Towards the end of the second world war, a five-year-old boy, Marcus, with a small and fearful growing awareness of the world around him, spends the afternoon with Neil, five years older, full of his knowledge, scathing of Marcus’s childishness, and possessed of a kind of fanaticism, “an ardour so extreme, so pitiless that it chilled and almost repelled”. Neil lives by the airfield, wants the war to go on long enough for him to be a pilot; he sees a decayed windmill over the fields and sets off, accompanied by Marcus, to explore it, and decides to test his nerve by swinging down on one of the sails and jumping off at the botttom, making a “four-point landing”. Unfortunately, the sails won’t turn, and eventually Neil falls to his death. The story, focalised through Marcus’s consciousness draws its force from the limits of his vision, almost like an allegory of short story form itself.

First published in Innocents, Hogarth Press, 1947 and collected in Submerged: Selected Stories, Virago, 2020