On 7 November 1955 William Alwyn's birthday was marked by a broadcast of his Festival March on the Home Service. He was 50 years old, and it was time to take stock. His diary, polished for publication in 1967, records his daily life for the twelve months following September 1955: he had already retired from his professorship at the RAM , he started composing his Third Symphony (1955–6). There were meetings with Roger Manvell and John Huntley about a major book on film music, and after much heart-searching he turned down the prestigious appointment of Head of Music for BBC Television - he could not face his “creative work reduced to a spare-time pursuit”. He undertook two major film scores to be completed within six weeks, one of which, Safari, he felt, “does not stimulate me to much enthusiasm, but difficult to reject as I shall need the money to pay for the time that must be devoted entirely to the symphony”.

Terence Young's film is an uneasily scripted, directed, and acted tale of a white Kenyan hunter, Duffield (Victor Mature), employed by the rich patron Brampton (Roland Culver) to hunt a famous lion. This familiar situation is complicated by the menace of the Mau-Mau and Duffield's determination to search out the murderer of his family. A romantic interest is provided by Brampton's fiancee Linda (Janet Leigh).

Alwyn's diary reveals the stress of composition. On 16 December he received the first editor's “lengths”, and he started work on his sketches. He found the blank manuscript paper “a reproach and a demand - an urgent and frightening reminder that the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra has been engaged for three whole days in a few weeks time to perform and record this non-existent music”. “Tense with anxiety and apprehension”, Alwyn exhausted himself in the first two days, “ideas forced out like drops from a squeezed lemon”. By 27 December he was working at the orchestration, and on 11 January, having almost finished, he took time off to look at his symphony again, before starting work the next day on The Black Tent.

A few days earlier, the stress of composing against the clock had brought worries of