She won a bet when I asked her out ... but I was the lucky one
MY WIFE BARBARA
I WAS 19 and on leave from the RAF when I visited the cotton mill in Blackburn, Lancashire, where I’d worked before joining up. Barbara, then just 16, bet a friend I’d ask for a date. She won half a crown on that — but I was the one who got lucky. I was soon posted back to Egypt, but we wrote to each other every day for 18 months. Meeting Barbara was the making of me. I have a photograph of her on our wedding day on July 9, 1958. I was the proudest man in the world to have her on my arm. We didn’t have much, at the start. I was a civil servant on low pay when we won £700 in a competition — it paid for the deposit on our first house. Then our four children came along. I got promotions which meant relocating every few years. When we moved to Sheffield we bought a rundown shop and turned it into a successful grocer’s. We had a wonderful life together. Barbara was always on the go, and loved Elvis and flowers. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on March 13, 2017, and died three months later. I miss her terribly. A man could not have asked for a better wife.
Barbara Miller, born February 7, 1938, died June 13, 2017, aged 79.