Married for 70 years, the sweethearts who took a leap of faith
IT was a forbidden wartime romance that has stood the test of time in quite spectacular fashion.
On Saturday, Toby and Jane Eaton will celebrate their platinum wedding anniversary, marking 70 years of marriage.
Back in the day, the couple arranged secret trysts – with the 19-year-old Jane climbing down a ladder from her bedroom window after her mother tried to stop the budding romance.
Mrs Eaton, now 90, was a driver in the Wrens when she fell in love with her future husband, who is two years older, at her family’s farm in Kent.
Speaking at their home in Barcaldine, near Oban, Argyll, yesterday, she recalled: ‘My mother tried to keep us apart because she thought I was too young. So I used to wait until she was asleep.
‘I didn’t dare go down the stairs, so Toby would put a ladder up to the window and I passed my dog to him and I followed them down and then we used to sneak off to the stables.’
The romance survived even after she was posted to Tullichewan Castle in Dunbartonshire.
Mrs Eaton said: ‘Toby and I wrote to each other and sometimes I would phone him from a call box. One time I told him that I would be in Glasgow for one night and he travelled all the way, in the corridor of a train, to see me.’
Mr Eaton had taken over farmland belonging to his future wife’s family and was ploughing a field when he first saw her walking past.
He said: ‘I think it probably was love at first sight. I don’t think there was any doubt because I tipped the plough over when I saw her – and I had never done that before.’
He proposed five months after meeting her and they were married within a year, in 1943.
The couple, who have two sons, Michael 68, and Roger, 60, five grandchildren and five great grandchildren, have lived and worked all over Britain, including farming on Mull and running the Altnaharrie Inn, near Ullapool, Ross-shire.
Mrs Eaton said the couple had managed to defy her mother’s prediction that the marriage would last for only three years by ‘always working together at whatever we were doing’.