Cambridge Coincidences Collection

My mother was my father's second wife. He had been through a very bitter divorce during WW2, with the result that he had gained custody of my half-siblings, even though he was on active service. My father and mother married after the war and my brother and I arrived. Father's first wife remarried and moved abroad. Such was the bitterness that Father would brook no conversation about wife no.1, which of course made her super-fascinating and mysterious. As a teenager in the late 1960s I was hitchhiking on the continent. Outside Clermont Ferrand I was picked up by a delightful Englishwoman who turned out to be that woman - she who should never be mentioned! She had the only picture of my father without a beard that I had ever seen, in her handbag after all that time, along with a Derringer pistol! One of the things she told me was that she thought that if anything ever happened to my mother, she and my father would get back together. I told my father this tale; I think he was amused and interested, but was still unable to make a conversation. When she died my father said only 'thank god', and himself died shortly after.

At the age of 17 I was on holiday in Austria when I had a dream about somebody I'd known at school several years before and hadn't seen for a long time, that she got engaged. When I arrived home a day or two later I heard that this girl had indeed become engaged, the first among my age group that I knew of to do so. I was quite young for my age emotionally and prospective marriage would certainly not have been on my mind at the time, and I can't imagine what brought this into my head.

Several remarkable coincidences in recent years, the latest being in October 2009. My sister and I had a 9 day holiday on a dude ranch near Tucson, Arizona. Another British family was there at the same time as us but it was only on the drive to Tucson airport to return to Heathrow that we got talking to them, apart for occasioinal small talk during our time on the ranch. It was through that that we discovered that she lived near the town where my sister and I went to boarding school, almost 200 miles from home in the south-east. We then found that she also went to the same school and, on hearing this, my sister asked her her maiden name. When she told us, my sister immediately exclaimed "You were in my class!". That was 48 years ago.

I was on a train journey in the USA travelling from Manhattan to Boston on business. It must have been in the 1990s. I was reading a paperback thriller to pass the time. I had just read a passage which referred to the station at White Plains. On looking out of the window at that point as my train slowed down I was astonished to find we were drawing into White Plains station!