Happenchance

By Rodney Gascoyne

14: Back in London:

At the end of the flight I rented a car and drove to my new offices in the City of London. The office had agreed to let me stay in their entertainment apartment located in the Barbican Centre, closeby. I found this so cold and deserted an area outside of office hours that I moved out within a week and went to stay with my aunt till I could find a home. My mother had returned to London by then but did not have enough room for me too.

After some searching I found an apartment that was still under construction in Mill Hill and made an offer on it that they accepted. About twelve weeks after my return I had my own home again. Mill Hill was a good station on a main line train service direct into the City of London where I could walk to the office and much of the City from stations at that end of the line. Our stop was serviced both by the slow trains that stopped everywhere but also was the last main stop on the edge of London for a fast service that went straight to Kings Cross before stopping again. Most days I was just half an hour door to door in my journey in and out of work. Not bad for London.

One occupation I took up again was sailing, using the small club on Aldenham Reservoir, where I joined in races. The club is down the same road that leads to my old school,  Haberdashers' and the newer Elstree site at Aldenham House. I tried a new class here, the Illusion. It is a four metre copy of the boats used many years in the Americas Cup, being a very much scaled down replica and a single hander. You lay within the hull of this small keel yacht with not much more than your head visible. Laying on your back you then operate all the sails and gear, including a spinnaker sail and the rudder by means of a foot bar. An interesting alternative to dingy racing.  

I was given a company car and, even better, they gave me a credit card and picked up all the costs of gas and running the car. Although there was a tax hit on this benefit, it meant that I had no costs at all for motoring and that included all my private use of the car. One weekend in the winter when the weather was unusually warm and I wanted to gather some family details of my ancestors, I made a round trip drive from London to Cromarty and Inverness, a long trip I would not have taken at my own expense. I even spent some time at Culloden and viewed the site of that famous battle in 1745. One of the stones for the clans decimated there was for the Macintosh. 

My work in this office followed along the same lines as I had established in Canada and I started to introduce new ideas and techniques to their practices. They had a lot of large public company clients but the partner I worked with was trained in older techniques and favoured writing program code himself to accomplish some work whereas I preferred to use established software. My methods were newer and different and so it took some time to get him to understand and accept what I was doing. Over time I introduced many of my methods into the largest clients although certain audit partners did not appreciate what was achieved and so were reluctant to let me help. 

This was repeated again when a new, fully approved, office audit manual was created, to which I had a lot of input, and we spent a lot of time and money to write and print it, then educate all the staff in its use. Over the next eight months, though, little of real change was achieved because each audit partner, separately, chose not to implement the new standards on their own jobs. I was meant to sign off on many larger audits but never did get asked to sign one single set of papers. I got along well with the Professional Development managers, particularly during the drafting of the new audit manual, and took a hand in staff training for IT matters as well as for the manual. 

This was set against the background of 'Big Bang', the period when the institutions, and mainly the professional and financial services sectors, of the City of London were refashioned and opened to newer methods and workings that later proved so disastrous. When I had articled in the City many years before, a man's word was his bond and your reputation was your main asset. The newer ideas soon degenerated into sheer greed and a series of scandals and company failures followed, both in London and New York, and throughout the western world. Not surprising, I guess.

The firm entertained some rather elegant and ornate ideas. Partner / Manager conferences were held twice each year and were staged in either main Oxbridge colleges or major hotels. I became involved in a number of the in-house training courses and a few of these was housed in big seaside hotels. Some of this involved formal dining in the college Hall, with many courses and all the wines you could wish for or, once, an elaborate, lengthy, formal dinner in the panelled, old Great Hall of one of the Worshipful Livery companies of the City of London. There was also an annual office Ball in sumptuous surroundings. For these events I bought my own dinner suit that became well used then and, later, for many cruises that I took, supplemented by a red raw silk jacket that was particularly appropriate for the Caribbean and other tropical seas. I gave new life to many of my formal wear extras that I had used in the evenings on the many ships of the Union-Castle Line.

