Just after the Second World War, Neville traveled to Barbados with his wife and small daughter on a one-way ticket, planning only a short stay with family. When he tried, in April 1946, to book return passage in time for a lecture commitment in New York on 1 May, the steamship company told him hundreds of people across all the islands were on the waiting list and he could not get out until autumn. Rather than accept it, he sat in his hotel room and vividly imagined the entire departure — his brother carrying his daughter up the gangplank, the rail's sea spray on his face, the bittersweet look back at the island — and shortly afterward the steamship agent called to say a cancellation had just opened exactly the passage he needed, landing him in New York on the very date he required.