Carolyn Buckley
I worked for a director at Wasey’s, I thought he was quite old but in fact, he was only 46 and his wife was very sick with MS. He was not a very happy man. One day he asked me if I would take this young secretary out for lunch and try to instill in her the importance of having a professional demeanor in an agency such as ours. She apparently spent hours on the phone and her idea of filing was to open a filing cabinet drawer and dump it all in. So I took her out to Hyde Park for a brown bag lunch and tried to advise her. She was all frothy and blond and pretty: and totally unsuited to secretarial work. Bill and I went on vacation and when we got back, she was gone. I had no forwarding address for her and completely lost touch.
In 1974 I moved to Rome in the vague hopes that some distance between Bill and me might help our marriage. There was also the small fact that I was having an affair with a striking Alitalia airline pilot. This would come to a very sudden end when he confessed that he was married with three children.
I had been in Rome a few weeks and had a dreadful cold but needed to go to Banco di Roma to get money that Bill had sent. The exchange rate at that time for lire from yen was very advantageous. Tokyo was so expensive that it seemed I lived on nothing. I was standing in line and my gaze happened to wander to the next queue and I noticed a blond woman in the line next to me whom I recognized. I went up to her and asked “Do you know me?” and she shrieked “Candace, what are you doing here?” She was a co-worker in London at Campbell Wasey Ewald. My husband and I had gone to Scotland to get our dog out of quarantine and when we came back she had been fired so I had completely lost contact with her over the four years that had passed. Anyway, she had taken up with a much older man who would become her husband, Roland Muri, and they had moved to Rome for him to take up a new consultancy job. We would become best of friends, they godparents of my son and we are still friends today although Roland died some eleven years ago.
She had returned to London and was working as a temp for a guy who was late flying in from Tehran. That guy would be Roland Muri. He asked her out for dinner and then said I am moving to Rome, want to come along and she did. They went to Trastevere to look at an apartment and while looking at the apartment, their car was looted and everything taken. Money, documents, clothing. So they were staying with some friends of Roland’s in EUR.
Carolyn had signed up for Rome At Your Service, a temp agency no longer in existence and I followed suit. My first assignment was for Rover Italia in EUR and hers was for an architect north of the city. We switched jobs. She went on to become the public relations person for Rover Italia and I would eventually end up with Brown Daltas Architects and Planners for which the architect I temped for was a consultant. Their main project at the time was for an 85,000 person military city in Saudi Arabia and would go on to include seven banks for the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency. We were a huge group of mixed nationalities but it provided for some interesting liaisons and many children.
Carolyn and I became lifelong friends. She now lives in Lugano, Switzerland after Roland whom she finally married in 1981, passed away three years ago. They were Godparents to my Rome-born son, Tobias.