Guests of Chance
by
Book Details
About the Book
Guests of Chance is an account by Kay Sowerby of the three years that she and her husband spent travelling round the world.
They had many varied and interesting adventures which began when they left Liverpool in May 1934 bound for Brazil. They crossed the Andes from Patagonia into Chile on horseback. On the train they took from Chile to Bolivia they were woken to find it had become a troop train carrying Bolivian soldiers to and from the Chaco war and their passports were taken from them as it was suspected they might be spies. When their passports were eventually returned they continued through Peru from where they took a boat to New Orleans. Here they bought a car to travel round the United States before taking a freighter to Japan where, once again, they were held on suspicion of being spies. In China where they took a boat up the Yangtze river visits ashore could only be made under armed escort due to the Communist uprising. They finally arrived in Singapore from where they secured a passage for Australia on the square-rigger "Joseph Conrad". This voyage lasted several months during which time the ship called at many remote Pacific islands and on some of which the author was the first woman the natives had ever seen. In Auckland, New Zealand, they bought two bicycles on which they cycled round the country; in the southern island they cycled across the Haast Pass which flooded they day after they crossed. They spent five months in Tahiti before continuing on the return journey. In Persia they carried diplomatic mail from the consulate in Kerman to Shiraz. They finally returned home across the English Channel from Bruges in March 1937.
About the Author
The author was born in London in 1911 and educated at a convent in Belgium. She met her husband Benn Sowerby when she was working as a secretary for G. K. Chesterton and he and his partner John Cooper were publishers with an office in Little Essex Street, London. They married in 1930 and shortly after spent three years, 1934 to 1937, travelling round the after which they settled in Jamaica, where their only son, Richard, was born in 1945. In 1950 they left Jamaica to live in Jersey where they both taught at St. Michael's School from 1959 to 1963.