When you drive a director for nearly five months to and from Shepperton Studios every day you get to know each other pretty well, and Stanley was fascinated by my wartime stories. I mean he was like a little boy. Also, he had tried to become a pilot, but on his first solo flight… I don’t know if I should be saying this, you know, in these Tiger Moth and Stearman, in New York or something, we had two magnetos, and before you took off you switched one magneto off to see how many revs you lost, and then the other one. It was a way of checking that the engine was okay. Well, Stanley did that, but he forgot to switch on the thing – the magneto – and he staggered into the air, and just managed to get back and make a forced landing, and since then has never flown in any other aircraft. Imagine.

So that was one story that I got out of him. But I told him a lot of my stories and he was fascinated by that, and he was going to make a film, you know, but he wanted to make it from the First World War because you could hold all those aerial fights and battles in your frame. You didn’t have to go with, you know… and then in the end, I had no more stories so I had to invent stories to tell, but it was a great... we had a great relationship, except that I said to myself, it’s one... I can only go through it once in my life. Little did I know.