All our lives must be at the end of a long chain of improbable coincidences

From The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson. Page 67.

“But for those who can adjust to the noise above, Wraysbury is a rather sweet and agreeable place. The village centre has a church and a broad green with a cricket “pavilion, a couple of good pubs and a cluster of useful shops. The surrounding gravel pits have been filled with water to make recreational lakes, which are now the homes of many sailing and windsurfing clubs. Many of the houses are large and attractive, particularly where they overlook water. My wife grew up just across the Thames in Egham. From her side of the river, Wraysbury’s rooftops are visible among the trees. This much I had seen a thousand times, but I had never been there, never had a reason to go.

‘You’ll like it,’ my wife promised. She would know, for her father came from Wraysbury. He grew up in a small, dark, decrepit cottage with his poor widowed mother and elder sister at the end of a quiet, wooded lane a quarter of a mile or so from the village centre. The cottage had no electricity or running water. The toilet was a privy at the bottom of the garden. My “father-in-law used to tell us stories of how he would walk seven miles to Staines and back on a Saturday evening to buy a bag of stale buns for their supper, for that was all they could afford. It was a different world.

My wife had told me where the cottage was, and I found my way there now – or at least I found my way to where it had once been, for the cottage itself is long gone. It was blown to smithereens by a German bomb in 1943. Wraysbury offered nothing in the way of targets, so the bomber was either lost or perhaps just emptying out his bomb bay before turning for home. In any case, his tumbling bomb scored a direct hit – a perfect, obliterating hit – on my father-in-law’s house. Luckily, no one was in at the time, so no one was injured, but the family lost everything and had to be rehoused. Thanks to his changed circumstances my father-in-law met a girl whom he would not otherwise “have met, and in the fullness of time they married and produced two children, one of whom grew up and married me. So the direction of my life, not to mention the very existence of my children and grandchildren and whoever else follows, is directly consequent upon a German bomb that fell randomly on Wraysbury on a summer’s evening long ago. I suppose all our lives must be at the end of a long chain of improbable coincidences, but it did seem fairly extraordinary to me, as I stood looking at the site of a long-vanished cottage, to think that if that bomb had fallen a hundred yards to either side or where the Germans had intended it to go, then my wife would never have existed and I wouldn’t be in Wraysbury now. It further occurred to me that every bomb that fell in the war, on both sides of the Channel, must have changed lives in that way.