Even in later years, John Newman could remember the black harbinger that brought the beginning of the end of that bright and happy time, a time in which life was normal and secure and everlasting in a way he was never to know again. It became like a clear distant picture — an image through the wrong end of a telescope.
He remembered the sledging with his friend Thomas-not-Tom.
Thomas was a little older, a little bigger, and much clumsier than John. He had untidy red hair, freckles, a wide turned-up nose, and thick lips. And John, in emulation of his apparent betters, had taken his outward appearance as the whole, and brutally classed him as a dimwit. One day however, in the schoolyard, they had raced for and reached ‘the wall’ — a small wall set a little in front of the main wall and on
