Mireille Day

Very little.

I would find out later that he was on the run.

Much later I'd find that out.

How do you discover on board that he had more than one name?

Well, in Darwin, I had gone with him to do all the bureaucratic stuff about ship's departure and all of that.

So I'd seen his passport and I saw that the name in the passport was Jean de Rayet.

And I noticed the books on the shelves and being a writer, I just went straight to them.

They were in French.

But I noticed on one of the books there was this author photo and it was the photo of Jean.

But the name of the author was Jean Kay, not the same as the name that was in the passport.

So that night I was on watch and he was replacing me and we had that moment of changing over and

And I said, oh, do you write under pseudonym?

I told him what I'd seen.

He said, no, I travel under pseudonym.

What are the facts of Jean's life?

Was he born in France?

He was a French citizen.

He was born in Algeria.

So this is when Algeria was still a French colony?

Yes, it was during the war, 1943, and his father was a career soldier and the French army was stationed out of France once the Vichy government took over.