Anniversary thoughts

It’s coming up on what would have been my grandparents’ wedding anniversary. My grandfather’s still around, but my Nan died just over two years ago.

The date of their wedding was significant for another reason; they got married on Nan’s 21st birthday, then the earliest she could get married without needing parental permission. We - the next generations, that is - always knew she got married against her father’s wishes, but we’d always put it down to the old religious thing; she was Catholic, he was Church of England. They never corrected that misapprehension.

My grandparents met in 1941. The war was going on; my grandfather hadn’t been permitted to enlist, as he was working at a local munitions factory; every time he tried, he was told that his part of the war effort was right where he was.

He went to a dance at the local town hall one Friday night, with some friends of his. I can picture it pretty accurately, since that same hall is still standing. The lights were probably up, there was a band, playing swing I’d guess. I can also make a pretty good guess that, while there are plenty of couples on the dance floor, those who aren’t dancing will be separated by sex, the young ladies on one side of the hall, the gentlemen on the other.

Now, my dad’s family have never been backwards in coming forwards, if you know what I mean. They all have a mile-wide streak of larrikin in them, and there’s not much that fazes any of them. God only knows, Pop’s got that family trait in spades now, so I imagine he did then too. Asking someone for a dance? Easy.

Not this night.

He happened to catch sight of one young lady in particular, sitting with friends over the other side of the hall and, talk about Cupid’s arrow, he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

As happens, she realised that someone was staring at her. Or maybe one of her friends did, and gave her a discreet elbow in the ribs, I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter. For whatever reason she looked up, caught his eye and, in a romantic gesture unequalled since Romeo and Juliet…

…stuck her tongue out at him, and then gave him a big grin.

Well, how could my grandfather refuse an opening gambit like that? Straight across to the other side of the hall he went, and asked her to dance.

She said yes.

They stayed on the dance floor until the band quit, and then he asked if he could walk her home.

Her - very proper - response was to say that she’d come with friends and was expected to walk home with them.

Undaunted, he asked if she’d be at the next dance, next Friday night.

“Maybe,” she said.

They were both there the next Friday night and, this time, when he asked if he could walk her home, she said yes.

Halfway to her house, my grandfather said, heart in mouth, “I don’t suppose someone like you would ever marry a bloke like me…?”

She said yes.

That was it. That was my grandparents’ courtship and marriage proposal. Predictably, her father refused to give his permission for his daughter to wed someone she’d met only twice and he’d never met (he was working quite some distance away on the railroads) so they waited the six weeks until she turned 21 and then married.

Barring the years my grandfather spent away at the war (yes, he did finally get permission to enlist, and spent his first wedding anniversary being shot at and shelled in the jungles of Papua New Guinea) and occasional hospital stays, I don’t think they ever spent more than a day or two apart. They held hands when they watched television, little things like that. If you asked me to point to two people who had an exceptional relationship - two people who were so together, all their days - it would be my grandparents.

And they never told any of their children the story of how they met. I can - kind of - understand why you wouldn’t want your children repeating something like that, there’s every chance it won’t turn out as happily as theirs did,[sup]1[/sup] but I wish I’d known it earlier, while Nan was still alive. Pop only told us after she died, the night before the funeral.

I’d ask you to charge your glasses and be upstanding for a toast to one of the least known yet - in my humble opinion - greatest love stories of the last few decades. Separately or together, they were and are a class act.

[sup]1[/sup]Their kids not knowing the story didn’t actually stop anything. My parents weren’t quite so intemperate, but they weren’t far behind in their romance. I love my family.