To Have And To Hold

TO say I was angry didn’t come close. I was furious. How could the girls have done it? “Calm down,” Richard said. “It’s only a photo. A rather good one, actually, in my opinion.”

“It is not a rather good one,” I ranted. “It’s a picture of two old fools cutting a cake, and those two old fools are us!”

You’ll have seen photographs like it, I’m sure, in your local newspaper. It’s always under the heading Golden Wedding.

On one side of the page is a picture of a bride and groom on their wedding day; on the other side is the photo of them as they are today, celebrating their fiftieth anniversary.

The wedding photographs are charming – the girls with their bouffant hair and brilliant white dresses, the young men in their snazzy suits and shiny shoes. Hope and expectation shine from their eyes.

Then you look across the page and see them as they are after 50 long years as man and wife.

They look old.

I gazed at our wedding picture. What had I been thinking when it was taken?

I remembered hoping at various points during our day that I looked like Dusty Springfield; that no-one would notice that the glass butter dishes on the top table didn’t match and that my feet wouldn’t start to bleed in my incredibly pointy shoes and the blood soak through the snowy satin for everyone to see.

What I don’t remember hoping for was 50 years of cooking the same plain food for a picky husband; 50 years of us two sitting on the sofa in front of the TV every night and 50 years of a July week at his sister’s house in Girvan.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Girvan, or with Richard’s sister or her house, but a change would have been nice.

I couldn’t have imagined, back then, how much it would matter to me that we never would afford the conservatory I wished for, or savour the smell of our own brand-new car, or drink a café au lait at some little pavement bistro in France.

Richard continued trying to pacify me.

“It was kind of Wendy and Julie to organise the anniversary party,” he said. “They wanted to make a fuss of us, because they care.” He shrugged.

“I thought we had a great time with all our family and friends. It was fun talking about the old days. And having that jukebox there, with all those golden oldies on it, was a brilliant idea.”

Remembering the occasion a month ago, I softened a little.

Richard and I had thought we were just going out for an anniversary meal with our two daughters and their families, but they’d sprung a surprise reunion of guests from our wedding, plus many friends and younger relatives we had added to our circle in the intervening years.

“Surprise!” everyone shouted when we walked into the room.

“Did you never guess, Mum?” Wendy asked. I honestly hadn’t. There was a finger buffet, cake, wine, balloons and a lot of laughter and reminiscing.

But as Richard said, the jukebox featuring the hits from our courting days was the highlight of the night.

The Kinks, the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five – we had danced to them all, back in the day.

Somebody selected Roy Orbison’s “It’s Over”, and our eyes met across the room – that song had been the soundtrack to our first big row which we, in our innocence, thought was the end of us.

Little did we know how many such rows we would have over the next 50 years, and that it wasn’t the end of the world, after all, or even the end of the road.

In fact, it was usually the start of a necessary and very useful conversation.

“It’s not the party I have an issue with,” I tried to explain to Richard.

It was the contrast, there in the newspaper for the whole world to see, between the young, bright, hopeful us and the tired, old, careworn people we had become.

“You do talk some nonsense!” Richard said.

“Doesn’t it worry you, even a little bit,” I asked, pointing, “that we turned from that into that?”

“Marion, did you spend any time talking to Di Roberts at the party?”

“Di Roberts?” I thought about my former workmate. “Not really. She introduced me to her daughter and granddaughter. Her

As a young bride I’d had so many hopes. Had any of them come to pass?

daughter’s a doctor and her granddaughter hopes to follow in her footsteps, so Di won’t be short of a bob or two in her senior years.”

“Maybe,” Richard said. “But don’t you remember that Di lost her husband when their girl was a baby? She had to bring up her child alone. Who did she cook a special meal for, or watch a favourite TV programme with?”

I listened as Richard related how Di had attended her daughter’s graduation alone. How, when the girl married, it fell to Di to give her away.

We sat in the evenings chuckling over Wendy and Julie’s little ones and the funny things they said.

Who was Di Roberts chuckling with over her grandchild?

“How much do you think Di Roberts would give for a photograph of her and James cutting a cake on their golden wedding anniversary?” Richard finished.

He was right. He was utterly and completely right; not something I’ve said very often in our 50 years of marriage. Suddenly it wasn’t the photograph I was ashamed of, it was my own selfish behaviour.

Growing old together doesn’t seem so bad when you consider that the alternative is not growing old together.

“I should ring Wendy and Julie and thank them for putting the picture in the paper,” I said sheepishly.

“Yes, you should. And, afterwards, if you play your cards right, I’ll dig out some of our old records and we can dance round the kitchen.

“After all that bopping about at the party, how about a slow dance to ‘I Love You Because’?”

“Jim Reeves is for oldies! I’d rather have some Rolling Stones.”

“OK.” Richard grabbed a large tub of sea-salt from the shelf and shook it like a maraca. “I quite fancy myself as Mick Jagger.”

And I quite fancy you, too, I thought. You’re not bad for an old guy! n