After one reading they haunted me, those notional peasant faces -- naive medieval eyes upturned under pudding-bowl haircuts. I found them in library books, I found them everywhere; the girls in the pictures were always younger, and their faces were unformed, less decisive. Why everywhere? Was someone arranging it? Was it a piece of knowledge directed especially at me? As if adults were sending me ceaseless information about it, as some sort of test of my moral courage. As if I were obscurely at fault for not having joined the crusade myself. As if ... It was the first 'fact' I decided to disbelieve. I thought it was a myth, and you can decide whether to take myths into your life; this one was not in my best interest. Further research convinces Blake Morrison that scepticism is in order. It seems the word used of these crusaders was pueri , which can mean not a child but a youth, any male between 12 and 28. A more convincing picture emerges: runaway apprentices and landless younger sons, big lads on the loose, on the road ... It sounds more likely. Still, the original, uneasy picture gnaws in the psyche: children lost and wandering, lost and gone for ever. Reading the early pages of Morrison's book, I go back to an earlier age still, when my body registered symptoms of fear whenever I heard the phrase 'far and wide'. It was the title, as my luck would have it, of a series