And before long Hitchcock took Ethel Lina White’s rather ordinary mystery yarn The Wheel Spins and turned it into the stylish nail-biter The Lady Vanishes. On a train through exotic European locales (which Hitchcock typically ignored, confining everything to his railway carriage set) a young woman (Margaret Lockwood) notices that the nice old lady she was chatting to (Dame May Whitty) has vanished, but no one will believe her. Except Michael Redgrave but he only because he’s taken a fancy to her. Turns out dear Dame May is a master-spy and our unlikely duo foil a devious plot by enemy agents. In the cast were those two cricket-loving, gun-totin’ gentlemen of comedy and adventure Basil Radford and Naughton Wayne, who would help out and thereby spin off their own series of movie adventures.

My bicycle misfortune wasn’t entirely a bad outcome. It did result in being home on schooldays recovering from my injuries—badly sprained ankle, dislocated wrist, multiple lacerations some of which went delightfully ganky. Plainly Mr Harrison utilised some quite malicious chemicals on his rosebushes and my joy at picking off the scabs and squeezing out the pus was sublime.