‘The whistling on the theme tune? That’s Dickie Attenborough!’ Hayley Mills on Whistle Down the Wind

‘I’d just made two films in America.

Shooting on a Lancashire farm was very different.

There was mud everywhere – and we’d be eating dripping, jam butties and fried eggs in buns’ Whistle Down the Wind was originally a novel written by my mother, Mary Hayley Bell, about three children living on a farm in Sussex.

The children – loosely based on my sister Juliet, my brother Jonathan and myself – discover a man in their barn.

Thinking he’s Jesus, they decide to hide him and protect him from the adults because they don’t want the same thing to happen to him as before.

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