Prologue

Do you ever wonder, as you sit and watch a movie, about what happened to those characters on the screen before the story you are watching starts? Or what was going on elsewhere as the movie tells its tale? Or about how their lives pan out after the movie ends and you have left the cinema and made your way home? (All right, maybe I've just been to see some dull movies lately.)

This tale features some of those characters, immortalised on film by Bogart, Bergman, Dooley Wilson, Paul Henried, Claude Rains and Tim Moxon.

There's a couple of people from the real world in here too but of course this story is as fictional for them as it is for the characters that we've known from favourite movies.

As for our hero, the story picks up not long after the conclusion of "The Golden Age". Avid fans of Freddie's Tales will recall that "The Golden Age" ended with Freddie in Florida and some thoughts about what happened to Freddie next. In fact, as is often the case with information about Freddie Clegg, this turns out not to have been entirely accurate.

The suggestion that he had been involved with the Special Operations Executive now appears to be wrong. Although Freddie did get involved in secret operations in Europe it wasn't quite as it originally appeared. Nor did Sandy flee France in the face of the German advance as had been previously thought. She stayed and made her own special contribution to the war effort as you'll learn.

I'll leave you to work out who should be playing Freddie, Elly, Sandy and the others when they come to make the movie of "You Must Remember This".

As for the rest of it, Robert Harris isn't the only one with insights as to what was going on at Bletchley Park in the 1940's.