Prankster and hero - the man who kept Colditz laughing

Last week, Memories profiled the work of Rayleigh film-maker Dave Windle , who has set out to create a video archive of the survivors of Colditz - the supposedly escape-proof World War Two castle near Leipzig that housed prisoners-of-war who had managed to escape from other camps.

If there were a medal for most remarkable Colditz survivor, then Squadron Leader Tunstall would be a strong candidate. His story in Colditz has been told in no less than 23 separate books. But Tunstall, among his other skills, is a polished raconteur. For vividness and entertainment value, nothing beats watching him tell his own story to camera.

Today, Tunstall lives in an idyllic part of South Africa, where Dave Windle visited him to make a four-hour filmed record of his reminiscences. Mouth-watering views of sun-swathed gardens and mountains are visible in the background as the old adventurer talks. But Tunstall's origins aren't South African. He is south Essex born and bred. The film is a record and tribute by one Essex man to another.

Two statistics from Tunstall's time in Colditz speak volumes. He broke the record for number of days in solitary confinement, 416, and for the number of courts martial, five. He recounts these figures as a badge of honour.

Tunstall's bomber crash landed early in the war on a Dutch Island. He was arrested by a possee of German soldiers in line abreast. Their commander uttered the immortal line: "For you, the war is over." "Well it damn well wasn't over," snorts Tunstall. "Not only was my war not over. As far as I was concerned, a different type of war had just started."

Tunstall and his fellow RAF officers had been coached before the war by A J Evans, a celebrated escaper of the First World War. Evans drove home the message that a British warrior's duties to the war effort did not cease when he became a POW. "Your first duty was to try to escape," says Tunstall. "Your second duty was to be as big a bloody nuisance as possible to enemy. Third, it was a good idea to set up some sort of code with person might likely to write to if you became a prisoner. I devised a code with my fiance."

Tunstall is perhaps proudest of the information that he was able to convey using this and other methods. MI9, the branch of the intelligence service that monitored prison camps, recommended him for an honour because of this work.

Yet Tunstall notes with some regret: "I have gone down in history as the arch German baiter the chap who is always causing trouble and raising lots of laughter which was esential for our morale. I seemed to have a knack for it, because I'm naturally rather naughty I suppose. But I'm sorry for that reputation, rather than being remembered for my escaping and getting intelligence messages home."

Among his most famous exploits was the feat of water bombing the German officers from a locked room above the courtyard. "I was a great water bomber, a very good shot," Tunstall says with some pride. Down below, the Germans were holding a muster of prisoners, and attempting to create order. Tunstall succeeded in landing a bomb directly on the card table where the papers lay. He also soaked the German officer in charge, who took cover.

All this created great hilarity and raised morale no end. But there was a serious end in view. Two other Colditz inmate had just escaped. By creating chaos for an extra half hour, the pranks extended the time before their escape was discovered. "The malarkeys I did get up to were part of my brief to be as big a nuisance as possible to the enemy," says Tunstall.

On another occasion, Tunstall and a crack team succeeded in spiriting away a ladder - something that would clearly be useful in an escape attempt. The ladder, propped up against a wall, was protected by a guard, but he was distracted. Tunstall recalls: "We tried to get the ladder up a narrow staircase, but it wouldn't fit. So we cut four feet off the end." The four-foot section was then propped back up against the wall. When the German guard finally turned round, he found that the ladder had "shrunk". "Poltegeists!!" he groaned.

The prisoners liked to taunt the German guards with word jokes as well as practical ones. Typical was the time that Tunstall managed to set fire to a pile of wood shavings, used as mattress fillings. "Of course, there was panic," he recalls. "Germans running around, fire engines." The prisoners, of course, didn't waste the chance to steal tools from the fire-engine. "Arson!" the Germans cried. "No, just ars'n around," came the response.

PETER Tunstall's adventures wereen't confined to his exploits within the walls of Colditz Castle. They began in childhood and continued long after the war.

