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

‘Just a fella’ … Hayley Mills and Alan Bates in the 1961 film Whistle Down the Wind. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

Hayley Mills, played Kathy Bostock

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.