Jon Lys Turner: I break Dickie’s work into three eras; his illustrations, his children's books, and at the end, the Bond era. Which was your favourite?

James Birch: Well, I suppose it’s the James Bond era. When my parents had a holiday home in Fingringhoe, across the river from Wivenhoe [where Dickie and Denis lived], a new Bond book would come out – The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), Thunderball (1961), You Only Live Twice (1964) – and Dickie would always bring a copy of the book over and give one to my parents and one to me.

JLT: How lovely. Have you still got them?

JB: I have. The covers were kind of surreal, and they were really what turned me on to surrealism.

My sister sort of fell in love with Dickie because he was so kind to her. He would bring over posters for bookshops and give them to her. And he would take her out to operas, to restaurants, to galleries, to the Colony Room.

I found both Dickie and Denis incredibly kind, enthusiastic and fun to be with. They were always ready to give up being the adults and play - to have pillow fights with me on their shoulders at age five or six.

JLT: So many people are coming forward with stories about things Dickie had done for people since the show opened, saying he really went out of his way for them, that he mentored them. It’s amazing.

Of course, Dickie and Denis are always remembered for their hell raising which, in anecdotes, becomes funny - though in reality it could be absolutely horrible.

I remember they would carry Francis [Bacon] into parties like a ventriloquist dummy with his arms around their shoulders. Once, when we went to the White Tower, Francis was in a particularly waspish mood. He had a few snipes at me because I wasn't going to go on holiday with the three of them – they were planning a holiday in France and had been including me in the ‘we’ – and Francis suddenly looked across the table said, ‘She's not coming.’

He was getting more and more pissed and I remember he had £2000 in £50 notes. He wanted more wine and he just wasn’t getting the waiter’s attention, so he threw the empty wine bottle at him. Then whole evening just deteriorated. Francis got up, put his hands on a trellis that went in between the tables, and then fell into it, landing on the table of the people next door. They were suitably upset, but they weren't above having £50 each put into their hands.

JB: I went with Francis once to The Golden Lion, the pub in Soho across from the French. The was a post-skinhead who had a tattoo around his neck saying ‘Tear round here’. Francis said to him, ‘Have you got any other tattoos?’, and he said ‘Yes, I’ve got one on my cock’. So Francis said, ‘Show it to me’, whereupon the guy shows it to him and he gave him 50 quid!

JLT: 50 quid was quite easily earned wasn't it!

Let’s talk about The Fly. It was a best seller in 1965, and Dickie at this point wanted to give up painting and illustration and become a writer. His own agent described it as ‘a perfectly disgusting concoction.’ Have you read it?

JB: I read it many years ago but I need to read it again. I do remember there were some quite controversial pieces in it.

JLT: Well, the whole concept of the fly - at first it lands on a condom outside in a filthy puddle and is eating away on that. Then it flies through an office window and lands on the mouthpiece of a telephone as the secretary is talking into it… And it just goes downhill from there! It’s of an era when it was deliberately shocking. It took years to produce and the author Angus Wilson came in and finished it off for him. So many people said, this is disgusting, you'll never get this in print. But he did, and it was a best seller! Number five in 1965 in the UK charts.

JB: I didn't know that, wow.

JLT: The thing that I take from Dickie is observations. He taught me about really appreciating details. What is it that makes us form a decision about somebody else? What little details do we see? What makes that person different? He used to keep books of these observations. I can sometimes make myself go to sleep by asking myself, what tiny thing did I see today?

JB: You do see that in his paintings. The attention to detail is unbelievable. What’s very odd about the cover of The Fly is that the eye is upside down.

JLT: Yes! While he was drawing it, Denis walked past and said, ‘You want to do the other way around, it would be much more impressive’. You can imagine with those two that that was like a red rag to a bull. The eye coming through the wooden hole on the cover on For Your Eyes Only was also Denis's idea.

In one interview Dickie said, the fly is everything about life. That horrible thing that just doesn't go away. It attacks your time. It's always there. But in actual fact, when you look at it really close up, it’s just beautiful. The original fly is in the show – in a box with a pin through it – the one he looked at through a magnifying glass for the Bond covers and other things. And it’s the star of the show!