Fay Compton, so her son told me, said to him in his early teens: ‘Tony, darling, I'm too poor to educate you properly, you'll just have to go on the stage’. Anthony Pelissier did, and amongst many other endeavours made a success of everything that he undertook. But he was an enviably talented man. Sadly this is not a biography about Anthony, though one is long overdue. No, no. Here we are dealing with much smaller fry. But, the smallest salmon parr on reaching the sea is liable to have strange experiences and meet many large fish in the oceans of his travels, some of them so large that they have influenced the recent history of our times. How then did I have the chance not only of meeting some of them but filming them? How could it be that I, the ex-messenger boy of John Grierson's G.P.O. Film Unit, could nine years later be face-to-face with the Commander in Chief (C. in C.) of the Western Approaches, Admiral Sir Percy Noble, outlining to him how I proposed to make the film he had requested on the Battle of the Atlantic? And, some years later, confronting L. B. Mayer, the founder of Metro Goldwyn Mayer, with the simple challenge: ‘Use me or release me. Otherwise you are wasting your money and my time’?

In retracing my steps they will not lead me to the confessional. I shall not, as the great Jean Jacques Rousseau in his vast volume of confessions, gloat over every temptation and his failures. He spares us nothing except the movement of his bowels. The confessional is for The Brompton Oratory, and greatly though I may be in need of it, I shall spare you the list of my failures and wrongdoings. I am only concerned here with the struggle to find my little niche in the world, the struggle that is the common denominator of us all. As I walk back over my pebbly path, if you will come with me, even part of the way, I shall be delighted and very flattered.