Cambridge Coincidences Collection

I was at Birmingham University between 1949 and 1952. In my second year I moved into new digs in the company of three other undergraduates these though being in their first year. One of them was from my old school and a friend of mine. The other two were strangers and both from Lancashire. One of these lads(I'll call him Tom Bassett) kept a photograph of a pretty young lady(I'll call her Joan) on his bedside locker. We gathered that Joan was from Tom's home town and was his current girl friend. He regularly received letters from Joan but was always slow to reply and we all decided from this and various comments he made that she was very keen on Tom though his feelings were cooler. Tom failed his first year and left the university. I went on to graduate in June 1952 and in the December of 1952 was called up to the RAF on National service. In early 1953, after completing square bashing I was posted to Bad Eilsen Air Traffic Control Centre in north Germany. From memory I had been there for about a year when a new airman, fresh from square bashing in the UK joined our office early in 1954 and was allocated a bed in my billet, a room that accomodated four people.

Sorry quite an involved one but here goes. I was born in 1960 in a tiny hamlet in the Chilterns called Dunsmore and lived there for the first 21 years of my life. I had horses and would ride out every day when I could. On to 1995 I was married with two sons and living in Horrabridge in West Devon. I had no horses but rode and worked at a yard in Lydford (about 15 miles away) for two days a week. We were moving and I told Ruth who was the head girl that I would be late the following Friday as I was moving. She asked where and I said it was a tiny hamlet in the Tamar valley which no-one had heard of called Townlake. She laughed and said that she lived in the pub in Horsebridge just down the hill from there - this was no nearer to Lydford so we thought what a coincidence. When we moved to Townlake we had a much larger house and my in-laws (who had lived in Amersham when Neil and I got together) gave us a coffee table they did not want any more - a present happily received. The following year I asked Ruth to house sit for us as we were going away.

My first stepfather was called Leonard Percy Williams. When we lived in at 59 Westleigh Avenue in Leigh-on-Sea his bank, National Povincial sent him a statement for another customer by mistake, Leonard Pacey Williams. The follow up to this which really creeped me out was in 1966. Leo had died in Ghana in I think 1957, my mother had moved to Putney in SW London. She later remarried and moved to Scotland and I bought her little town house in Putney. Our phone number was Putney 5899. We moved in the day England beat Portugal in the semi-final of the World Cup. A few months later the phone rings. I answer. "Can I speak to Leo Williams" "I'm afraid he is dead" "Oh my God when was that?" "In 1957 in Accra." "He can't have - I spoke to him yesterday" "What Leo Williams do you mean?" "Leo Williams of Westleigh Avenue" "Yes that was him." Long pause as penny drops. "What number did you dial?" "Putney 5898" "Did you mean Westleigh Avenue, Putney?" "Yeesss" "We were at Westleigh Avenue, Leigh-on-Sea" "Thank God.

At Nottingham University Geography Department at the close of the Summer term 1953, we were discussing plans for the holiday. A friend and I were cycling through northern France and Merick Poznansky ( recently retired Professor of Archaeology University Los Angeles) announced that he was on a study course at the Sorbonne. We cycled through France to Vezeley on the Massif Central and camped in the garden of a friend of our school french master; an amateur archaeologist. He took us to a site investigating a Mousterian settlement and we were invited to see a display approached by a tunnel. Leading the crawl out of the tunnel I was confronted by someone crawling in and came nose to nose with Merrick Poznansky. Speaking no French he was very pleased to see us as he was very lonely.