There we were in downtown Nowra, dodging the 40-degree heat by rushing from one air-conditioned shop to the next with the sounds of "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas" following us, when I spotted the cause of all my juvenile wet dreams, a Karmann Ghia, and a sporty red one at that!
This sports version of a Volkswagen was as rare as a Bugatti and as expensive as a Porsche and was, of course, totally out of my reach as a young 18-year-old who badly needed wheels to be able to follow his mobile office as paymaster of a column of some two hundred workers who were building the "Autobahn" from Hannover to Bremen.
Instead, being only barely legal to obtain a "Führerschein", I bought with borrowed money guaranteed by my older sister a bashed-up FIAT 500. It promptly and irreparably broke down and left me with no car but a loan which I kept paying off until I left for Australia in 1965. It also left me with a bad taste in my mouth and I didn't go near another car until I got my first company-supplied car on the island of Bougainville in 1972.
Today, I could afford any kind of car, however sporty and however red, but with receding hair and an expanding waistline I no longer fit into the picture; in fact, this one Padma took of me in Nowra will be the last.
And that's about all that I can say about our short mini-holiday in Nowra. The surgeon was happy with the way the incision was healing up and presented me with a histopatholgy report which confirmed that the melanocytic lesion had been completely removed. One more month of daily bandaging with Fixomull and I should be running marathons again.
