Narrator Tom Crick begins this flashback sequence by ruminating on his father’s trust in people: “And don’t forget […] whatever you learn about people, however bad they turn out, each one of them has a heart” (1). Tom’s father is also highly superstitious and an excellent storyteller. Tom then ponders on a night when he was 10; he and his 14-year-old brother Dick set eel traps in their homeland in the middle of the Fens in East England with their father, Henry. Their mother died six months before, resulting in Henry’s turn toward superstition and the occult.

Henry is a lock-keeper on the River Leem in charge of raising the sluice. Tom describes in detail the various scenarios involved in this job, then leaps ahead six years to another midsummer’s night, this time in 1943, when a dead body gets caught in the sluice. It’s a boy named Freddie Parr.

Many years later Tom addresses his high school students in his last days as their history teacher. His leaving is not by choice but because of an unfortunate incident involving his wife.

A surly student, Price, “asserted that history was a ‘fairy tale’” (6) and that only the present and future matter.