Born in Chadwell St Mary to a schoolmaster father in 1918, Tunstall early acquired a fascination for flying, nurtured by the exploits of World War One airmen. "It didn't matter if their names were ickey or Manfred, German or Britain, they were just my heroes," he says.

He learnt to fly while he was still at school, gaining his first experience in the fields around the family home in Orsett. His recalls that his first aircraft was "a clapped out wooden glider had rats nesting in it."

Flying lessons then cost 30 shilling an hour, or two pounds for dual instruction. Tunstall found an easy way to pay for these lessons. He would shoot rabbits on a local farm owned by his brother-in-law, skin, gut and sell them to a local butcher. "It didn't take many rabbits really to get an hour's flying," he says.

Narrow scrapes and near death experiences too numerous to mention have never put Pete Tunstall off flying. His adventures as a pilot continued after the war, when he flew planes in Africa for the notorous president Idi Amin.

Retired from flying, inhis own words he "scouted around for something to fill the time." He became a professional actor, and wrote and produced a 39 episode radio series called Captive Eagles.

He now lives in some comfort in South Africa - but his home is inside an enclosed compound surrounded by security systems. His ability to see the humour in any situation has not deserted him. "I've escaped Colditz, only to end up with razor wire all round me again," Squadron Leader Tunstall says.

DAVE Windle's fiilm about Squadron Leader Peter Tunstall, is cleverly titled Escape Into Colditz - it was Tunstall's record as an escape artiste extraordinaire that caused him to end up in the medieval castle. There is only space on this page to record a handful of the extraordinary and bizarre anecdotes that fill this DVD. On more thanone occasion, Tunstall came close to stealing a Geman aircraft. Only bad luck scotched him.

The film runs for 3hr 50mins. It consists of one man's reminiscences, and stills of the people, places and aircraft that he describes, along with a few of Peter Tunstall's own cartoons. If this sounds like hard work to watch, it isn't. The hours fly by like a Red Arrows display.

Tunstall's verve as a narrator and humorist, and the sheer compulsion of the story he tells make this true-life adventure more gripping than even the best piece of war fiction. Above all, though, the film fulfils Dave Windle's mission to set down the unembellished facts about Colditz, stripping away the tall stories and factual inaccuracies that have crept in over 65 years.

Peter Tunstall enters fully into the spirit of this, perhaps his last, adventure. He takes immense care to get the facts exactly right, even adding a section of corrections at the end of the film. At the end, you realise that the facts of Colditz don't need any embellishment. They are quite extraordinary enough in their own right.

At first sight, Tunstall comes across as a fully paid-up member of the gung-ho brigade. As the film progresses, however, he steadily emerges as a far more thoughtful and sensitive man. In the end, this film emerges as a testimony to the futility and waste of war, from someone who knows what he is talking about. Behind the adventures at Colditz lay a different story. Tunstall knew men who "lost their marbles" as he puts it. He recalls having to mount suicide watch on one prisoner, desperate to commit suicide.

In the end, Coldtz Castle took it revenge on Peter Tunstall. As he says: "I suppose you couldn't spend four hundred and sixteen days in solitary confinement and not be affected." .

Much of the final period, when peace and liberation were in sight, Colditz remains blurred in his memory. He suddenly found himself unable to follow straightforward conversations. He visited the camp doctor, and was told, simply, to get a grip on himself. Stiff upper lip principles ruled.

With little in the way of touch-feely assistance from the medical profession, Tunstall work out his own way to survive in solitary. His account is a remarkable testimony, from a man of action, guns and machines, about the quieter powers of the mind.

The formula was simple. "I wasn't there," he says. "I got out. I just took off." Shutting his eyes, he would take his thoughts far from the prison cell, back to England. "I would hold long conversations with real people, with people I invented, with my fiance, with old friends," he recalls. Suddenly, he would hear the bolts of the prison door being drawn. It was time for his meal of slop. "The day had flown by," he says.