“Then the Sergeant made a fire out of sticks and began cooking supper for his men. He was making rice in an enormous pot, and while the rice was boiling, he took from the truck a great stem of bananas and started snapping them off the stem one by one and peeling the and slicing them up and dropping the slices into the pot of rice. When the food was ready, each askari produced his own tin plate and spoon and the Sergeant dished out large portions with a ladle. Up to then I hadn’t thought about my own food and I certainly had not brought anything with me. Watching the men eat made me hungry. ‘Do you think I could have a little of that, please?’ I said to the Sergeant.

‘Yes, bwana,’ he said. ‘Have you got a plate?’

‘No,’ I said. So he found me a tin plate and a spoon and gave me a huge helping. It was absolutely delicious. The rice was unhusked and brown and the grains did not stick together. The slices of banana were hot and sweet and in some way they oiled the rice, as butter would. It was the best rice dish I had ever tasted and I ate it all and felt good and forgot about the Germans.”

California is a queer place - in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific…. It’s sort of crazy-sensible. Just the moment: hardly as far ahead as carpe diem.

We’re always lucky,” I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.

When I meet Iris Apfel, the American interior designer and style maverick who has lately become a star, the first thing I notice are the glasses. They are the most enormous spectacles imaginable, round and black-rimmed with lenses so thick she looks as if she is peering through two giant magnifying glasses, like the designer Edna E Mode in The Incredibles. ‘I like them big, big!’ she tells me. ‘The bigger to see you with.’