Unable to practise his profession, he left the US in 1952 and began a new life and eventually a second film-making career in London. It was very hard at first. For several years, he worked as a script doctor and wrote under pseudonyms. Even British film companies were afraid to employ him under his real name. (When he co-wrote the screenplay for David Lean's Bridge over the River Kwai, his name was removed from the print. The screenplay won an Oscar, which was awarded to the French author of the original novel, who could barely speak English.)

My father's first marriage did not survive the move to England, although it took a decade or so before he was divorced. He was apparently a difficult husband, an angry man and something of a rake in those years.

Unable to write, fearful that his professional life was over, he socialised compulsively and gambled regularly with the likes of Otto Preminger and Sam Spiegel at expatriate clubs like Siegi's and Les Ambassadeurs. "I felt it was important for me to engage in activities that were normal and red-blooded and American," he once wrote.  

The first real friends he made in England were Anthony Havelock Allen, who had produced Brief Encounter and In Which We Serve and was now with the Rank studio, and the director Terence Young, an Arnhem veteran who later made the first Bond films. After my father died, Havelock Allen recalled what seemed even to him a particularly glamorous evening they spent together, a double date at the Café de Paris with Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly. It ended in a row. My father thought that Gardner was one of the most beautiful women in the world, but he wrecked any chance he had with her by attacking bullfighting. Gardner had had a tumultuous affair with Luis Miguel Dominguín, the great Spanish matador. Perhaps there was something of the gypsy about my father, not that he necessarily recognised it in himself. He had dropped out of college, hitchhiked to Hollywood for a year at 19 and then joined a travelling circus. This need to be free marked his personal life and seemed even more urgent in the years when he was trapped in Britain by his lack of a valid passport. When Marlene Dietrich came over to perform at the Café de Paris, my father went backstage to meet her. They ended up spending the night together at the Dorchester and afterwards she said to him, "If I had a man like you, a writer like you, I'd never ask you where you'd been or when you're coming back. You'd be free." He never forgot that. He never really settled down until his late forties when he met my mother.  

On the other hand, his life settled into some patterns that would continue for at least two decades. He had an office in Jermyn Street, in central London, where he would write and which happened to have a convenient bedroom in the back, where he sometimes stayed at weekends. He would lunch at the same French restaurant across the street almost every day. Every night, he came home to a couple of bone dry martinis, until my mother eventually persuaded him to switch to whisky and finally wine. For most of his adult life he was also a chain smoker, who would keep two cigarettes going at the same time, one for each side of the typewriter. He gave up the habit cold turkey when I was about six.