Happy Marriage
It’s such a shame about Keith and Laura because we’ve always had happy marriages in our family until now. My late husband and I were very happily married, as I often used to tell him. It was our golden wedding anniversary in 1995, you know. Oh, we had a lovely party – bridge rolls, sausages on sticks and a beautiful cake with “Dorothy and Bill – Fifty Happy Years” in yellow icing. There was some in here that said it was in bad taste, with Bill having died in 1987, but they’re just the ones who didn’t want to chip in to the collection. They bought us a beautiful clock that plays the opening bars of the Alleluia Chorus on the hour. Monica spotted it on the shopping channel. PVC I think they call it. She used to watch it all the time, you couldn’t move in her house for ornamental bird cages and power tools, but she had to have it disconnected when the bank cut up her credit cards. I used to think of my Bill every time that clock chimed. It got on my nerves in the end and I jammed a bit of paper under the mechanism. It’s got a lovely tick, though.
Anyway, I like to think we provided Keith with a first class example of what married life’s all about. We stayed together and we didn’t complain about it. Bill’s tea was on the table at six o’clock every night and he never wanted for a clean pair of socks. We met when he was home on leave in 1942 in our air raid shelter. His family hadn’t got one, so they shared ours. I was only sixteen, and I was smitten. I used to get quite flushed when I heard the air raid siren go off. Of course, it meant that our courtship was conducted under the watchful eye of his parents, my parents, my granny, (who was an absolute tartar), his daft Uncle Frank with the wall eye, not to mention his brother, my sister and the dog, which used to break wind constantly. Hardly an ideal location for romance to blossom! But he was a handsome young man in those days, despite the gum disease, and I soon let him know in my quiet, shy, feminine way, that I wouldn’t actively discourage any proper and gentlemanly tokens of affection. When that didn’t work, I had a word with his mother, and the next thing was, he turned up on my doorstep with a bunch of chrysanthemums wrapped in newspaper and a sweaty forehead. And we never looked back!
We got married in 1945, just after the war. I remember it as if it were yesterday. I had the most beautiful frock, and Bill had a boil on his neck. We had three days in Scarborough and then we moved in with his parents until we could save enough for a place of our own.
She’d never been much a housekeeper, Bill’s mother, and she really had to pull her socks up when I moved in. We used to have very pleasant mother- and daughter-in-law chats in the back garden as we put our smalls through the mangle. She was very kind to me, went to a great deal of trouble to find out everything she could about houses to rent. In the end, they cashed in the old man’s life insurance and bribed a man at the Council to put us at the top of the housing list, which was very thoughtful of them.
We weren’t always in each other’s pockets of course: I had my coffee mornings, and he went to the pub once a year, on Easter Sunday, for a pint of shandy and a pickled egg. He used to go to the office Christmas party but I had to put a stop to that in 1975 after the business with – you know – well, there’s no point in bringing it up all over again. I know he was in the wrong, but if a young girl’s got no more sense than to wear a low cut shirt with dodgy buttons and no bra in the same room that grown men are drinking pints of brown ale with Pernod chasers, then she’s got something missing up top. In the brain department I mean, she clearly had nothing missing up top there.
He apologised, of course, and I accepted it gracefully, but on the understanding that there were no more Christmas parties after that. There’ll always be young girls who think nothing of throwing themselves after attractive, happily married older men who’ve had a few to drink, and I thought it was safest to keep him away from temptation, because he was only a man and they don’t find it easy to resist, do they? I got him to sack that secretary that kept phoning him at home at the weekends, because she was clearly angling for him. Funny really, she turned up to his funeral all those years later, wearing black and crying fit to bust. She had a young kiddie with her as well, so she must have got married somewhere along the way. Who would have thought she’d have remembered him after all that time?
© Jane James 2005