‘A steam-filled bathroom. The camera pans along a shelf of toilet requisites, shampoo, talcum powder, toothbrushes in a glass, and slowly down towards the bath. Through the steam we see what appears to be a plump, white arm hanging elegantly over the side. In the bath is a dead pig.’

The idea for A Private Function came from Malcolm Mowbray. He wanted to make a film about the immediate post-war years, when rationing and food shortages were more severe than at any time during the war. Though the pig in the bath was an actual incident in the lives of his in-laws, who raised and killed a clandestine pig and scalded it in their own bath, the years just after the war were for Malcolm an historical period. I could remember them, though not with much nostalgia. My father was a butcher and the weekly worry that his allotted supply would not be enough to cover the requirements of his registered customers eventually landed him in hospital with a duodenal ulcer.

I dare say Leeds, where we lived, was no more corrupt than anywhere else; certainly there were quite a few butchers in our neighbourhood who were on the twist, and everyone knew who they were. Though Leeds is a much larger place than the town in the film, there was the same sense that, rationing notwithstanding, some people were still doing very nicely, thank you. The same must have been true in country areas. I know of one village that was regularly visited by a hearse, the visits seemingly unrelated to the death rate. Stopped one day by a Ministry of Food inspector, it was found to be carrying a coffin packed with pork … an incident far too theatrical to be put in the film, life as so often more over the top than anything one could invent. But ask anybody in the village today about pigs in that period and they still look over their shoulder before replying. So, though the central incident of the theft of the pig may nowadays seem far-fetched, I don’t think it would have been then. Though whether a fully qualified chiropodist, even when married, like Gilbert, to a distant relative of Lady Macbeth, would descend to such a deed is another matter.

Those days are hard to recall now, and the newsreel that starts the film was put in to inform as much as to entertain. Sticklers for historical accuracy will probably spot that the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to the Duke of Edinburgh took place in November, a November in our film when the trees are in full leaf and the countryside bathed in warm sunshine.