Sam Youd as John Christopher

‘What’s wrong with the captain, Mr Cotter?’ ‘His mind’s sick.’ ‘Like Mother Lutron?’ ‘Something like that.’ ‘But he didn’t even see us,’ Billy said. ‘He looked at us as though we weren’t there.’ ‘Yes.’ The...

‘I saw the captain.’ ‘Did you?’ ‘I said good morning, but he didn’t answer me.’ ‘He was probably thinking about something at the time. Throw me that shirt over, will you?’ He washed and dressed,...

‘You’d like I should run you a film maybe?’ ‘It’s a bit late,’ Matthew said. ‘You must be tired. I know I’m pretty tired.’ ‘I always run a film at night, sometimes two.’ He stood...

While they ate, he told them something of his routine. He had an alarm clock to wake him at six-thirty. He got up then, bathed, sometimes shaved, and went to the galley to make himself...

‘What about wireless?’ ‘Radio? Aw, that’s dead.’ ‘You can’t fix it?’ Skiopos shrugged. ‘I don’t know too much about radio.’ ‘If you could get it going – there might be stations broadcasting from somewhere that...

He gave ice cream and a bar of chocolate to Billy, lit a cigarette for Matthew and a small cigar for himself. He sat with them and talked. Matthew listened to him, wondering whether he...

Billy, when Skiopos had finished, had a comical but a clean look. The shirt and trousers were much too big for him, the latter being kept up by a pair of gaudy blue and gold...

‘You’ve been here all the time, then? By yourself?’ ‘They all went,’ Skiopos said. ‘I told them they were crazy, but they went. I told them, anything that dries up the Channel, that makes a...

It was steel and nylon and hung from the bulwark, forward of the stern on the starboard side. It reached the ground, and more – the extra lay in a tangled untidy heap on the...

When he first saw the ship, he did not believe it. A mirage, he thought confusedly – but surely mirages required hot dry air, and brightness? Or an hallucination … Only the stern and twenty...