Tom Stoppard

And I'm constantly coming up against students, for example, who believe that I've written the play in a sort of attempt to disguise what I'm really writing about.

And I know what they mean, because perhaps on some level you're doing that.

But it's not, honestly, it's not really the way that writers think, I don't believe.

Yes, I mean, in the sort of general phrase, the gathering war, you know.

a lot of people left what looked like, what looked as though it might turn into a theater of war.

And we went to Singapore, which was ironic because we got there in time for Pearl Harbor and the Japanese invasion.

And we got, women and children went on boats.

My mother tells me that our boat was supposed to go to Australia, but for some reason or other, while we were out at sea, it turned around and went to India.

And that's how I ended up there.

That's right, and he died in Singapore.

And after the war, when we were in India, my mother remarried an Englishman whose name I now have.

Exactly.

I remember, I think I remember being driven to the boat in Singapore, and I had a sense that there was some kind of air raid, and I certainly remember a Japanese Zero airplane with its nose in the ground, just sort of where it had crashed.

I remember being in the air raid shelters.

Everybody in my generation remembers the smell of sandbags.

But in India, I'm afraid that protected by the innocence of childhood, I never felt unhappy or worried or nervous.

I mean, obviously, I must have done sometimes, but in a general way, I look on India as being a lost domain of childhood happiness.

Yeah, when I was asked to write that screenplay, they didn't know that my own childhood wasn't that different from young Jim's.

Was he called Jim?

Yes.