‘“No” would have been unthinkable’
Getting engaged in the Raj was sometimes a bit like speed dating. Often, minds were made up and a lifelong commitment to another human being promised after only a few meetings and without the aphrodisiac bait of great wealth, a large and splendid estate, or huge personal prestige to account for such rapidity.
Violet Swinhoe, who had previously merely played a round of golf with her future husband, recalled in September 1916 of one dance: ‘had two with James and he was ripping and there was a full moon and altogether everything was top hole’. After a few other meetings, at another dance on 19 March, she was writing: ‘began dancing and was at the fourth when he told me he loved me. Dear thing, but I said, I was so uncertain in my mind . . .’. By the 30th it was fixed. ‘James had final talk with Daddy and then we were engaged. Too queer for words. I lay down.’
Yet looking at the phenomenon of almost instant betrothals from the standpoint of the parties concerned, it is understandable. Most ICS men, once they reached the age when they were allowed to marry, would devote their energies to finding a wife; and if their six-month home leave brought no joy, would continue the search on the ship back to India – most returned from leave in the autumn, when the new crop of Fishing Fleet girls went out. If unsuccessful at home or on the ship but still anxious to marry, they would naturally focus on the available girls in India, who were, in the main, Fishing Fleet girls.
Once there, with a male-female ratio of about three to one, in the hothouse atmosphere of balls, parties and moonlight picnics, popular and pursued as never before, it was easy for any girl to fall headlong in love. ‘Hearts are strangely inflammable under Indian skies,’ wrote Maud Diver, ‘and propinquity fans the faintest spark into a flame.’
Rumer Godden found herself engaged to a man she knew she did not love, simply because as an inexperienced eighteen-year-old brought up to agree with older people, this, coupled with the glamorous surroundings and the pressure of romantic expectation on all sides, was overwhelming. ‘On Christmas night, after dinner, Ian took me apart on to the high foredeck of the furthest ship and, under those glittering stars, asked me to marry him . . . I had no chance to say “Yes”. Ian said it for me. “No” would have been unthinkable. “It is yes, isn’t it?” he said, and kissed me. All his love and longing was in that kiss but I think I only blinked . . . This was happening to me and it was wrong.
‘Then why did I let it go on? I think I did not know how not to and I was immensely flattered, to be a chosen girl. Hostesses beamed approval on me. “Ian is such a nice man,” which he was. “He deserves to be happy,” which he did. Flowers came every day and Ian would take a case out of his pocket with a smile and there was a brooch, or a bracelet, once a string of pearls.’ Finally, she found the courage to break it off.
More usually, courtship was a long-distance affair, with a stream of letters passing between a couple who might have met during, say, Delhi Week, thereafter to be separated by hundreds of miles as he returned to station or cantonment and she – who would never have come to Delhi Week on her own – with her hosts to where they were living.
Philip Docton Martyn (always known as PD) was an ICS man posted, when he joined in 1927, to the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal. On leave from India six years later he met his future bride, Margaret, then twenty-four; one bond was that they were both graduates of Manchester University.
They met a mere three times that summer and six months later he proposed, from India, although this meant a long engagement until he had reached the age at which marriage was permitted. It was only after four years of letters, written in the form of daily diaries and posted once a week, that he returned, married Margaret and took her back to India in 1939. (Among the advice Margaret received from a woman who lived there was to bring out a garden party dress with hat and gloves for the Christmas Garden Party at Belvedere – the Viceroy’s Calcutta residence – as many evening dresses as possible, a black outfit in case of official mourning and fine lawn underwear.)
Lieutenant Leslie Lavie, stationed in Vizianagram, a town inland on the coastal plain of Bengal, halfway between Madras and Calcutta, was another for whom letters were the lifeline. He had met Florence Ross in February 1895. The youngest daughter of Dr Hamilton Ross, a former Surgeon Major to the British Army in India who lived in County Antrim, she was staying in Secunderabad with her sister Alice, married to Major Herbert Nepean.
