Author’s Note

The Priest, His Lady and the Drowned Child was previously published as A Man Like Any Other: A Priest’s Tale. It is set in April 2008, with references to ‘the past.’

Waldringhythe Abbey, the village of Monks Bottom, and the Strathburn Naval Base, are all fictitious creations.

The passages relating to nuclear research during the Second World War in Scotland are also wholly fictitious.

‘Embrace the Base’ took place at the Greenham Common Army Base in Berkshire, UK on Saturday, 12 December 1982. Although the events described are fictional they are based on eyewitness accounts.

Memory and Experience

One breaks us, one makes us, but I’m damned if I can decide which is which.

Father Ewan McEwan
2008

Life!

Life! I know not what thou art,
But know that thou and I must part;
And when, or how, or where we met,
I own to me’s a secret yet.

But this I know, when thou art fled,
Where’er they lay these limbs, this head,
No clod so valueless shall be
As all that then remains of me.

Anna Letitia Barbauld
1743–1825