The Sunday Post (Newcastle)

Post haste ... my race to find Mum’s old wedding dress

- By Jessica Ward mail@sundaypost.com

A DESPERATE gran is trying to find her late mother’s wedding dress after it got lost in the post.

Lorna Aspey, 70, sold the treasured possession on eBay for £400 in July, and then instantly regretted it.

To Lorna’s immense relief the buyer decided to return it . . . but when she did, it vanished in the post.

Despite months of searching, the dress is still nowhere to be seen.

Now the grandmothe­r-of-five is making a desperate appeal to find the dress which belonged to her mum, Jerry, who wore it when she wed Lorna’s dad John in 1944.

The couple met at a dance hall in Edinburgh in the late 1930s, where John was serving with 603 Squadron of the Royal Air Force.

Because of rationing Jerry was unable to find a wedding dress, so John had one made in Canada from ivory silk.

Lorna, of Kinross, Perthshire, said: “My mother never saw the dress until it arrived in a big cream box.”

Lorna, who was an only child, kept the dress and hoped to wear it on her special day – but it didn’t fit.

She said: “When my mum died I inherited her wedding dress and hoped to wear it when I got married – although in the end I wasn’t tall enough.

“I kept it and it was my most treasured possession.”

It was the death of Lorna’s own children that prompted her to sell it. She lost her youngest, Damian, to cancer when he was 32 and her second youngest, Mark, to suicide when he was 43.

Lorna recalls: “Going throug my sons’ possession­s when they died was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.

“I decided to sell Mum’s wedding dress so my children wouldn’t have to decide what to do with it when I died.”

After she sold the dress, thehe buyer decided she didn’t want it and returned it.

But because the weight was different from when it was sent, most likely because thee

ale buyer put it in a box, Royal Mail claimed the postage hadn’t been paid.

Lorna said she offered to pay the difference but Royal Mail wouldn’t let her.

Desperate to get it back,

 ??  ?? The dress was made for the
wedding of Lorna’s mother and father Jerry and John in
1944.
The dress was made for the wedding of Lorna’s mother and father Jerry and John in 1944.

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