with the Rev KEVIN LOGAN, Vicar of Christ Church, Accrington. . .

SEAN Connery was 007. My six-year-old son became 006 and my younger daughter 005. This was for real. No family game. The man called Q had made it so.

Q, you'll recall, is the boffin without whose gadgets James Bond can't possibly save the world. The original Q, the one on whom Ian Fleming based his character, was Charles Fraser Smith, and it is 32 years ago next month that this amazing man entered our lives.

Pre-war, he was a Christian missionary, bestowing agriculture and spiritual wisdom on the Moroccan royal family.

When war broke out, he caught the last English steamer out of Casablanca, and MI9 subsequently recruited him as supply officer, along the corridor from Fleming.

Charles enlisted 300 companies to hide compasses in buttons and secrete ink within POW-bound golf balls, enabling prisoners to forge escape documents.

His silk maps of Western Europe were plain handkerchiefs until a spy or POW spent a liquid penny on them.

My privilege was to ghost write his Secret Warriors book explaining how he supplied the new SAS, SOE and MI6.

We used his lifelong motto for our last chapter: Sans Dieu rein" -- without God nothing. No right. No wrong. No law. No order. Only the strongest or loudest rule, only might is right.

The universe, wrote Charles, is incomprehensible and man is a mere purposeless accident if there is no Creator.

This sane, practical saint fought the war of good against evil. The good could never idly sit by, he believed, without themselves becoming evil.