This happened one afternoon when my son John was around six. It was getting towards teatime – my husband Dennis had just got home and was sitting reading the newspaper, while I was beginning to prepare the evening meal – when there was a knock on our front door.
I opened it, and there was John. He was accompanied by a rough-looking man, who had his hand firmly on my son’s collar. “What on earth…?” I began, but the man interrupted me. It turned out that John and his friend Ian had been playing on a building site nearby. The man who now had John by the collar was the site watchman. He had already dropped off Ian at his house nearby, no doubt to much disapproval from his parents.