My daughter kept up a letter correspondence for the time I spent in London and I was able to arrange to fly her over each summer for a holiday. The first one we went to Ibiza and shared a self catering apartment. She was 16 that year and we spent much time together although she also made friends there and went off on her own at times. It was her first trip to southern Europe after a quick trip to Paris the year before when we had our last holiday from Regina. The next year we drove back to Paris and then around a circle to visit Luxembourg,  the vineyards of the Mossel and the Rhine, then on to Bonn, Amsterdam and back to the ferry across the English Channel. Those are still the only trips she has made in Europe. 

The last trip was meant to last for almost a year as she had graduated High School and wanted a year off with me in Europe. After about two months her mother phoned to say she was ill and needed her back immediately. I tried without luck to change her mind on this. The operation my wife claimed she needed was not then carried out for many months so the emergency was always a ploy in my view. I think she had been upset when she received glowing accounts of the stay in London, from our daughter, that she was enjoying herself, the work and friends she found there. 

I had said that I would stay in London so my daughter could choose to go to university there if she wanted. This shortened trip made it plain such plans were not now agreed upon and so my daughter decided, maybe because she saw she had no choice, that she would go to college in Regina. This released me from the need to stay in London as it also seemed unlikely my daughter could get back to London on any other occasions.

While in London I also managed to take a few other trips on my own. The firm gave me up to six weeks annual leave and so I found ways to make use of the time. My first solo trip was a sudden chance to take a cheap last minute flight to Gibraltar. There I rented a small car and made a circuit of the sights of Andalusia in Spain, visiting Cadiz, Seville, Cordoba, Grenada and Malaga before driving the old, rough coastal highway back to Gibraltar. I mainly visited the churches, palaces and sites from the days of the Moors or the period just after the Spanish had driven out the invaders. I took many photographs of the sites and this started a focus I used on most holidays after that of capturing images everywhere with a reasonable camera. My next trip was much longer and far more adventurous. I asked my partner and he agreed that I could save up extra unused holidays and take a really long one the next spring. I set off for five weeks in all, to fly round the world.

At a family gathering I mentioned my idea and that I wanted to mostly visit friends and family in Australia. Overhearing this my aunt asked if she could come and before I had really answered she was already saying she would accompany me. The plans I had were to go to Australia first followed by New Zealand and then California. I wanted to stay in Sydney with a school friend and his family who had emigrated there some years earlier. We had also had some contacts with the Macintosh family who visited London and so I wanted to catch up with them down under at the same time, just as earlier generations had done. The last two weeks was just a chance to utilize the fact I was already flying over New Zealand and the US to get home, for no extra cost. My aunt made her own arrangements for two tours to Ayers Rock and the Great Barrier Reef during the first two weeks and so we arranged to visit family in our last week in Sydney. 

The trip to Sydney was tiring as we stopped in Dubai and Singapore before arriving early morning in Sydney after twenty six hours of flying. My friends met us and we dropped my aunt at her hotel in Kings Cross from where she would take her tours. We then went to their home where they were putting me up. As well as local trips with them and a quick trip to the offices of the local associates of my London office firm, I had purchased  a ticket in London with East West Airlines allowing me to travel all over Australia with their flights for ten days. I went to Ayers Rock myself where I accidentally bumped into my aunt, as well as Tasmania, Melbourne and Brisbane. I trusted to find hotels on arrival in most of those centres and the visits worked very well. The weekends I spent with my friends as we had not met for about nine years. 

During the shared, family week we had managed to go to Canberra and a property further south in the Snowy Mountains with a family couple from Sydney in their car. The spread was owned and run by family members, where they ran thousands of sheep and hundreds of cattle. They showed us sheep shearing. The Macintoshes also arranged to hold a family gathering at "Lindsay" on Darling Point, and received permission from the National Trust who then owned the building. There were about thirty members of the family, nearly all from Sydney, who attended as well as my aunt and I. It was a sunny and cheerful afternoon and an opportunity to be at that house and, while on the way back from Canberra, "Laurel Park" also and see the houses my great great grandfather had owned. We had many family photographs from his times of those houses and the family then living in them. 

