up then or you’ll see nowt.’
    And I was swung up on to the beefy shoulders of a stranger. The rough cloth of his jacket scratched the inside of my legs, but I could see over the tops ofthe heads now, as the sour light strengthened slowly, see the iron gates and the tower and the bone-white clock with its black fingers. As I looked the second hand jerked one point closer to eight and from behind and all around me there was a soft murmur like the sea, spreading, then dying away again.
    I was afraid. I still could not imagine what was going to happen, but I was sure that they weregoing to bring Arthur Needham out on to the prison tower and hang him there before us all. I couldn’t see how the whole crowd could go inside the prison itself to watch, as I had watched down the viewing tube at the peep show on the pier. I didn’t know if I wanted to see the hanging or not. It was the condemned cell that I thought about. I wanted to see that, to be there inside it with ArthurNeedham.
    The clock hand jerked forward again. Then, from somewhere behind us, someone began to sing, and gradually, the crowd took it up, until everyone was singing, but quietly. The soft low swell of the hymn made me shiver.
    Abide with me
    Fast falls the eventide.
    The darkness deepens
    Lord with me abide.
    They sang another verse and then the singing stopped quite suddenly, as if there hadbeen a conductor somewhere who had given the signal. And after that there was the greatest silence I had ever known.
    The clock hands were at eight. The man carrying me on his shoulders gripped my legs tightly. I stared and stared at the tower. Everyone in the crowd seemed to have stopped breathing and the sky was grey and faintly shining behind the dark prison.
    Nothing happened. No one cameon to the tower. I screwed my eyes up in case I was not seeing properly, but still there was nothing, nothing at all, forquite a long time, and still the strange and dreadful silence went on.
    And then I saw a man in uniform walking across the prison yard towards the gates, holding a white piece of paper in his hand. There was a murmur at the front of the crowd, and a whisper took off and spreadlike a flame. The man came out of a small gate set within the great one, and pinned the piece of paper on to a board. The murmur grew. People were telling one another and passing it on, passing it on, and then the man swung me