On this day eight years ago, the phone rang and a stranger's voice said, "This is Sheryl from Brisbane. We're across the river at Nelligen and would like to come and visit you."
"I don't know a Sheryl from Brisbane", I replied. "Yes, you do", the voice said. "I'm Sheryl. We worked together in the ANZ Bank in Canberra in 1967." OF COURSE! And so we met again after 48 years.
Back then Sheryl and I not only worked in the same bank but also lived in the same boarding-house about which I had written here. She had found my story on the internet some years ago and contacted me then by email but I had promptly forgotten. She and her husband Roy were campervanning up and down the East Coast and calling in on friends.
Sheryl had been more of a teenage crush than a friend to me as she was by far the best-looking sheila in the bank. I had been in Australia for just over a year and owned nothing more than the clothes I stood up in at a time when possessing a car was 95% of a young man's personality.
With 5% personality and a thick German accent I never stood a chance.
P.S. ... and to think that fifty-six years ago, I would've willingly given up on the idea of seeing so much more of the world, would've willingly stuck with my dull 9-to-5 job in the bank, would've had kids and a big mortgage on a small house with a white picket fence around it - as they say, "the full catastrophe ..." - IF SHE HAD ONLY SO MUCH AS SMILED AT ME!!! Are these just the faintest echoes of Somerset Maugham's "Red"?
