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the chorus with Helen Osborne, Jacqueline Rufus Isaacs and a transvestite from Milan. When these productions were over, we composed reviews of them in the manner of Harold Hobson and Ken Tynan, the dramatic critics of the period. The notices had to be dreadful; Tony would not have been amused by success.
    Mealtimes often produced dramas and could be discussed and analysed in detail afterwards. There was an elderly economist, often on the telephone in the café in La Garde Freinet advising Harold Wilson on the British economy, who would turn up at Le Nid du Duc in extremely baggy shorts. The grass around the lunch table was always scattered with rubbish, bones abandoned by the dogs and bits of dead animals. Seated opposite the economist, a girl grasped a chicken’s severed claw between her toes and inserted it, gently and cunningly, up his voluminous shorts. When the yellow leg was in position she scratched his private parts with it. This entertained her neighbours and caused the flattered victim to believe, with delight, that the elderly lady at his side was making a pass at him. After this, Tony was able to massage his thighs, choke with laughter and feel that the day had not been entirely wasted.
    One night a French movie actress whose beauty I had long admired was invited to dinner. The evening was uneventful, Tony was bored and we went to bed early. At breakfast, much to our surprise, he was in a mood of bubbling delight. At about two in the morning, it seemed, the exquisite actress had thrown a glass ashtray at her boyfriend’s head and he had to be taken to the hospital in St Tropez to receive several stitches. ‘The marvellous part was,’ Tony told us, ‘he said she usually held on to the things she hit him with, but this time she let go and it was much worse.’
    I was first invited down to discuss a film version of I Claudius and Claudius the God , books which I have always admired. Then Tony decided to do them as a stage play and ‘go for broke’ by bringing it straight into the West End. I wrote what I thought was a chamber piece with parts doubled by a fairly small cast of actors. Tony kept on getting new ideas. He stripped the cork trees of bark which he had painted blue to make armour for the Ancient Britons. He decided that the set should consist entirely of ‘bleachers’, the sort of steps which are erected for an audience at sporting events or presidential inaugurations. He said that the spaces between the steps should correspond to those in front of South American temples where ‘little Inca priests had to jump up and down’. He invited the leading players to Le Nid du Duc where they drank champagne and rehearsed round the pool. These rehearsals were an unmitigated delight.
    I was surprised, when we got to London, to find that the full cast consisted of about thirty actors and many of my lines had been transferred to characters for whom I hadn’t intended them. However, the rehearsals continued to look promising, kept alive by Tony’s endless enthusiasm and flow of invention. He gave a party at his house in London before the first night, at which I sat on a sofa between Jo Grimond, the former leader of the Liberal Party, and Robert Graves, who was immensely handsome, with the sort of head you might expect to find on a Greek statue or a Roman coin. There was a lull in the conversation and then Graves said, ‘Of course Jesus Christ lived to the age of eighty, went to China and discovered spaghetti.’
    â€˜In which Gospel,’ Jo Grimond was puzzled, ‘do we learn that Jesus Christ discovered spaghetti?’
    â€˜In no Gospel.’ Graves was smiling. ‘It’s simply a matter of common knowledge.’
    Jo Grimond was wise enough to ask no further questions on that subject, but when the legendary writer said, ‘Keats wasn’t a great poet. He couldn’t be because he was not a gent,’ Grimond uttered another mild