I am always puzzled by people who can remember only sunshine in their childhoods. I recall great gales shaking the brickwork of my hilltop school, thrilling fogs in which the outside world disappeared, and marvelous white winter silences in the precious unbusy days of early January. I can remember frosts freezing the milk on the doorstep. And perhaps above all, for I am British, I recall melancholy rainy days during which the wet roads gleamed in the gray cloudy light. There were a lot of those, and it was on such a day that I encountered one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen.

It was in a junk shop, once a common feature of the English townscape, now not so easy to find. I was in there, aged perhaps twelve, because one of my favorite adventures in those days was to spend most of my pocket money on a return first-class ticket to West Town, on Hayling Island. It cost one shilling and sixpence, and allowed me to occupy the florid luxury of an Edwardian railway carriage which had ended up on this shriveled appendix of the British railway system. The journey is impossible now because my impoverished country, once a world power, thought it could not afford to maintain or replace the bridge which carried that train over the water, and so closed the whole line forever.

One of the chief joys of these excursions was being told off by railway staff for fare-dodging and then producing the tiny rectangle of white pasteboard which showed that I had in fact paid the full price. Every half hour or so, hauled by an immensely ancient night-black steam engine with a tall chimney, and known as the Hayling Billy, this train bustled past our suburban back garden, over that quaking bridge across a stretch of sea, or of slime when the tide was out, and then into one of the remotest places in all southern England, low-lying, surrounded by salty mudflats, where Hampshire, sky, and water meet, a boot-shaped island of mystery. You could not (or at least I could not) bear to watch that train clatter past day after day without sometimes traveling on it.

It was not much of a destination. On wet winter afternoons nothing much happened there. Its beaches did not appeal. Yachtsmen had laid up their boats. But still the train ran, and when you got there, there was very little to do while you waited for it to go back to the mainland, except visit the junk shop close to the station. This ill-lit, chilly place was randomly crammed with more or less useless objects from the Imperial age, appalling stuffed furniture, dead clocks, and chipped sherry decanters.

But on one of these visits I discovered a bound edition of the cartoons of H. M. Bateman. You have probably heard of him. He used to be funny. He was especially famous in the 1920s and 1930s for his series of drawings about “The Man Who . . .” In these cartoons some untutored booby would have offended against the customs of the time in a way which is now almost completely incomprehensible. The effect depended on understanding the era’s elaborate codes of behavior. Those looking on would be gazing at the offender in silent amazement, their mouths gaping and their eyes as big as the Round Tower in Copenhagen. I either understood the jokes or thought I did at the time. His world, full of lean men in dinner jackets and bow ties, and of substantial women in hats, was not then as far away as it is in these feverish days.

Bateman, as I see now, was a brilliant draftsman with quite a lot of bitterness in his Indian ink. But when I opened that book, bound in dark red with gold lettering on the spine, about the size of a small atlas, I still had the general view that cartoons were supposed to be funny. And I came upon one entitled “The Boy Who Breathed on the Glass in the British Museum.” Surely this would be funny, I thought. It is a little like a strip cartoon, a series of perhaps thirty small pictures telling a story. It begins mildly enough. An Edwardian boy of about my age, in the clothes of the era, breathes on the glass of a display case full of Egyptian mummies, sniggering as he does so. A furious museum employee, side whiskers flying in his own slipstream, sees the crime and rushes to apprehend the boy. This is amusing, sort of, because it is such a mad over-reaction. (I noticed the other day that the noted British public intellectual Mary Beard has been musing about the same cartoon, but either she was being funny or she really meant it when she said it might be “a prequel to some Foucauldian vision of the museum as an apparatus of cultural power.” I like Professor Beard, but she is a bit of a lefty: how can one be sure when dealing with twenty-first century academics whether or not they are joking?)

Bateman’s joke, such as it is, continues for a little while as the boy is delivered to the police. You might smile at it perhaps even up to the point where he stands in the dock at the Old Bailey, England’s central criminal court, and an eagle-faced judge in a full-bottomed wig pronounces what is obviously a shockingly long sentence. This might be the point at which everyone wakes up, and it is just a nightmare. But it is a nightmare from which there is no waking. For at that point the whole thing becomes quite ferociously cruel and merciless. The boy is shown saying a tearful farewell to his distraught parents (the father’s face distorted to make him look absurd and pathetic, so that we are still being encouraged to laugh). He is then taken to prison, and there garbed in the terrifying uniform of the Victorian convict, marked with the broad arrow that in those days signified that everything stamped with it was government property.

In a series of brilliant, tiny, concentrated sketches, he is first shown decaying from youth to middle age, and then sinking into a skull-faced miserable toothless, hairless decrepitude and a living death. It is so cleverly and brutally done that it is almost as horrifying as those “memento mori” sculptures of decomposed corpses that the powerful but pious used to place beneath their tombs in the Middle Ages, to contrast with the bold and beautiful effigies of them that were on display above. At last, barely able to stand or walk, bent and bowed, he is let out—whereupon he travels to the British Museum, breathes on the glass once more, and, with an expression of rather stupid fury on his face, drops dead.

Here we see an entire life eaten by the locust. If it is supposed to be a witty comment on the ferocity of Victorian justice, the wit goes straight past me. I was so dismayed by the drawings that I remember first closing the book, and then surreptitiously opening it again to look at it once more, with horrified fascination. When the internet made it possible to view it again a few years ago, I did so, and found it just as disturbing as I had done on that wet, chilly day sixty-odd years ago. I have never forgotten it. I think it lingers deep in my mind whenever I hear people demanding long prison sentences or exulting that some condemned person will die in captivity.

Currently, in Britain, I am engaged in an attempt to reopen the trial of a young woman called Lucy Letby, a nurse convicted of murdering several babies and trying to murder several more in the hospital where she once worked. The New Yorker has published an interesting article on this case, which is still not readily available in Britain. The authorities have shown what looks to me like relish in telling her that she will never be released and will die in captivity. She is not a popular figure, but I and some others fear that her conviction is not safe, and that the evidence is not good enough to justify her conviction, let alone the penalty she now has to endure. That of course is our problem, and we must argue as well as we can for our cause. Others reply, rationally and calmly, that she was properly convicted. But a third group, gloating that she will die in prison, sneer at her plight. It is this that tempts me to anger, which I must not indulge. Prison was always a strange response to wrongdoing, developed by liberals who could not stomach the more violent punishments which went before. But the idea of locking someone up until he or she dies, or even nearly as long as that, seems to me to be at least as cruel as execution, if not actually more so. Perhaps that is Mr. Bateman’s fault, but there it is.