After the three weeks were up we said goodbye to the family and friends and with some reluctance we set off for Christchurch. We had fixed up from Sydney to take flights south to Mount Cook and then Queenstown the day after our arrival. At the airport on leaving to go south, we also managed to get the last two seats on a local tourist flight from Queenstown to Milford Sound, a large and beautiful fjord on the west coast of the South Island. Although all these flights were a bit hair raising it was an experience not to have missed. The next day after spending some time looking around Christchurch we set off by train for Picton and the ferry to Wellington on the North Island. Here we had booked a rental car that we would use to drive up to Auckland, via Rotarua. On arrival in Auckland we had three days in all to see the local attractions and sights before our late afternoon flight to Los Angeles. Although I had enjoyed our stay in New Zealand, it somehow failed to live up to my expectations.

Another rental car awaiting us here on one of the longest days in my life. It was Easter Sunday in Auckland and it was still Easter Sunday in LA when we landed, as we had crossed the date line in flight. Then we drove up to Las Vegas under the delusion that those cities were not too far apart. We did not arrive until near to ten O'clock but had to drive round to see the lights before going to bed as this was our only night there. The next morning  we booked to take a flight over Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon and this trip was a wonderful experience too although by now I was feeling weary of small planes. We even landed at South Rim because they wanted to change planes for our trip back to Las Vegas. From here we got back in the car and made a circle of California, going to Yosemite National Park, Sacramento, San Francisco, Carmel and down the coast to San Simion before returning to LA and the final flight back to London. A fun trip in all!

At work in London I also made some office trips to Europe, including an educational course, a public IT audit conference, another conference amongst our associates firms and later a teaching trip to Dusseldorf and Copenhagen to help those offices learn how to use IDEA, a Canadian software audit tool for running CAATs that I had been working with for some time. The office's use of IDEA stemmed from a visit the Canadian Institute, its developer, had made to the English Institute in London. I involved the firm in a scheme to bring the software to Europe and later helped the agent who headed up the process. With my help he set up agencies in a number of European and other countries who were our associate firms. 

It was to assist them in this as well as using the software for their own audits, that created the need to make the last European tour. My first visit to Dusseldorf was the firm's European  IT Audit conference and we were royally hosted, including a private dinner in an upscale restaurant. One notable event was the serving of the first course - many waiters came into the private room, each carrying one plate with a domed, silver cover, for each of us. They then ceremoniously unveiled our plates at the same time, to show a small cube of toast. After the laughter and applause died down we were then served with the soup that was poured over the cube. It was a memorable evening and I repeated another happy visit to the city to train their own office staff, a year later.

My time back in London was more of a forced stay and I did not grow reattached to living in England nor to London itself. I had already left it once to get away from the overcrowding and the nightmare of travelling to work. Now that my daughter had decided to go to college in Regina I felt released from the need to have to stay. Just to make certain, I took one last holiday, this time back to Toronto in the fall of 1988, to see if I wanted to return there, as Regina was not a possibility if I did return to Canada, as I felt driven. That holiday went well and I even visited the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Toronto (CICA) to renew my friendships with their staff, after meeting and hosting them in London over the introduction of IDEA to Europe. I liked the city and felt comfortable about returning to live there, rather than staying in London. On my return I set about making arrangements to move to Canada for the second time in my life. I had by now given up, too, the chances that the marriage could be salvaged, so I now just needed to satisfy myself. 

As I maintained contact with a few other managers, back in London, I later became aware of difficulties the firm had after I left and to which I could have become a victim. By early 1991 they had lost a few of the really large audits as a result of a change in attitude by large public companies who believed they needed to be seen to be audited by one of the big five firms. This, together with a bad economic recession, that hit London as well as other major centres around the world, led to the need to seriously reduce their staff. The international association of accountants of which they were a major leader, also found themselves under pressure and this too collapsed when the US member left to join another group. To cope with all this the UK firm underwent a major contraction of staff and many of the higher paid London Office technical and development staff were laid off. They are in another international group now but a mere shadow of the firm I knew.