The poet Rupert Brooke said of Samoa: "You lie on a mat in a cool Samoan hut, and look out on the white sand under the high palms, and gentle sea, and the black line of the reef a mile out, and moonlight over everything ...
And then among it all are the loveliest people in the world, moving and dancing like gods and goddesses, very quietly and mysteriously, and utterly content. It is sheer beauty so pure it is difficult to breathe it in."
To me, in 1978, Samoa was that place of sheer beauty. It was a beautiful life in a beautiful country, and I revelled in the new challenge of setting up the accounting system for the newly-formed PACIFIC FORUM LINE ...
... until that fateful phone call from Price Waterhouse Associates in Hong Kong, "Are you interested in another assignment in Malaysia?" Of course I was, and so I packed up once again and was off to Penang.
"But if ever you miss me, suddenly, one day, ... you'll know that I've got sick for the full moon on these little thatched roofs, and the palms against the morning, and the Samoan boys and girls diving thirty feet into a green sea or a deep mountain pool under a waterfall -- and that I've gone back." So wrote Rupert Brooke but, of course, I never could!
