Looking back over the decades and the miles I feel that I have very little cause for complaint. Things might not always have been for the best in the best of all possible worlds but they could have been a damn sight worse. And my earlier life, at least, there has be the element of unpredictability that helped to make things interesting. I recall a rather amusing incident from my youth, shortly after my first, round-the-world-a-couple-or-three-times in Cape St. Andrew. I was home on leave. It was during what passes for summer in England. With a couple of friends I went to spend the day at Great Yarmouth, a seaside resort on the east coast. On the beach there was the tent of a gipsy fortune teller. I had my fortune told. The lady assured me that I should never travel. Not so oddly I did not believe her prognostications. But if she had told me that I should finish up as an Australian shipmaster and an internationally known science fiction writer I should have been incredulous.
It would have been much neater if my second wife had been to see her fortune teller at exactly the same time, but it must have been quite a few years later. She, a girl raised in an entirely land-locked country, was told that she would one day marry a sea captain . . .
I’m glad that the second fortune teller—her fortune teller—was right. Apart from anything else, three of the four Ditmars that I have been awarded should really have gone to Susan.
The other one should have gone to Grimes.
Or Bligh.
* * *
Editor’s note: A few years after this memoir was written and published in Algol, A. Bertram Chandler was the Writer Guest of Honor at the 1982 World Science Fiction Convention, held in Chicago that year. Captain Chandler died on June 6, 1984.
—Hank Davis
Gateway to Never (John Grimes) Page 63