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By Root 354 0

smoking heavily and although I enjoyed living in my Grosvenor Square flat, I felt something was missing from my life. I had set up Stanley comfortably, and I had bought Mum a big house in Streatham, a suburb of south London, which I split up into flats so that various family members could move there with her. Everyone was happy with their new arrangements – but what about me? I was thirty-eight, unmarried, although not, you might say, without offers, and yet something in me felt unfulfilled. I looked back at my life and at the enormous journey I had travelled and I asked myself where I had really been happiest. Hollywood was a high, of course, and the last ten years had included some fantastic experiences, but it hadn’t exactly been tranquil. And then I thought back to Norfolk. That’s what I need to do, I decided. I need to become an evacuee again.

I wanted to be able to get to London quickly but I wanted to live in real countryside. Berkshire seemed to me to offer the best of both worlds; the Queen seemed to agree with me as she obviously enjoyed spending time at Windsor Castle. So I started to look for a place on the River Thames and I found what I wanted almost at once. The Mill House was 200 years old and sat on a hundred yards of river frontage in five acres just outside the little village of Clewer, near Windsor. Both house and garden were in a bit of a state, but although this suited me, I decided to subject the place to the ultimate test and invited Mum and my old friend Paul Challen, from youth club days in the Elephant, along to view it. I’d read somewhere that you should only make an offer on a new home if, when you take your nearest and dearest along to see it, they sit down. I was home and dry. When I got back from looking round the garden, I found them both sitting outside having tea with the owner’s wife. I made an offer on the spot.

I’ve always loved gardens and gardening and over the course of my life I’ve created a few gardens from scratch. For me, working with your hands, designing and growing things, is the best form of therapy money can buy and tackling the Mill House garden was the beginning for me of a long slow climb back to health and happiness. In fact I had been given a timely helping hand on the health front from a surprising source. I was at a party in London one evening and chain-smoking as usual when I looked down just in time to see a hand snake into my jacket pocket, pull out my fag packet and hurl it on the fire. I opened my mouth to give the thief a bollocking and stopped. It was Tony Curtis. ‘That’s the third cigarette you’ve had since you arrived,’ he said severely and proceeded to outline a very clinically detailed and convincing argument about the risks posed by smoking. I had been smoking for years – two packets of French Gauloises a day, which I considered very chic, but I did think about his warning and gave up cigarettes for a year, and then fell by the wayside and started smoking cigars. Many years later I was having dinner at Gregory Peck’s house and when I went through to the drawing room to have a cigar I found myself sitting next to Yul Brynner. ‘I have lung cancer,’ he said to me quietly. I was absolutely stunned and, embarrassed, started to stub out my cigar, but he put his hand on my arm to stop me. ‘Don’t bother,’ he said. ‘I’m already dying; your smoke can’t harm me.’ He looked at me for a moment. ‘Do you know what I did yesterday?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘I made an anti-smoking commercial. To be played after my death.’ A few months later, Yul did die and the commercial was indeed shown. I took no notice. Yul smoked cigarettes, I reasoned; I smoked cigars and in any case, I didn’t inhale (now where have I heard that before?). But one evening I was watching TV at home in Britain, cigar in hand, when the snooker player Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins came on to do an anti-smoking commercial. I barely recognised him. He had lost a lot of weight and he looked terrible: he had throat cancer, he said. I sat there for a while, shocked, and then I put my cigar in the ashtray, got up and walked