It arrived only a week or so later. I was immediately impressed by the typing, which was flawless and most beautifully formatted, with the dialogue in black and the stage-directions in red – something I had never seen before and never have since. What was typed, though, whether in red or in black, justified all my worst fears. I summoned up my courage and wrote the most tactful letter I could, aborting the whole enterprise and returning his elegant typescript.

It was elegant no longer, I discovered. I had put it on the floor beside my desk while I concentrated on the politeness of my refusal, and my second daughter, aged one, now long since employed in the worlds of broadcasting and publishing, had made her entrance upon the literary stage like her sister before her, not this time by scribbling her comments on the text, but by ripping the pages out of the file one by one, tearing them up, and attempting to eat them. I agreed with her judgment, but I was embarrassed at the frankness with which she had expressed it. I parcelled up the resultant mess as best I could, and added an even more grovelling postscript to my letter. Priestley behaved with the utmost grace, I have to record, both about my rejection of his helping hand and my daughter’s only too eloquent support.

My second meeting, which particularly delighted me because I was a great admirer, was with Kurt Vonnegut. He had reviewed the book in Life magazine, and then, in 1971, when he set up his own film production company on the proceeds from the success of Slaughterhouse-Five, bought the film rights. (He called the company Sourdough, after the old prospectors in the Yukon, because, as he assured me, there was gold in them thar hills.) I went to New York to stay with him and discuss how we were going to do it. I had a delightful few days walking through the baking July streets with him while he recalled bits of the book that had particularly amused him. He was a man who was easily amused, and laughter welled out of him like foam from champagne. He was also a heavy smoker, so that every time he laughed not only did the tears run down his cheeks but he would have to stop in the middle of the sidewalk and double up, coughing and choking, unable to breathe. Several times I feared that his new vocation as movie producer was going to finish him off somewhere along Third Avenue. We couldn’t think of how to make a film out of the material, though, any more than Priestley could a play, and the gold remained, like most of the gold sought by prospectors in the film business, concealed where it was in those tantalising hills.

But at least none of my children offered their assistance, and Kurt and I remained friends for many years. Even after we had lost touch towards the end of his life he evidently retained a touching regard for the book, and in an interview he gave in those last years, where he was talking about the growing difficulties of writing comedy as one got older, I was surprised to read that after The Tin Men I had never been able to write anything funny again. Since he had later come to the first night of Noises Off on Broadway I took this as a considerable testimony to the consistency of his opinions.