Especially a chubby, unmysterious boy with cheeks like rosy ping-pong balls, a mouth like a pink buttonhole for the button nose above it and a cowlick of chocolate-coloured hair that would never do anything but stand up in a butcher-boy quiff. When he grew up looking like one of those dolls that won’t knock over, no one but Mr. and Mrs. Meekes would have continued to call him Merlin; but having christened him that, they were capable of anything. Mr. Meekes had been reading the Idylls of the King during his wife’s confinement, and it was touch and go that the jolly round baby was not called Gawain. At school, he was always called Wizard, and the name stuck to him through college and into the Army, until a girl in the Naafi canteen started to call him the Wizard of Oz. After that, he was Oz, or Ozzie to everyone. Daniel called him Ossie, believing that his name was Oswald, so Merlin kept his real name dark, for Daniel and everyone else laughed at him enough already. He did not mind. He had been laughed at all his life, and it was better to be a buffoon than a nobody.
