Amost welcome letter, from someone unknown to me, a John Sullivan. He wondered whether I would be interested in directing a film based on a novel by Helen Ashton, Yeoman's Hospital. The first draft script arrived a day later. It had more substance than a straw to a drowning man. It was good and with work could be very good. I accepted at once and a week or two later was back in my old stamping ground, Pinewood Studios, meeting Jan Read, the script writer, and a sturdy Texan, Earl St John, who was, I gathered, the right-hand man of someone called John Davis who, judging by everyone's reaction when his name was mentioned, was even more fearsome than anything that Hollywood could produce from its executive ranks. Earl St John had a mane of leonine grey hair which he forked back off his brow with both hands, a mannerism he was fond of in his eloquent moments. He had been a cinema manager which automatically made him highly qualified, but with no means of proving it, to wield considerable authority in the Rank Organisation which had really slipped into films by mistake; however, that's another story.

Having sold my studio in Bradbrook House, Kinnerton Street, to Arthur Pann, the artist who had painted the famous portrait of Winston Churchill sitting with his hands resting on the arms of a leather-backed chair, I had no base in London so Jan Read very kindly put me up. He had a flat in Dilke Street, Chelsea, and here we worked and had a most happy collaboration as we added new ingredients in reshaping the script of what was to become White Corridors. Amongst other strands we introduced a running gag in which poor Basil Radford, a returning colonial, finds it hard to adapt to post-war socialist Britain, and even harder to find the right procedures to take advantage of the N.H.S. He is always baulked by the hospital porter, a nice enough old boy, who with patience and sympathy tries to explain what must be done. Who better to play the part of the porter than my dear old friend, the gunner in Western Approaches. What a wonderful contribution he had made to that film, and he was to make just as good a one in White Corridors.