'Lucky Alex' is the biography of Group Captain Alex Jardine who was born in Vancouver, lived in Victoria and went to sea at 15, to give his mother fewer mouths to feed. His career included 5 years on Canadian and British merchant ships, 10 years in the RAF - during which he flew Catalinas against Japan out of Singapore and spent years as a POW in Java, and 20 years in the RCAF. His flying went from Tiger Moths to jets. His singular personality makes the story a good one, right to the bitter end, when he loathed being an air attache on the cocktail circuit in Prague.
Alex Jardine was different from most career airmen in that he combined a deep seriousness about doing the best possible job at all times with a love of fun and jokes which enabled him to make light of the most desperate assignment. Consequently his story is never dull even when he is flying a desk. He has not a pompus bone in his body.
His career is contained enough action for several lifetimes and he found himself is some crucial historical spots. For example, he was a sailor on shore-leave in Hamburg when Hitler was conducting Germany's last election for 12 years in 1933; he flew anti-submarine patrol for the Prince of Wales and the Repulse the day before those two ships were sunk by the Japanese - and was sent out to confirm the awful truth when this was thought to have happened; he escaped from a Japanese POW camp in Java and, having failed to find or build a boat, managed to be recaptured with no harm done to himself or his companions - no mean feat; he survived 3.5 years in the same POW camp as Laurens van der Post, with two guards who were subsequently executed for war crimes; he was commanding CF100 jets atRCAF St. Hubert in October 1956, when the Suez and Hungarian crises made WW3 seem imminent; and he was Canadian air attache in Prague - and insisted on keeping on drinking with the Russians - during the darkest days of the Cuba Missile crisis.
Alex was once declared the most eligible bachelor in singapore, yet he remained unmarried until he was 44. One of the book's themes is this personal journey. He had an extraordinary ability to direct his own life and to avoid pitfalls of love and marriage - when those delights would have detracted from his being able to do the job assigned or, more importantly, when the job assigned would not have allowed him to be responsible for a possible wife's welfare. He watched other men, as doomed as himself, marry before the bullets started to fly. But that was not for him - not until his future seemed predictable again. and that only happened when he became a base commander in the RCAF.