The photograph.

Two baby boys sit on a rug in a council house garden. Both are entirely dressed in white, including their tiny cotton hats protecting them from the summer sun. It is an instant of innocence that would have satisfied Blake. The picture must have been taken by my father in 1957, a year before I was born.

All old black and white photos demand you imagine the colours and I know that back then my brother Peter’s hair was Nordic blonde and his companion’s would later become ‘mousy’.

Neither of the boys seem to be looking at the camera nor smiling. This was long before the artificially induced grin became compulsory so I retrospectively imagine some significance in the way they seem to look beyond my father with an unfocused stare.

I found the picture in a box of old photographs kept by my mother. It is in my brother’s baby book in the ‘ Friends’ section and above it is written in my mother’s flowing hand ‘ Peter and Richard Palmer’.

My brother has struggled in life in many ways but is the dad of four amazing children and we still meet and talk on the phone from time to time, but I have no idea what Richard Palmer’s life is like today, or if he is still alive, or whether he kept that name. For Richard Palmer , long forgotten now by most people in this information saturated world, grew up to become an infamous killer, whose actions one night in April 1972 helped to get the film ‘ A Clockwork Orange’ removed from cinemas for nearly thirty years.