“He’s still living here, Alice,” Bobby Hedley says as we sit in the promenade cafe, its salt-misted windows facing the North Sea. “Same school, headmaster until he retired.” That’s a surprise. I wouldn’t have expected Mr. Nixon would still be around at all by this time. Any more than I would have expected Bobby himself, once co-ringleader in mischief with my brother Mick, to be wearing a dog collar—the Reverend Robert Hedley, a Methodist minister, no less! But maybe not all that remarkable, considering the sea-going Hedley family has for generations waved the banner of religion in this part of