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he found people had difficulty in pronouncing his name. I laughed and said, There’s a TV programme called Steptoe & Son and Hercules is the name of their horse.’ So he told me his real name. It’s very easy to say.The ‘H’ is silent. You then say ‘error’ and join it to the surname of John Cleese the actor and you have the name ‘Heracles’.
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    Heracles’ command of English was always very good and I don’t remember a time when he misunderstood me, but little problems would arise. Tuesday night was the evening he chose to study and I was invited to his flat if I sat quietly beside him while he did his homework. I didn’t stay silent very long but the invitation remained. He would ask me questions, one of which was, ‘How do you say, “sit on the bitch”?’ I replied, ‘You can say, “sit on the beach” spelt B E A C H, which is the sand beside the sea, or you can say, “sit underneath a beech tree”, B E E C H, but you can’t say, “sit on the bitch,” B I T C H, because it’s a female dog.’
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    I taught Heracles to drive my car and he passed his test first time. This was strictly a result of my tuition as he only had two lessons before we decided I should teach him. Every Sunday we would go out for the day, frequently to Windsor, with Heracles at the wheel. On one of our weekly excursions we were travelling through central London when I suddenly doubled up in agony with fierce stomach pains. The pains did not subside and were so intense Heracles decided the best thing we could do was find a hospital and get me there as quickly as possible. He sawthe ‘H’ sign and followed the directions, taking me straight to Casualty.
    One of the nurses took charge of me. She ushered me into a cubicle and told me to take all my clothes off, put on the paper dress she passed to me and wait for a doctor to come and see me.
    The doctor was absolutely beautiful. He was aged about twenty-eight, blond with blue eyes, very handsome and Australian. He asked me to lay down on the couch and he examined me over my paper dress. He pressed different parts of my stomach and asked, ‘Does this hurt?’ and, ‘Does it hurt now?’ Each time I replied, ‘No.’ He looked down at my legs and said, ‘No wonder there’s no pain, you have your legs crossed. Would you please uncross them?’ which I did. He touched me again and this time it hurt.
    The doctor put on a pair of transparent rubber gloves. He said, ‘Now I’m going to give you the examination that Princess Anne had recently when she had an ovarian cyst. Would you open your legs please?’ As I realised he was going to put his hand inside me I exclaimed, ‘Oh, no! Do I really have to go through this?’ He replied, ‘It will only take a minute.’ I resigned myself to my fate and silently allowed the doctor to do as he thought necessary. When he had finished he took a brown medicine bottle off one of the shelves and gave it to me saying, ‘I want you to take two teaspoonfuls of this medicine everyfour hours and if the pain goes away within three days then all you have is wind. But if the pain does not go away then you have appendicitis.’ He paused and said, ‘You can put your clothes on now and go home.’
    Back in the car with Heracles I took a huge swig of the medicine. One hour later I had no pain. As the day passed by and still I had no pain I slowly realised that I’d had wind. I said to Heracles, ‘I went all the way through that terrible examination by that tasty doctor and all I have is wind. Why couldn’t he just have told me to go to the loo and do my best to have a good blow?’ 
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    Heracles went home on the third Christmas and I received a letter from him in mid-January. He had worked out all the numbers for me to dial on my telephone in London and had written, ‘When