Spookdaddy
Cuckoo
- Joined
- May 24, 2006
- Messages
- 7,986
- Location
- Midwich
...and I can't believe that they would have tried to persuade him home at 3pm, however dark it may have been getting...
Three in the afternoon is the time the boy is supposed to have left home. The other events described clearly took place after this, but there's no evidence to suggest that they did so soon after this, rather than at some time in the course of the evening. The written account suggests that the tram crew's advice was given later in the evening.
The use of the term 'schoolboy' might sound a bit odd now - but it's possible that it's just a word used as an indicator of age, in an era when the idea of a 'teenager' did not really yet exist. (I'd suggest, 'child', 'schoolboy', 'youth', 'young man' might be the sequence used by the press of this period - with some class based interchanging between 'schoolboy' and 'youth'.)
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