‘A man with congestive cardiac failure, two patients with myocardial infarctions and an old boy who had fallen out of bed and hit his head …’ I was telling Dahl a bit of what I had been up to earlier in the evening.

‘My writing career was started by a bang on the head, you know.’ Dahl had a mischievous twinkle in his eye. ‘Yes, it was the great bash on the head.’ I suspected he was ribbing me, but I let him go on. ‘… The plane coming down in the desert. Mind you, there was quite a bit of good fortune involved too …’

After five months in hospital in Alexandria, Dahl was sufficiently recovered to rejoin his flying squadron, who by this stage were in Greece. Their equipment had been upgraded to the Hawker Hurricane.

Downing his first enemy plane, a Junkers 88 was a big moment:

But the RAF squadron protecting Greece was vastly outnumbered by the Luftwaffe. Day after day their numbers were reduced as planes came down, especially during the Battle of Athens: ‘an endless blur of enemy fighters whizzing towards me from every side’. As the Germans pressed on Athens, the squadron was evacuated to Palestine, as Israel was then known. Landing at a remote strip near Haifa, Dahl was astonished to find ‘a welcoming committee of fifty screaming children and a huge man with a black beard, who looked like the prophet Isaiah and spoke like a parody of Hitler’. The man was a German Jewish settler, and the children were orphans. Dahl downed further enemy planes above Haifa, and having five aerial victories met the criteria to be classified as a flying ace. However, he suddenly started to get blinding headaches.