Harry Watt, meanwhile, after his success with Night Mail (though Grierson, for reasons that I have touched on, did not give him the credit for having directed the film), had to be content with a shared credit with Basil Wright. He was bitter about that, and rightly so. However, he soon got over it and was now assigned to make a film about the Post Office Savings Bank. One had been made already by Arthur Elton, a year or so before. I had worked on it as Davidson's loading boy. The film was a crashing bore, a disaster. I don't know whether it was ever shown. If so, it was soon put into the vaults alongside Grierson's P.L.A.

So, Harry had not only to redeem the unit's reputation so far as this section of the civil service was concerned, but advance his own theories of how to go about this rather precious documentary film thing. He was getting sick and tired of too much intellectualising: too much of this dialectic materialism that everyone was on about, to coin a contemporary phrase. Left wing O.K. Everyone who thinks at all is bound, at some stage of their lives, usually early on, to be radical, very radical. But, you don't want to meet Das Kapital in the loo. It's not that sort of book, is it? There was a good deal of impress, impress: intellectual fireworks flying about. If that was the way to get on, O.K. for some, but not for Harry. Now, he was burdened with a film on the Savings Bank. If only to camouflage a boring subject he was determined to get the message across in story form. But to be anchored to the premise that it is wise if not virtuous to invest at three per cent so that when you are ready for the grave your capital will have grown sufficiently to give you a decent funeral requires inspired winching to get that off the sea bed. Find the right shape, though, and you can make anything work. Metal can be shaped to float. The sea! The sea had brought him to Flaherty and then to Grierson. He would launch his Savings Bank film on the ocean, somehow, somewhere.