When Paul was filming Help! in the spring of 1965, the fans gathered outside the front door in such a mob that Dr Asher devised an escape route out of the back of the building from Paul's attic room. After donning his boiler suit, he climbed out of the window and reconnoitred the route himself, tapping on the windows of the startled residents. When the occupants opened their windows to him, he explained, in his impeccable upper-class accent, that he had a chap staying with him who needed a discreet method of ingress and egress to his premises and would it be all right if he occasionally climbed across their roof? Amazingly they all agreed, and Paul was able to slip out and into Browning Mews behind Wimpole Street and away. Dr Asher enjoyed it all enormously. PAUL: I used to go out of the window of my garret bedroom, on to a little parapet. You had to be pretty careful, it wasn't that wide, it was only like a foot or so wide, so you had to have something of a head for heights. You'd go along to the right, which was to the next house in Wimpole Street, number 56, and there was a colonel living there, an old ex-army gentleman. He had this little top-floor flat, and he was very charming, it was quite amazing going through. 'Uh! Coming through, Colonel!' 'Oh, oh, okay, hush-hush and all that!' and he'd see me into the lift and I'd go right downstairs to the basement of that house. There was a young couple living down there and they'd see me out through their kitchen and into the garage. I remember I bought them a fridge later on to thank them; I'd noticed they hadn't got a fridge during a conversation with them. The couple lived above the old stable at 10 Browning Mews and Paul would leave through a street door set between the two garage doors on the cobbled mews. 'I'd do a left and then I'd be through the archway into New Cavendish Street. I'd have to watch that the fans hadn't noticed, they were just around the corner, then I'd just run down the road. It's quite funny to think now of some of the people I met doing that.'
In Barry Miles’ Many Years From Now (1997).
