Most nights Dad would drive from our suburban North London home to his favorite café to play chess late into the night.
One night, as he headed home through familiar streets, an odd thing happened. As he drove down the North End Road from Hampstead to Golders Green, a red post box, or mailbox as Americans call them, exploded just after he had driven by it.
This was at the time of the Irish Republican Army's (IRA) mainland campaign in the United Kingdom, and the explosion, as it turned out, was a letter bomb that went off prematurely. A few moves more on his last game of chess and my dad might have become a terror statistic. Instead, he was safe, and nobody else was hurt.
