A woman who left her purse on the roof of her car has marvelled at the neighbourliness of Bermudians who tried to alert her to what she had done, and the honesty of a man who found the purse lying in the road and took it to her home before she even realised it was missing.

"Only in Bermuda," said expat Racquel Rose-Green. "If this had happened back in London I would have had to kiss my purse goodbye. It's almost amazing, Bermuda is definitely another world."

It was as she loaded up bags of grocery outside a store on Front Street that she placed her purse on the roof of the car and then forgot to retrieve it before driving off with friend Karen Clemons.

Ms Clemons described what happened next: "There were people calling out and waving in the street trying to tell her about the purse but in the heavy traffic we couldn't hear what they were saying."

Mrs. Rose-Green said: "I thought they were telling me my door was not closed properly."

Unaware her purse was sliding around on the roof she drove to the Montessori pre-school in Rosemont Avenue, Pembroke, to pick up her son and then went home.

Still unaware of about what had happened, Mrs. Rose-Green was unpacking her shopping and preparing dinner when there was a knock at the door.

It was a man who gave his name as Jay Johnson and said he had found the purse in the road and, using the address on the driving licence inside, had driven to her home to return the lost purse and its contents. He had his young daughter with him.

Mrs. Rose-Green said: "I was shocked that he had gone to the trouble of driving to my home to bring it back to me. I'm so glad his daughter was there to see these values being passed on.

"Every card I owned in the world was in the purse. If this had happened in the UK the purse would have been gone in a minute and I would have had to cancel every card."

She added: "Sometimes you wonder about how things are going but Bermuda is not so bad as we sometimes think."

And Mrs. Rose-Green said a number of years ago her mother had lost her purse at the Market Place and on that occasion it had been handed in to the Police by the finder, who was unable to return it in person because there was no local address on any of the cards.