My true love story
It was love at first sight for Margaret and sapper Terry Tildesley, but at the end, the pandemic cruelly meant he could not see her. Margaret in Hadleigh, Suffolk, tells of their great love…
On my way back to work after lunch, my friend and I plucked up the courage to go and speak to two young soldiers.
It was 1960 and they were working in the Army ammunition department in Hadleigh where I lived. It’s now a Morrisons store.
It was love at first sight for Terry and I, who was in the Royal Engineers, and normally stationed at Hoo, near Chatham in Kent.
He asked me out on a date and we met on May 4. Then I saw him again on May 5, and then on Friday night, May 6, we went to Hadleigh cinema (long gone sadly).
On Saturday May 7, he proposed to me.
At the time he said: “The Army has me for eight more years, but you can have me for life.”
Terry came from a mining village called South Elmsall in West Yorkshire, and he asked his mum if he could take me up to meet family at Whitsun, which I did after knowing him for just three weeks!
Terry went back to Hoo, and came up every weekend to stay with my family in Suffolk.
We were engaged in July 1960, and he was then posted to Cameroon in Africa. We were married in St Mary’s Church here in Hadleigh on December 9, 1961.
We had our son David two years later in 1963, before Terry was posted to Singapore, where we joined him. We came back to England in 1966 before our second son Paul was born in 1967. We now have four grandchildren and five great grandchildren.
Terry and I would have celebrated our diamond wedding anniversary in 2021, but sadly he passed away, aged 79, in July 2020.
Terry had Alzheimer’s and was in a nursing home in Hadleigh, but because of the pandemic, I couldn’t see him.
The nurses told me he kept calling my name. It broke my heart. I loved Terry dearly.”
■ How did you meet the love of your life? Send a current photo and wedding picture to siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk