Death was a very hard thing to find out anything much about. I personally had never known anyone who died, and those kids who had lost someone close to them would murmur the fact from time to time but were strangely reluctant to provide details, especially in the midst of our frequent boisterous schoolyard discussions on the subject. Of course, people were getting killed in the movies and on TV all the time, but we knew that wasn’t real. The News offerings were hardly any more enlightening, and the closest we could get to an association to the subject was through a chap named Caryl Chessman.
    He was an American criminal, raised in reform schools, learning his trade in prison, who became the notorious Red-Light Bandit, a murderer for sure, condemned to death. But via appeals and reprieves, he hung out for eleven years and survived eight dates with the gas chamber. He wrote a book to which he offered his address as a title—Cell 2455 Death Row—which became a huge bestseller and from which they made a crappy B movie that nevertheless had the bodgies all agog.
    Now Chessman had reached the last roll of the dice and we waited breathlessly. Vivid descriptions of his projected fate, strapped to the chair as the gas bombs went plop-plop and the murky pink stuff rose up about him, were to be had and we devoured and discussed them ravenously. In America there were huge protests against the execution—surely after all those years on the knife-edge he had suffered enough. How could they kill a bestselling author, a folk hero? In fact he did succeed in underpinning attempts to abolish capital punishment in many countries, giving weight to the humanitarian causes with the publicity he generated. But not in blood-thirsty America.
   They bumped him off anyway—I tearfully read of it in the newspaper one Tuesday morning in May 1960. Apparently, there was another stay of execution ordered (although only for one hour) but the judge’s secretary dialled the wrong number and Chessman was already dying and too far gone by the time the call got through. Ultimately it was revealed that the primary reason that they killed him was because he was such a bloody pest.