Week 18. 2011 3rd May 2011

Tendring Topics……..on line


An Easter Wedding

It is springtime, a season in which according to Tennyson ‘A young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love’. This springtime phenomenon is by no means limited to young men. Nor are thoughts of love necessarily light!

On Saturday 23rd April I was present, and played a very minor role, in the official Civil Partnership Ceremony (in effect the same-sex wedding) of my only granddaughter Jo to her loving friend and companion Siobhan Donnelly. It was the first ceremony of its kind that I had ever attended and I found it to be solemn, love-filled and deeply satisfying.

The happy couple; Siobhan on the left, Granddaughter Jo on the right. I have loved my granddaughter since she was a little baby* and over the years I have greatly admired her courage in overcoming serious illness, her prowess on the football field, her capacity for study and hard work and her lively intelligence. She is the only member of our family who is both an M.A. and a B.Sc.! It was not though until I saw her in that white bridal gown, that I realized how truly beautiful she is!


There were about 100 guests at the ceremony that was conducted, with warmth, understanding and respect, by two mature and friendly women registrars. Both Siobhan and Jo had a great many loving friends and relatives. A number of Siobhan’s guests had come from the Irish Republic and one had travelled from Canada for the occasion. Jo’s guests included my elder grandson Chris who lives and works in Taiwan and had travelled halfway round the world for his cousin Jo’s ‘big day’, and my younger grandson Nick and his Belgian girlfriend Romy, both of whom work for the European Travel Commission in Brussels. They had travelled directly from an assignment in Budapest to the wedding venue (an imaginatively converted farmhouse in the Peak District near Macclesfield)

I was the oldest guest, probably by as many as twenty years! Siobhan’s mum and I had both been asked to read something appropriate during the course of the ceremony. I don’t find reading aloud from a script easy these days. Fortunately though I still have a good memory for things that I have read and that have impressed me years before – if not for the events of the previous few hours!

The 23rd was, of course, Shakespeare’s birthday and I enjoyed sharing with Jo, Siobhan and their guests his well-known sonnet; ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment. Love is not love which alters where it alteration finds or bends with the remover to remove………and so on. I am sure that readers of this blog will be familiar with it. I added that, many years earlier, when I had been a PoW in Germany we had had in our ‘barrack room’ a tear-off calendar with a ‘thought for the day’, in German of course, for each day. One that I had remembered for nearly seventy years was by the German poet Goethe. ‘Lieben und geliebt zu werden, ist das höchste Glück auf Erden’. In English ‘To love and to be loved in return is the greatest happiness that this world offers’. In sixty years of marriage Jo’s Grandma and I had found that to be abundantly true. I sincerely hoped that Jo and Siobhan would find the same. My contribution seemed to be found acceptable.



At the Wedding Breakfast, Jo chats with her cousin (my elder grandson) Chris.

The ceremony was followed by a sumptuous ‘wedding breakfast’ and an evening of music and dancing that I was far too old to appreciate. I was glad when the opportunity arose for me to depart.

Two families – left to right: Siobhan’s mum, me, Siobhan’s dad, Jo and Siobhan, Jo’s dad and mum.

23rd April (St. George’s Day and Shakespeare’s birthday) has been a significant date in the recent history of my family. It was on that day in 1979 that Jo’s mum and dad, my son Andy and daughter-in-law Marilyn, were married. In 1946, thirty-three years earlier, it had been the date on which I had been discharged from the Army after nearly seven years service in World War II – and just four days before Heather Gilbert, destined to become Jo’s Grandma, and I were married.

23rd April 2011 is another date that I, and every member of my family, will remember warmly for as long as we live. We all wish Jo and Siobhan every happiness.

*Postscript

Jo was the most beautiful baby that I have ever seen. Here she is as I first knew her, just five days old! Very shortly after that photo was taken she showed the first symptoms of a life threatening illness from which, thanks to God and to the professional skills of the staff at the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, she completely recovered.

……and the Royal Wedding!

I am not so tied up with events within my own family to have failed to note that there has been a Royal Wedding! I haven’t had my eyes glued to the tv all day, but I did watch and thoroughly enjoyed the wedding service for Prince William and Catherine Middleton in Westminster Abbey. I love the sonorous words and phrases of the Anglican wedding liturgy. The two hymns, Charles Wesley’s, Love Divine, all loves excelling and Blake’s Jerusalem are among my favourites, the former bringing back memories of my own wedding, almost exactly 65 years ago.

I was also delighted to hear Ubi caritas et amor, ubi caritas Deus ibi est   (where there is love and compassion, there also is God) used as an anthem. This – surprisingly perhaps – is often used (in Latin!) at a midweek United Reformed Church service that I regularly attend with a friend.

This was one of those occasions on I am doubly glad that I revived and renewed my membership of the Church of England a few years ago. I am now a regular communicant as well as, for well over half a century, a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and a regular attender at Clacton Quaker Meeting. I find that Anglican sacramental and liturgical worship and Quaker worship, based on a prayerful and expectant silence, complement each other perfectly. I would be very sorry to lose either of them.

Today (I am writing this during the evening of the wedding day) I enjoyed the joyful peal of the Abbey bells, the thunder of the organ, the fanfares of trumpets, the dress and demeanour of the bride and groom, the colourful uniforms and the carefully rehearsed ritual, all performed before the  high altar and beneath the ancient soaring arches of the Abbey – and the noisy enthusiasm of the waiting thousands outside the Abbey. All are part of a thousand years of English history and part of our still-evolving culture.

Many of the thoughts that I have published in this blog could, I suppose, be described as radical, even – by the uncharitable – as ‘loony leftie’. But I am not a Republican. I think that there is a great deal to be said for having a head of state who is not closely identified with any political party, who can claim to represent all the British people. I do not see how that can be achieved except by means of a constitutional hereditary monarchy.

I wish the newly created Duke and Duchess of Cambridge every happiness and very much hope that they are destined to breath new life and credibility into a British institution that, I think, we would be very unwise to declare redundant.

My VE Day!

Partly perhaps, because the TV channel Yesterday has been running programmes on World War II and its climax, there seems to be greater public interest in the anniversary of VE Day, when in 1945 World War II in Europe came to an end, than there has been in recent years. I hope to publish this blog on the web on Tuesday 3rd May. The 67th Anniversary of VE Day will be the following Sunday.

I remember that first VE Day very well indeed. Still a prisoner of war, I was one of a party of 30 ‘other rank’ British POWs who had been marched away from the battle front (and possible liberation by the Soviet Army) the day before. At about 11.00 am our guards told us that they had heard on the radio that the war was over. In our area SS troops (Hitler’s elite army corps) were fighting on – as the sound of nearby gunfire made evident! However they were not SS. They proposed to get rid of their rifles and try to make their way home. They suggested that we do the same.

Myself, aged 24, in 1945

Jim Palmer, an Ipswich milkman who had been with me since our capture at Tobruk, and I decided to stay together. The next day found us in a part of Czechoslovakia liberated and occupied by the Soviet Army. I had learned, from Soviet POWs and civilian slave workers, enough Russian to explain that we were British comrades on our way home to England. No one hindered us as we hitch-hiked and grabbed train rides though Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia to Prague, and then on to American occupied Pilsen, by plane to a British army base near Rheims, and finally home.

Heather Gilbert.  The 'Essex girl' who waited for me for four long years.

 VE Day was on 8th May. Just ten days later, on 18th May, I stepped through the front door of 31, Kensington Road, Ipswich. It was my 24th birthday and – after four years overseas, three of them as a POW – I was home again