"Well," said Arthur, "I heard the other day that all these surveyors and engineers that have been crawling all over it have found serious problems with the towers. They say the whole thing's going to have to come down."

"My God," gasped Donald. "That would take them 10 years to do that and build a new one."

From the look on his face, the others could see that something was troubling Bob. They waited patiently and eventually he spoke sombrely. "I was very lucky that night."

"Oh, why was that?" asked Donald sympathetically.

"Well," he went on, "I was on my last trip before retiring, on the container ship Sprinter coming from Rotterdam and heading up the Forth to Grangemouth. We had actually passed under the bridge a couple of minutes before when suddenly we heard an almighty bang. What a fright it gave us."

His two friends listened intently.

"The pilot and I ran outside to see what it was, but in the darkness and heavy rain we couldn't really tell. One thing we could see was that the traffic on each side had stopped, so we knew something was wrong on the bridge."

"My goodness," declared Donald. "You never told us about this before."

Bob paused before replying slowly. "I don't really like talking about it. It brings back awful memories for me."

"So what did you do then?" asked Arthur.