As I near the end of writing a book I usually become overwhelmed by a desire to just get it over with. After a time, I begin to wish I had added a chapter or two describing what happened to some of the more colourful actors or reflecting on the ironies revealed by the passage of time. But in this case, after I had sent the text off to my publisher, I began to have rather different regrets. I wished I had dwelt more on the contacts between the Poles and their British hosts, both military and, perhaps more interestingly, civilian. The book does cover this angle at some length, but with hindsight I began to feel that there was almost another book to be written on the subject.
