PROLOGUE

July 1976

The summer of ’76; endless sweltering hot days, overcrowded beaches, a drought and a crazy hit record by Ray Stevens telling the story of Ethel the streaker! In so many ways it was a summer to remember.

Simon Letwin and his family spent the whole six weeks of the school holidays by the sea in their caravan near Scarborough. Simon’s grandparents, William and Margaret Steele, managed to spend a few days with them but since William ran the family brewing business and with the summer months being busy ones for the industry, he found it difficult to get away for more than the odd weekend.

Simon, unlike his younger siblings Mark and Annabel, was not a lover of the sea, preferring to sit on the beach reading a good book. His brother and sister, meanwhile, splashed and screamed in the water for most of the six weeks with the hundreds of others who just wanted to enjoy the unprecedented good weather while it lasted.

Not that Simon was a loner, he just preferred his own company. He did spend some time in the sea when his mother Carmen’s cousin and her children travelled to Yorkshire from their home in Essex to stay with William and Margaret and, as part of the trip, visited the Letwins at their coastal retreat.

Sonia Croft was a few years older than Carmen Steele, but the cousins had hit it off from the first time they had met as young girls and both had always looked forward to their annual reunion during the summer holidays. One year Sonia and her parents Eric and Elisabeth would travel and stay with the Steeles, and the following year the journey would be reversed for a fun holiday together in Essex.

By the 1970s, with Carmen and Sonia both married and with young families of their own, the tradition continued. Ronald Letwin and Gerry Binns, the two spouses, did not have a lot in common: Ronald being a GP who enjoyed photography and reading, whilst Gerry owned a cycle shop and was athletic and ran every morning.

However, the two men took the view that if their children and wives were happy, then this was something that they would both embrace and enjoy.

The Binns’ children, Graham and his younger sister Ashleigh, loved visiting the Steeles because it was the only time of the year that they got to visit the coast. Living close to Ilford as they did, it was over 60 miles to the nearest sandy beach at Clacton-on-Sea, so trips there were rare.

Graham was twelve years old, two years Simon’s senior, and Simon looked up to the elder boy as children often do. The boys got on very well together and Ronald was happy to practise his photography hobby, capturing for posterity the highlights of the summer holidays in monochrome.

Pictures in the sea, pictures building sandcastles, and pictures playing beach cricket, with the occasional accident as one of the children tumbled over some poor unsuspecting individual who got in the way of an attempt to take a spectacular catch.

Photographs that would sit for years in an album, largely forgotten, the annual trips to Yorkshire and Essex dwindling as the two families got older and the grandparents passed on.

Forgotten until one photograph, innocent enough in itself, triggered a chain of events that would wreak havoc within these same families decades later.

As he sat on the beach soaking up the sun along with thousands of other happy souls, carefree in his youthful innocence, Simon Letwin was totally unaware of just how dangerous life would get when he reconnected with the Binns’ family many years later, after the picture of him with Mark and Graham sitting on the seashore had perfectly captured, in freeze frame, the fun and excitement of that glorious summer of ’76.