“… How do I really feel? Does the thought that all this is going to end in two months’ time—as it happens, before the last episode of my favourite TV series—throw me into a complete panic? Do I walk around all day with a feeling of terror, like a victim in a horror film? Surprisingly, the answer is no. If anything, I feel cool and detached, as if all this is happening to someone else. The brain seems to have developed a way of standing back from itself, like a locomotive uncoupling the carriages behind it. To tell the truth, the biggest problem faced by the dying is how other people feel, especially their friends. There’s a real sense in which the dying have to die twice, once for themselves and once for their friends…”

Did Dick believe this? His sister and her husband, a retired Dundee accountant, had moved into the house to look after him, but they were unobtrusive, sensitive, and reassuring. As I drove home it occurred to me that Dick had many acquaintances but virtually no close friends other than myself. Did he resent my concern for him and my visits to his hospital bed? Or were the friends for whom he had to die the invisible TV audience that had invested its admiration in him for so many years and now needed to be placated?

But all sense of an audience had gone by the time of our second interview. The first recording had left me light-headed. Unable to work, I roamed from room to room. Time seemed dislocated, like an endless afternoon in a strange city. When I arrived at Richmond, an hour early, Dick scarcely seemed to recognise me and consulted his diary as if to remind himself. During the recording he sat stiffly at his desk with a brave if bleak smile and described his activities in the past week, which seemed, eerily, to resemble my own.

I noticed that more mementoes had left the walls, the ticket stubs of the Rio premiere of 2001 and photographs of himself with the American astronauts at the Houston Space Center. I guessed that he was clearing away these remnants of the past twenty years so that he could return to his youth. Steadied by the camera, he reflected on his Scottish childhood and his wartime schooldays in Australia, where he and his sister had been evacuated.

“… Thinking about the Japanese during the first years of the war was rather like thinking about death. Everyone in Australia was vaguely frightened of the Japanese soldiers and knew they were approaching, but no one had ever seen one. Of course, our idea of the Japanese was a complete caricature—very different from your case, Jim, as a boy in wartime Shanghai. You knew exactly what the Japanese were like, and you’d also seen a great deal of death. Looking back, how do you think that affected you?”