Everyone went to the same school as someone famous. In my case it’s Spider-Man, Tom Holland, who joined my former school about 30 years after I left. Back in the mid-1970s, the most famous old boy was another superhero, Major Pat Reid, who’d been captured by the Germans during the war and briefly imprisoned in Colditz. His bestselling memoir popularised the notorious jail and led to a TV series, an Action Man model and various other spin-offs. He was known as the only man to have escaped from the Nazis and turned it into a board game.

He showed up on sports day, in July 1975, to give us a pep talk and hand out prizes to the school’s top athletes. I wasn’t among them, of course. My great days as a sportsman lay ahead of me. They still do, in fact. For us boys, it was a thrill to hear from this legendary veteran. He was the genuine article. He’d risked his life in a real war and come through unscathed. His record made him far more glamorous and impressive than James Bond, who was regarded as a womanising poseur by anyone who’d worn the uniform between 1939 and 1945. We hoped that Major Reid would delve into his memory and recount to us in graphic detail how he fought his way out of Colditz by slitting the throats of several stormtroopers before shinning down the walls with a rope made out of knotted........

© The Spectator