God knows what the customs thought when so many sportsmen and hunters started coming through. It was as if caribou had become the blight of Jersey, and stags were stampeding around on Guernsey. They just loved tomatoes, I could have told them if they’d cared to ask. I made six trips altogether, for a hundred-pound bonus at the end of each, and soon I had nearly a couple of thousand in the bank. We took a risk, the one condition being that if we were caught we were to say nothing more than that it was our first time and that we were on our own. We had various bits of paper to suggest it, and proof of a bank account in the Channel Islands with ten quid on deposit. It was worked out so that nothing could be traced to the Big Firm itself. One morning Moggerhanger called me in and said he wanted me to go to the New World in a couple of days. ‘Where’s that?’ I asked. ‘You’ll do,’ he said when he had stopped laughing. ‘It’s a special mission to Toronto, and I want somebody with a head on his shoulders.’ I never anguished over making a decision, in the hope that one day I would make the right one.
