Saturday, January 8

 

Marilyn and I are celebrating our 56^th Wedding Anniversary today.  It will be a rather subdued celebration: age and Covid are taking their toll. However, we have good memories of past celebrations. For our fortieth, for example, we took our first cruise – sailing from Singapore on the Gemini visiting the islands and ports of Thailand and Malaysia, and there have been many other highlights to stir our memories.

 

I’m not a dyed-in-the-wool romantic but I can’t help musing on the circumstances which led Marilyn and I to St Aidan’s Church in Corrimal back in 1966.  If you believe there is a force in the universe dedicated to bringing people together, you might be right.

 

The first sticky thread of the web of our relationship was laid on January 8^th, 1951, the day my mother, my brother and I arrived in Australia.  On the dock, waiting to greet us was my father carrying a large basket of flowers.  Those flowers had been arranged by Iris Lofting, Marilyn’s mother.

 

My family moved to the small mining village of Russell Vale where we soon discovered Marilyn’s mother ran the local corner shop.  I must have seen Marilyn often, playing in her yard, or walking in the street, perhaps to visit her grandmother, although I have no memory of it.  We went to the same primary school; in those days, boys and girls were segregated but we might have seen each other over the fence separating the playgrounds.  The threads may be tenuous but they’re real, nevertheless.

 

My family moved away from Russell Vale, first to Sydney and then to Gwynneville and Marilyn and I had no contact until about 1960.  In that year, the DeMolay Order was established in Wollongong and I joined it very early.  Marilyn joined the female equivalent, called the Rainbows and the two organisations became close..  Marilyn’s father, Bill Lofting became the first Chairman of the DeMolay Advisory Committee and the potential for more threads adding to the web became apparent. 

 

Marilyn was a regular attender at dances organised by the DeMolays, coming along with her father.  She would have stood out, being very pretty, very petite, beautifully dressed and a great dancer.  I discovered she worked at the Anthony Horderns Store in Wollongong and began to wait at the bus stop outside the store each afternoon for her bus home.  I found that it suited me to wait at the same bus stop – another thread!

 

About that time the DeMolays were organising a bus trip to Luna Park and I plucked up my courage and asked Marilyn if she would be my date.  Yes, we talked like that, in those days.  At Luna Park, my watchband broke and Marilyn put my watch into her purse for safe-keeping.  A little touch of intimacy and another thread.  On a particularly violent ride, Marilyn let go of the purse, it flew through the air and landed on the ground, shattering a bottle of Electrique perfume in the process and dousing my watch.  A shared disaster and another thread.

 

I bought my first car in 1962 and promised Marilyn I would pick her up in the morning to take her to work.  Of course, I slept in and she had to catch the bus.  A disagreement, certainly but, in its way, another thread. 

 

In the way that things worked in those days, there was no formal asking of her father’s permission, or bending of the knee to propose; our relationship evolved to the point that the question being considered was not, ‘will we marry’, but ‘when will we marry?’  Being teachers, we married in school holidays:  as it happened, on the fifteenth anniversary of the day I arrived in Australia – a particularly strong thread, I think.

 

Looking back, I have regrets that I am not more romantic and overt in showing my feelings.  Marilyn, on the other hand, has no difficulty in sharing her emotions.  Somehow, Marilyn has accepted that my shyness has been an issue for me right through my life and I am eternally grateful that she has tolerated my failings.  She has been an extraordinary partner to me, and we have shared some very difficult times.  However, I think more of the wonderful memories we share and, if there is some force out there bringing people together, I would just like to say, “Thanks, mate!”