How it all started

As I wrote last week’s contribution my mind went back before our marriage to our first contact, I say contact because we were pen pals. Mike was in the RAF in Cyprus in the days of EOKA working as a photographer. I was a dental nurse in Eastbourne. One day a friend asked if I’d like to write to a poor lonely serviceman, I wasn’t particularly interested but she sent my address any way. Sometime later a letter arrived, I was so taken aback that I wasn’t sure what to say in my first letter back to him, so my Mum wrote it on my behalf!!

Mike told me later that he was quite taken by this first letter, liked my sense of humour and personality, it was ages before I could bring myself to tell him it was my mother he had been so impressed with. Things developed and I started to write for myself, before long we were writing everyday sometimes as much as 20 odd pages. Now I can’t think of what we wrote about but it did take most of my non working life. In order to get to know each better we took Vogue and Good House Keeping Magazines which we would discuss so our letters crossed one another. Finally after over nearly two years Mike proposed to me by letter, we still hadn’t met. Naturally I accepted, Mike wrote my Dad who was very suspicious but gave his blessing with certain conditions which we ignored and started to plan our wedding and life together. It was nearly time for Mike to come home so by now we didn’t have long to wait. Virtually all my family pronounced doom for us “It’ll never last, you’ll be divorced in a year” and yet here we are over fifty years later still together without writing a single letter since.

How things change

Back again, while I have been away I went to my Granddaughter wedding arranged in most unusual circumstances. A friend of a friend of theirs had booked a wedding at one of those hotel places where they do weddings as a speciality and paid a hefty non returnable deposit. All was well until his bride to be left him with a non wedding and a loss of £5000. His friend said why don’t you sell it, I know a couple who are always talking of getting married and so it was that my Granddaughter had a very sudden wedding. Naturally we went and were surprised at the grandeur of it all. It seems to me that weddings have increased out of all proportion with the meal alone reputedly costing £60 a head.

I remember when we got married the buffet cost 7/6 a head (37.5p) and we got married in a room above a pub as I remember it we seemed to have a lot more fun. We married in March so that we got maximum benefit from the tax rebate which was available at the time. If you married just before April 6^th you were classed as married for the whole of the previous year and so were paid a rebate, I thinks ours was £25 or something like it. We left our wedding by train for the Midlands and a 22’ caravan in a field near to where my husband worked. We took a taxi to our new home and caused the driver a little concern when we asked him to stop by a hole in a hedge which we passed through to start our new life together. To us it was more important to be together than wait to save for the fripperies of to-days weddings. Still the world has moved on but it’s fun to look back and enjoy our memories both long and short.