I got on to the stage and Brian was there, and... and the question was who should go first, and they tossed a coin and I was going to go first. You don't really want to take first innings in these kinds of occasions, but there it was.

And I went into the wings and Leslie said, as people do when they're doing auditions, you know, 'When you're ready'. And I don't know what possessed me, but I... I devised a walk which was sort of, like kind of Groucho Marx squared: very low and sort of slithering onto the stage like that. And I did... how did it go? 'Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. How do you do you do? We'd like to do a little number written by one of the boys in the band. It's called, Good Evening, Mrs Robinson, how do you do you do? With a one and a two and a three and a four...' and that was as far as I got.

Brian Marlborough, who was very ambitious and good, said, 'It's not worth my doing it'. So funnily enough I got this part which turned out to be a huge hit when we went to London. So I did Graham Greene, and that was pretty successful, and then I did Joe and the Boys, and that was pretty damn successful. We went to Oxford, and I had a curious experience in Oxford actually, because I met Jeremy Atkinson, the same guy who'd asked me to be the House commander of the Lockite Platoon, who had got the same Holford scholarship the previous year, that I wanted to get the year after. And he was still up at Christchurch.

And he had a girlfriend called Janet. And I don't know how we... I went to Christchurch to have a look at what it would have been if I'd gone there. And I saw Jeremy, and he said, oh this is Janet. So Janet said to me after we'd talked a bit, 'Would you come for a walk with me?' She was a blonde English girl. 'I'll show you Christchurch Meadows, and you know, perhaps you'd like to see the barges, and all of that on the Isis'. So I said fine. So we went out for a walk and there she was, and after a bit she said to me, I was... what was I? 20... I suppose I was 22, wasn't I? Something like that. Yes, I was 22. She said, 'Do you think I'd be a good thing for Jeremy?' And I said, 'I don't know you. I mean... I... what do you mean?' So she said, 'No, no, no, because I know the people who were a school with you, Jeremy and other people, too, and you've got a sort of gift, haven't you?' 'Have I? Well, maybe I have and maybe I haven't but honestly, Janet, you know, I don't know anything about you and I don't actually know much about Jeremy. I spent four years with him at Lockites, I know his father went down with his ship, and I know various other things about him, and he plays football – I think he's a left inside, isn't he? And he's a scientist, isn't he? But, you know, he's not a friend of mine, I don't know him'. 'But', she said, 'he is, he is a friend of yours'. So I said, 'Listen – if you want to marry him, marry him. If he wants to marry you, get married. That's my advice. And if you don't want to marry him, I wouldn't do it. I don't know anything about it'. But it was odd because, of course, I sort of did know something about it. But I don't know what it was. I read people, that's what writers have to do. Not necessarily rightly.