On Thursday 8 October, we had bad news over the rushes. Two good dialogue scenes which had not been easy to shoot were ruined because the faces in the foreground were underexposed and the background sky too hot and hopelessly overexposed. After seeing them in rushes it was obvious we faced new problems, especially for poor Jack Cardiff, and goodness knows, he had had enough to put up with as it was, bearing up under the physical strain of his daily ordeal at sea. Now, light problems. Either too much of it or not enough: either too red or too orange; either too bright or too dull, and all four ingredients being mixed up into a nightmarish goulash as the day proceeded—for the light ingredients changed as quickly as the night sky at sunset. Somehow, he had to juggle with these so that the faces did not look as though they had been washed in tomato ketchup or were waiting to play the ghost in Hamlet.

Not unnaturally, as we left the cinema, he was a worried man. So was Penny, who immediately understood Jack's problems even though they were in Technicolor—in some ways a system more able to overcome exposure problems with three films to bear the burden of any mistake, rather than just one in black-and-white.

Back at the hotel, like a tolling bell, Jack said: ‘Those “inky dinks” aren't up to it. I'm going to need two mini arcs: du-arcs, and that means a “genny”.’

‘Oh my Gawd’, I said, but soon realised that his needs were everybody's, even though they meant delay for us all.

‘If you need them, obviously you've got to have them, but where on earth do we put the “genny”? Tyella can't take another paper clip with Kay's stuff aboard, and Jim would never have it bolted to his deck’, I said.

‘Be no good anyway. Bound to hear it. Be the end of “sync” shooting’, Penny said, stunning us into gloomy silence until he ventured to suggest: ‘There's only one place it can go and … that is the second lifeboat!’ Jack's powers of deduction were equal to this simple equation.

‘Keeping Tyella out of shot is bad enough without sandwiching a lifeboat between us. We'd be lucky to get a shot a day, and it's no news to you that even that's a struggle sometimes’, I said.