Akira Kurasawa took the techniques of Sergei Eisenstein and John Ford, pinching a story from a settlers-besieged-by-Indians western the name of which everyone (including Kurasawa) seems to have forgotten, and added the elements of the martial arts, but composed it all into something way beyond the sum of the parts in his Seven Samurai. The battle in the rain and mud is superbly staged, and Tishuro Mifune quite outstanding as the bravest of the seven in all his bare-arsed ferocity. The concept travelled back to the wild west in the 1960s as The Magnificent Seven.

The regular image of this solitary and repentant figure slouched alone in the schoolyard did not go unnoticed, but the other teachers saw no reason to express sympathy. In English I could read aloud and mispronounce words of even one syllable; in Mathematics I could add a column of figures any number of times and invariably come up with a different answer on each occasion; in Chemistry I presented such a menace with my seemingly ceaseless capacity to break test‑tubes and beakers containing dangerous substances, and turn on the gas to the Bunsen burners without adding flame that for a time I was not admitted to the room until my classmates had securely tied my hands behind my back.