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‘D’you hear me?’ The threat was on a rising note. Again, the child looked up and seemed fearful and bound to obey. He took a half-step but, as his gaze shifted, he saw his prize again and faltered. When he went back to it, he may have thought he could lever it free and take it to his mother. But what he may have reasoned didn’t matter. With a yelp of frustration, the woman leaped from the bench, crossed the few yards of playground at speed and dropped her cigarette as she grabbed the boy by his arm and smacked his bare legs. At the instant of his first cry, she smacked him again, and a third time.

I’d been comfortable in my thoughts and was reluctant to be taken from them. For a moment I thought I could head for home, pretending, if not to myself then to the world, that I’d seen nothing. There was nothing I could do about this little boy’s life.

His screams were angering his mother further. ‘Shut up!’ she shouted at him over and over again. ‘Shut up! Shut up!’

Even then, I might have forced myself to ignore the scene. But as the boy’s shrieks grew louder, she seized his shoulders in two hands, pulling his dirty t-shirt clear of his belly, and began to shake him hard.

There are some decisions, even moral ones, that are formed in regions below conscious thought. I found myself jogging towards the playground’s fence, stepping over it, taking three paces and putting a hand on the woman’s shoulder.

I said, ‘Excuse me. Please. Please don’t do that.’

My voice sounded prissy in my ears, privileged, apologetic, lacking all authority. I was already doubting where this could lead. Not to a future of reformed, kindly parenting. But at least, as she turned towards me in disbelief, her assault had ceased.

‘What was that?’

‘He’s just little,’ I said stupidly. ‘You could do him serious harm.’

‘Who the fuck are you?’

It was the right question and for that reason I didn’t answer it. ‘He’s too little to understand you.’

This conversation was proceeding over the child’s screams. Now he clutched at his mother’s skirts, wanting to be picked up. This was the worst of it. His tormentor was also his only comfort. She was squaring up to me. The dropped cigarette smouldered by her foot. Her right hand clenched and unclenched. Trying to appear not to, I took a vague half-step back. We were staring each other out. It was, or had been, a rather lovely, intelligent face, its obvious beauty marred by weight-gain plumping up the flesh round her eyes, narrowing them into a look of suspicion. In another life it could have been a kindly, maternal face. Rounded, high cheekbones, a slew of freckles across the bridge of her nose, full lips – though the lower was split. After several seconds, I noticed that her pupils were pinpricks. She was the first to shift her gaze. She was looking over my shoulder and then I found out why.

She yelled, ‘Oi, John.’

I turned. Her friend or husband, John, also plump, naked from the waist, bright pink from a bout in the sun, was on his way through the playground’s wire gate.

Still several yards away he called, ‘He bothering you?’

‘Fucking right.’

In some other sector of all imagined possibilities – the cinematic would be one – I needn’t have worried. John was about my age, but shorter, flabbier, less fit, less strong. In that other world, if he’d struck me, I could have floored him. But in this world, I’d never hit another person in my life, not even in childhood. I could have told myself that if I knocked the father down the child would suffer all the more. But that wasn’t it. I had the wrong attitude, or rather, I lacked the right one. It wasn’t fear, it certainly wasn’t lofty principle. When it came to hitting people, I didn’t know where to begin. I didn’t want to know.

‘Oh yeah?’

Now John was squaring up to me, the woman having stepped back. The boy continued to wail. Father and son were comically alike – both crop-haired, ginger-blond, with small faces and wide-apart green eyes.

‘With all respect, he’s just little. He shouldn’t be hit or shaken.’

‘With all respect, you can fuck off out of it. Or else.’

And John did look ready to hit me. His chest was puffed out, the ancient self-enlargement ploy of toads and apes and many others. His breathing was rapid and his arms hung well clear of his torso. I may have been stronger, but he would be more reckless. Less to lose. Or this was what bravery was. Being ready to take a chance on not getting felled and your head lifted and slammed down on the tarmac many times, with lifelong neural consequences. A chance I wouldn’t take. This was what cowardice was, a surfeit of imagining.

I raised both hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘Look. I can’t make you do anything, obviously. I can only hope to persuade you. For the little boy’s benefit.’

Then John said something so surprising that I was completely outflanked and for a moment could hardly reply.

‘Do you want him?’

‘What?’

‘You can have him. Go on. You’re an expert on kids. He’s yours. Take him home with you.’