Your name is Gordon Nimse and your retirement is spent holed up in a library cubicle pursuing your lifelong dream of writing a novel.

You have four sharpened pencils, a ream of unspoiled paper and enough tales to fill any number of boys' own adventures but where do you begin?

You consider detailing your rubbing shoulders with Gregory Peck, David Niven or Ernest Borgnine. No, that would be too ostentatious.

You contemplate taking your audience to the Birmingham street where you wrestled an escaped lion. No, that wouldn't get to who you really are.

How about committing to the page details of your "dangerously fond" relationship with a young nun, Sister Theresa, who was sent packing to India? No, that is more an amusing vignette than a novel.

In truth there was only one locale where Gordon Nimse, a former Odeon promotions manager from Ewell, would set the scenes that fleshed out his four books: Burma at the end of World War Two.

It was here that the British Army halted the Japanese advance towards India. Against a backdrop of silver rupees cascading from the skies and into the hands of Karen resistance fighters, the young Gordon joined the Military Police guarding a compound of prisoners.

Among the assorted murderers, rapists and British Paratroop deserters, he uncovered truths stranger than fiction. Now, aged 90, he has finally had the last of them published as his latest novel, the Interpreter, inspired by the star' prisoner.

His name was Joseph Stevens and he was a young dashing, seemingly mild Anglo-Burma awaiting court martial for "waging war against the King".

A natural linguist, Stevens had mastered Japanese, attracting the attention of Sergeant Major Ekesta, chief of the local Kempetai, Japan's equivalent to Germany's Gestapo.

Gordon, taking up the story, said: "Ekesta, a sadist with an overdeveloped sense of duty, arbitrarily appointed Stevens as his official interpreter.

"Consequently, Stevens found himself closely involved in many a brutal interrogation, not least when Ekesta hunted, tortured then executed two British officers.

"To his eventual cost, Stevens was also closely involved as an interpreter when Lance Corporal Washington, one of his former Army colleagues, was beaten by Ekesta."

Word reached a war crimes investigation team and Stevens wound up in the prison compound. Assumed guilty he endured a torrid time.

Gordon, though, found his interpreting invaluable and listened to Stevens' account of events, later taking the trouble to check it out.

The court was less understanding. Stevens' trump card - there being four witnesses to Washington's beating - was simply passed over. Worse, the court president was heard, in his cups, to say "Not tomorrow, old boy - we've got to do a traitor".

When the defending officer retired, Gordon filled the breach, placing himself at the centre of the intriguing events.

What he cannot have foreseen was just how entangled proceedings would become. The main problem was that virtually every witness needed an interpreter with Stevens, the natural polyglot, seizing on any loose translations.

When the log jam did break - a witness claimed that Washington had "shopped" Stevens but was too scared to withdraw the accusation - the evidence was disallowed as hearsay. The trial, it became painfully clear, had become Washington's word against Stevens'.

By these rules there could only be one winner. The interpreter was soon found guilty on one of four charges. His punishment: six months' hard labour.

Gordon was contented with the outcome since his assiduous work, discrediting several prosecution witnesses, had clearly saved Stevens from the firing squad.

How he fashioned these experiences into fiction is worth a story in itself. After searching fruitlessly for ghost writers Gordon wrote a triptych of novels, over two years in the early 1980s.

The works were published by Robert Hale but, with interest in World War Two waning, sales of Take What You Want, Colonel Baker's Dozen and The Cache were thin.

Disheartened, Gordon banished his Underwood typewriter and dismissed as impossible his ambition of becoming a recognised author. Only nostalgia led the nonagenarian to rediscover the manuscripts while on holiday two years ago. What followed is the stuff of lore, or at least editorial features.

"The old magic surged back after 20 years. So much so that I resolved to cap all three books with a story that had been simmering in my mind for years," Gordon says.

"So, out of the mothballs came the old Underwood, and, in due course, out came The Interpreter. It must be that World War II is back in favour for my dear Robert Hale jumped at it.

"The contract even included a proviso for future novels. The circumstances being what they are this will depend on which comes first: my last writes or my last rites."

Whichever, Gordon Nimse can rest assured of one important legacy: the proof that it need never be too late to chase your dreams.