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On the 21st August, 1979, Nicholas Laurantus travelled with neice Thalia and father John Kapetas and his wife Anna to accept his MBE from Governor-General, Sir Zelman Cowen. They stayed at the Kythera Motel, Canberra.

"Wednesday was cold, clear and sunny. Nicholas was very nervous and rather shaky, so the two women went into his room to help him dress. He had brought his best three-piece navy suit and a dark-blue tie splashed with paler blue, but he had refused to buy a new shirt for the event, muttering that this one was perfectly all right. When Thalia looked about the motel room for his socks, she could find only one. ‘Look under the pillow,’ said her uncle. Puzzled, she did so. Underneath the pillow was the other sock — and inside the sock, his wallet.

With a twinkle in his eyes, Nicholas explained to the two women that many years earlier, when he had been staying at a small country pub, had put his wallet under the pillow before he went to sleep, as was his habit then, only on this occasion he had left the hotel immediately after breakfast without going back to his room. Later in the morning, when he remembered his wallet and returned to the hotel to collect it, he found that all the bed linen had been changed and there was no trace of the wallet. ‘After that experience,’ he said, ‘I devised this foolproof method of putting it in one of my socks, for there’s no way I can leave with only one sock on’. They laughed, watching him put on the other sock".

Page 126-127, Jean Michaelides. Portrait of Uncle Nick. A Biography of Sir Nicholas Laurantus MBE. Sydney University Press, Sydney. 1987.

Source: Portrait of Uncle Nick

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