‘Life is about making memories’ – a love story in pictures... TIMES PAST
APICTURE paints a thousand words, the old saying goes. For Isabel McNulty, her treasured photos capture a love story which has lasted more than five decades.
“Brian and I met at school at 14, got engaged at 17, married at 18 and will celebrate our 52nd wedding anniversary later this year,” she smiles.
“I have photos of us all the way from when we met, until today. Photos are important – life is about making memories, after all.”
Isabel has a wealth of stories too, from her Glasgow childhood, through her dancing days, to life as a mother and grandmother, missing her family during the difficult days of Covid.
“We all just can’t wait to be together again,” she says, with feeling. “This has been so hard for everyone.”
Isabel has shared some of her fantastic photographs with Times Past, from her schooldays, to her wedding day, to last year’s double celebration when she and Brian turned 70.
“We have changed a lot,” she laughs.
“We were both pupils at St
Augustine’s in Milton in 1965.
“One day, my friend said one of the football players in the school team wanted to speak to me. I was quite shy, but I went down to the pitch after school anyway, and we got chatting and that was that.”
She smiles: “He told me later he’d spotted me walking across the playground. I had flaming red hair back then, and I was wearing a green duffel coat and green hush puppies…they were all the rage – and he wondered who I was.”
Like many Glasgow couples in the 60s, Isabel and Brian loved to go dancing.
“The Maryland on Scott Street was our favourite,” she says. “They played all the 60s tunes we loved – especially Please Stay, by the Cryin’ Shames. That was our song and Brian would sing it to me at family parties.”
The couple, who live in Milton, married in 1969 at St Agnes’s in Lambhill, and they have two daughters – Shirley-Anne and Tracy – and a son, Brian. They have five grandchildren – Sean, 25, Niamh, 18, Erin, 14, Riley, nine and seven-year-old Michael.
When they were first married, Isabel worked in Littlewoods on Sauchiehall Street as a storeroom assistant, and Brian was an apprentice boilermaker.
“We didn’t have a lot of money,” she says. “Eventually I went on to work in the renal dialysis unit at Stobhill Hospital, where I stayed for 30 years, and Brian worked as a heating engineer and later, ran his own window cleaning business.”
Looking through her photo albums, Isabel alights upon the stunning pictures of her wedding day.
“My parents threw us the most beautiful wedding – even though we were very young, and I was a bit nervous about telling my mother,” she says, adding with a laugh:
“Brian always says we should have been ‘slapped round the heids and sent back to school.’
“Yes, we were young, and of course we have had fall-outs – any married couple who says they have never had a cross word are making it up. But when you know, you know.”
She smiles: “I love Brian just as much now as I did back then – and he still sings to me, always the Cryin’ Shames, always Please Stay.
“We talk a lot, we laugh a lot and we trust each other. That’s what marriage and family are all about.”