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Clohessy’s breakfast I didn’t have to eat again till the evening, when there’d be dinner on the lawn after the day’s filming was over.
    ‘You’ll not be wanting rain on your fillum, will you?’ said Mrs Clohessy every day as I left for the set. ‘Let’s hope you’re lucky again.’
    The odd thing is that we were. ‘Tip’, as they called the local town, has one of the highest annual rainfalls of any town in Europe, you half expect it to have gondolas, but we never saw a drop.
    Day after day the sun shone. The lawn of the old country house began to look bare and brown. The owners worked in horse-breeding and they had stables with thoroughbreds, but they hadn’t had much luck at the market or the races and they took in guests whenever they could. They were pleased to be full up, but after a week they said they wanted a day off, so we’d have to do dinner for ourselves.
    In the morning I hitchhiked to Tip, where I found an off-licence. I’d noticed that the drinks stores were running down and I bought a dozen bottles of cider, some seven-pint tins of beer and half a dozen glass carafes of wine with sealed metal tops. The Clohessys’ rent was so small that I still had plenty of cash left from the paper mill. I bought a tray of cut-price chicken pieces from a supermarket and the ingredients for a barbecue sauce. I’d done a lot of cooking as a child because I got hungry waiting for my parents to come home. I had to feed Julie as well as myself and she was quite fussy about the way I did it.
    It was tricky getting all this stuff to a point where I could hitch a lift back, but the man in the supermarket lent me a trolley. Everyone was off filming in a wood in the furthest part of the estate and there was no one around except a small girl called Jude, who had straight brown hair wrapped in something I think might be called a snood. She wasn’t needed that day and had been told by Stewart to get a meal together. She was sulking about this; she said he’d picked on her because she was a woman and that he’d never have told a man to cook. I gave her a Glynn Powers roll-up and said I could look after the dinner.
    At five, I put up a trestle on the gravel by the kitchen garden and laid out the drink with some paper cups I’d got from the village. I stuck the chicken under a marinade in a huge pan I found in the kitchen. With old bricks and bits of stone I picked up near the bonfire site I built a base for a barbecue with a good draught running under it, laid some wire netting over it, then gathered armfuls of wood from the parched grounds. By seven I had orange-grey embers, and by eight I was ready to offer marinated grilled chicken with barbecue sauce, baked potatoes and salad to thirty people.
    I tried to pass it off as Jude’s work, but actually nobody seemed to care who’d cooked it; no one even asked who’d bought it or got it to the house. A guy called Andy said, ‘Great sauce, man.’ Maybe he thought I was a caterer.
    I noticed that Jennifer enjoyed it too. I’d bought apple pies and cheese from the village to have afterwards. She laughed when some apple squeezed from the piece of pie she was holding and dropped into her lap.
    Jennifer was playing one of the main parts in the film, as it happened. Stewart Forres gave a talk before the camera rolled. He had a thin brown beard and Christ-like hair parted in the middle. He said, ‘You’ve all seen the script that Dave and I have developed. We started with this heavy concept – an acid Twelfth Night , if you will – but we’ve finished with something more unstructured. Most of the dialogue is going to be improvised, so you’ll be work-shopping some of your scenes with me or Dave first. We’re going to light some Tibetan candles now and sit in a ring. This is a good-luck ceremony. I’d like you to respect it.’
    It looked really good with all the candles and everyone gathered round. The light from the flames shone up on their faces: Kathy and Dave