WELCOME
WHEN I WAS but knee-high to a bow-legged woman —about seven or eight years old — I saw Jaws for the first time. And I was not okay. In fact, for a while I refused to go into any swimming pool, convinced that a great white shark might somehow enter through the water filter system and wreak havoc on my thrashing legs. This was unlikely: I lived in Gerrards Cross. But such was the fiendish relentlessness of the shark, at least the shark in Steven Spielberg ’s movie, that it seemed plausible. I was safe from most of the far-fetched villains I’d seen on screen. But this one was different. Real. Unseen. Out there, somewhere, cruising for food.