Exactly how Dahl stumbled into this world is not entirely clear. His sister Alfhild, whose love of a good story often rivalled her brother’s, believed Roald’s links with espionage began shortly after he was invalided back to England in 1941 – he had been flying out to join his RAF squadron and had made an emergency landing in the Egyptian desert, narrowly escaping with his life. Alfhild described how Roald “got in with a lot of funny people” in the winter of 1941. She recounted a convoluted tale about an Englishman and his half-German, half-Japanese wife whom Roald met on the boat back home. In London, Alf and her sister Else fell in with the couple’s social circle, but began to suspect that they might be spies for the Vichy French. Alf shared her suspicions with Roald, who promptly had them reported to the authorities. Subsequently, she believed her brother had been “followed and watched” by Secret Servicemen before he was eventually sent for training somewhere on the outskirts of London. Dahl himself, however, never corroborated this story, and the official records suggest that he had little contact with the intelligence world until some months after he arrived in Washington.