HOW LONG DO YOU THINK IT TAKES FOR A TWO OR THREE-YEAR-OLD TO DROWN? It's a horrible question, I know, but from experience I can assure you it can happen in the time it takes to read a couple of sentences or a short paragraph in a book. It happened to my two-year-old boy, James -- my first child -- in Perth in 1975 when my wife at that time, fighting every shrill warning and instinct she felt, allowed herself to be led away from the family poolside of a new-found friend she was visiting to help make coffee. She didn't leave him completely alone, I assure you. There was another friend there by the pool, a young man, reading a book. "Don't worry," he said. "I'll watch him. He'll be OK." "Don't take your eyes off him," my wife implored; and I know that everything inside her was telling her this was a most dangerous thing a mother could do. But they were so reassuring, both the man and her new friend, and they were making her feel like a silly panicky fool. "Go do your thing," he told her. "He'll be OK. I'll watch him." It was just a few minutes later, while she was helping set out the cups and saucers on the tray, that they heard the man screaming. And our son James was on the bottom of the pool. I wanted to kill that young man at the time, and for years after. But today