Cyclone Pam

The news of the cyclone revived memories of the storm that hit Vila a few days after my wife and I arrived to work there in 1972. We'd been invited to my new boss's place (he was the manager of Burns Philp Trustee Company) for dinner on the Tuesday night, and the storm hit that morning. Well, we had lived through hurricanes in the Bahamas, and I'd encountered a few when I was at boarding school in Brisbane, and we reckoned that a bit of a blow wasn't enough to cancel the engagement. Of course the house was dark when we got there - but, you know, they would have torches and we could all have a friendly beer while the wind roared outside.

Hmm. Not really. The boss and his wife were from Sydney, and were scared absolutely witless: thought we were mindless idiots to have driven through the rain, and ordered us to go home and hide under the bed like normal people. Not a promising start to my working relationship! As it happened, the boss cracked under pressure ten days later - ripped the phone out of the wall because he couldn't get a connection, and caught the next plane back home.

I had better say that our hurricane was a mild one, and nobody died. Unlike this latest one, which warrants my sincere sympathy.