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circumspect after life on the seven Seas, but in an office of this sort the people and
the matters in which we were engaged were, if not always scintillating, invariably
of substantial human and intellectual interest. I felt that I had arrived in the right
place. Even the most important things worked out well, our younger son Andrew
arriving in 1977 to enhance the world with his wit and spirit.
A few months after I began learning my craft, however, I again re-learned
the impermanence of life. One day, at home, I received a call from an unknown
young lady, whom I found was Malcolm’s girlfriend. She recited a horrible tale;
during a trip to Houston, where his ship was moored, Malcolm had gone ashore
for the evening, and upon his return to the ship had been accosted by two young
men who asked him to hand over his money. He apparently had $25 on him, but
I knew him to be a parsimonious sort of fellow, and, characteristically, he refused
to comply. Having a black belt in judo, he was quite ready to take them on … so
they simply knifed him, and he died on the spot! His assailants were caught, and
I recall that his mother came over to Vancouver from UK to look after his affairs,
which were few enough. A tragic waste of a good person.

And other strange things happened. When Andrew graduated from
secondary school, his inamorata was a young lady whose father was of Czech
descent. As Andrew was the Master of Ceremonies at the year-end dinner and
gave the representative address to parents and teachers at its conclusion, we saw
little of him during the meal, but as we were on the same table as his girlfriend’s
parents, we necessarily engaged in chit-chat. Her father, a Czech Count (I was
not aware that the Czech Republic even had ranks of ennoblement) seemed not
to want to converse with us, the proletariat. So, I entered into a conversation with
his wife; at first, it was heavy going. But somehow the subject of Canberra came
up; “Oh,” said she, “I was on that ship in 1967 when the Arab-Israeli War started!”

“In first class?” (as if I didn’t know) I responded.
“Yes,” she said, “and we had to turn around and go around South Africa!”

It was not difficult to recall that on that voyage (as in the preceding Part 7),
there were two young girls, and even over the years, I could see that I was not
talking to Virginia. Suddenly the mood changed, and in fact improved beyond all
measure when the Count also discovered that David’s wife, Sabine, spoke fluent
Czech, her parents having arrived in Canada from Czechoslovakia some years
before. Except for the worrying effect of the Gothic makeup that the daughter
favoured, the evening turned out to be a very convivial event.

(One has to digress at this point, and that is because ‘coincidence’ plays such a
role in any life, even those not ‘well-lived’. As the average life encompasses many
thousands of chance encounters, that some strange coincidences would not
consequently arise would by itself be an astonishing coincidence. In particular,

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