Roger Moore's 007 dodges crocodiles in tell-all Bond diary

Fire and thirteen hundred ferocious crocodiles made B-Day Forty-seven a day to remember, and I am lucky to have lost no more than the hair on my hands and arms. 

We shot the scene where Bond, encircled by crocodiles, escapes from the island near the shed where Kananga’s workers are packing heroin.

Bond surrounds the shed with benzene soaked rags and rubber, and lays a trail of chicken pieces from the swamp edge to the shed door. An alligator slithers from the swamp, follows the trail through a gate and inside the shed.

The next thing we see are workers tumbling over each other to get out of the door on the other side, but Bond has lit the rags and ringed the building in flames. 

To escape from the island, Bond makes a death-defying leap over the crocodile-infested water.

I am glad we got this shot in the can quickly because I must confess my "bottle" was twitching, which is a sure sign my adrenalin glands are working overtime. "Bottle", for those unfamiliar with rhyming slang, is short for "bottle and glass", which rhymes with what was twitching. 

When it came to flaming the rubber and rags around the building, our special effects had a field day. The shed was circled in a sheet of fire, and before I could dodge back, the licking flames had singed all the hair off my hands and arms. 

The whole thing went beautifully, and our star alligator, dubbed Daisy, crawled on cue through the gate and into the hut. Ross has had Daisy since she was eight, and she is now thirty.

From the moment he saw the Live and Let Die script, Ross trained her to walk up the bank at a certain spot, choosing a nice, shady place she fancied, and fed her there. When Daisy was familiar with her walk, the construction team then moved in and built the hut and gate at the end of it.

Daisy is quite a tough lady; she is the alligator who killed two crocodiles and duffed up three more, losing half her teeth in the conflict, which upset Ross because she is unlikely to grow any more. Personally, I am not at all perturbed. 

In the film, the crocodile swamp is not, of course, on San Monique, but in Louisiana. After Bond fires the shed, he belts away in a speedboat, which is why I was battling around the Louisiana bayous.

In typical topsy-turvy film fashion, we filmed Bond at the croc farm in Jamaica, jetting off in a boat to start the chase sequence we shot five weeks ago in Louisiana.

The terrain of the crocodile farm in Jamaica and the bayous are strikingly similar, except for one thing: the depth of the water.

The swamp water at its deepest is only two feet, so, today, instead of zooming off in my jet boat, I stuck in the mud and had to be pushed back to begin again. The work force dug channels where the water is sometimes only six inches deep, but overnight the mud sank back. 

The crocodiles and the boats are divided by stakes and very fine chicken wire through which eighty pairs of evil green eyes stare at us hungrily. I now know why it is called chicken wire; when you are on one side of it and the crocs are on the other, you are very chicken. 

Ross is supposed to clear the section where we are working each day, but he has an unnerving habit of suddenly splashing into the water, waving his pistol as he spies a maverick in the mud.

Ask Ross why a certain croc is loose, he says: "Oh, that’s dear old Daisy," or "That’s friendly Fred. I’ve had him thirty years and he’s alright."

Before we began, Ross moved ninety-six crocodiles from the area where we are working, and he says he knows the exact number that lived there.

But they burrow tunnels and stay submerged for months, so I hope Ross has his arithmetic right and there is not the odd one basking below. The crocs have this petrifying practice of lurking log-like all day, but moving imperceptibly nearer as the day wears on.

As we finished today and "Crackers" called: "It’s a wrap, fellows," a log came alive and moved rapidly towards the camera, leaving a wake like the Queen Mary as if he said to himself: "Christ! There goes my tea."