“Boys in their twenties in America are calling themselves ‘veterans.’ I’m sixty-eight. I’ve spent thirty-odd years fighting for something that I have eventually come to believe in. That, is what a veteran is. Those boys returned with the medals they’d been awarded for being wounded and they called our war ‘The biggest nothing in American history.’ And that hurt and offended me. You made a one-act appearance in a fifty-act play, and you killed more of us than were murdered in the entire century before and you called it nothing. And when it’s all over for you, when the white-water flow of money abates and your leaders find something sexier to support, we’ll still be here fighting for our lives against the next tyrant, or poverty, or nature. And by then you will have forgotten us. That’s what I want your Hollywood to tell everyone. Tell them it’s only nothing for you. For us, it’s survival and hope.”

That was going to be my big finish. I could perhaps squeeze out a tear or two and make my voice crinkle a bit and do my bulldog long-jowled expression. She’d give me a glass of whisky to make me feel better and . . . well, as Civilai said, one thing would doubtless lead to another.

The wobbly bottomed secretary found me in reception and led me up the staircase to the fourth floor and what they jokingly referred to as the “royal suite.” A queue of ten to twelve people stood at the end of the corridor, and the secretary placed me at its tail. But before I’d taken a step forward, the hotel siren sounded. Some in the queue panicked and ran. Others, like me, held their ground. There was a policy for air raids. We’d all been shown the nearest bunkers and been directed to areas like schools or hospitals that were supposedly only hit by accident. There were a lot of accidents those days.

And then the door to the suite was thrown open, and a small scrum of people directed by a hotel official passed us in the hall headed for safety. Jane Fonda was at the rear, propped up by a large man in a baseball cap. She seemed smaller than I remembered her from Cat Ballou. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt rather than her silver space suit, and her hair was mousy brown. In her natural state she was even more naked than Barbarella. I noticed she held a ballpoint pen in her hand. She spotted me at the end of the queue and pulled away from her minder. I was holding the serviette with my speech notes. She smiled, took it from me, turned it over and signed it. She smiled again, said something I didn’t understand and followed the entourage to the hotel bomb shelter.