They became engaged on 30 January 1896, and thereafter the besotted Leslie wrote daily to his beloved: long letters (‘I really ought not to spend about one and a half hours a day writing to you as I have certainly let things get into arrears a little’). These told of the news of the cantonment, of the appalling and enervating heat, the illnesses from which he and his friends suffered and the general discomforts and oppression of life in the hot weather. They gave her instructions couched as wishes ‘I hope you will try to get an idea of the way an Indian household should be run’), and discussed the ups and downs of their relationship (‘be nice and tell me why you were so cold in your letters last week . . .’); ‘My own darling, you have ceased to address me like this, I suppose for some reason best known to yourself, perhaps because you no longer look on me as such . . . I have tried and tried to think how I can have offended you, but don’t know’).
But even when there had been a spate of reproaches he was devastated when circumstances intervened to interrupt the steady stream of correspondence; when the railway broke down because of floods so that no mail got through he wrote, on 9 August, that it was ‘a fearful blow to me, as my spirits and happiness depend on your letters’.
Theirs was a story that ended in tragedy. After working through financial problems, negotiating their way past the age barrier (Leslie was not quite old enough at twenty-seven) they married on 16 September in St John’s Church, Secunderabad. Only seven months later he died after an illness of ten days during which, unsuspected, an abscess developed on his liver and eventually was said to have burst through his lungs. He was buried the next day in the cantonment cemetery, under a tombstone of white marble engraved with the sad little phrase, Entered into Rest; and on 24 July 1897 Flossie gave birth to a posthumous daughter, Leslie Mary Maud Lavie – usually called by the diminutive, Mollie.
A few years later, Flossie decided to try her luck in India again, rejoining the Fishing Fleet in the early 1900s and leaving Mollie in the care of her grandparents. Postcards arrived for Mollie at frequent intervals. One, postmarked 28 December 1905, reads ‘Very many thanks for your letter. I hope you had a Happy Christmas and had plenty to eat. Mummie.’ But Flossie’s second Indian venture was unsuccessful, despite at least one proposal. ‘It may be a waist [sic] of money your trip to India, but since you have only one life to live you might just as well enjoy it while you can,’ wrote her sister Ellen from Minneapolis. ‘Who did you get yourself engaged to? Unless you were quite sure you would be happy, it is as well you did not do it. It is easy to get married but not as easy to get out of it …’.
Later, Flossie said that no one she met on that second visit measured up to her beloved Leslie. Although only thirty-five, she never remarried, remaining a widow for over sixty years, until she died at the age of ninety-seven.
Not many girls become engaged on top of an elephant but one was Honor Penrose, born in 1888. One of a large family, she was brought up in Lismore Castle, the property of the Duke of Devonshire, as her father was his agent. Life in Ireland was quiet, with entertainment consisting mainly of travelling circuses and concerts, the arrival of the first bicycles (‘I ran all down the drive to see one’ recalled Honor) and then the motor car – a shock for this small community. ‘I seen the Divil in his Hellcart coming into Athlone,’ said one old man, ‘and I just had time to go down on my knees and say two Aves and one Pater when “Hoot-toot!” says he and away with him.’
Honor herself was responsible for another innovation: riding astride, in those days unheard of, especially in a quiet corner of rural Ireland. Although the FANYs, the nursing yeomanry founded to ride out and give succour to the wounded in the South African War of 1899–1902, took to riding astride in 1910, they wore khaki so that their professional role was clear and therefore acceptable, despite a certain amount of tut-tutting. By contrast Lord Annaly, Master of the Pytchley 1902–14, was so outspoken in disapproval of riding astride that he would not give the Pytchley white collar to any woman who did so.* Honor, who took to riding astride because her back hurt intolerably when sitting sideways on a horse, was apprehensive on her first such outing.
‘I can remember my agony of shyness arriving at the Meet and keeping my horse as close to my father’s as I could to hide the terrible fact that I had two legs, even though they were covered discreetly by a divided skirt!’ she wrote later. ‘People were very nice to me but another girl who followed my example some time later had stones thrown at her by the cottage women and shouts of “Go home and put on the petticoat!”’
As Honor grew up there were teenage dances, conducted in the most formal way with programmes and white kid gloves. But this happy mingling of the sexes soon ceased; there were no jobs for the boys and ‘one by one they departed to distant corners of the Empire to earn a living and we girls were left lamenting at home’. When in 1913 her older sister Judith was invited to India by a cousin but could not go, Honor was sent in her stead ‘to find a husband,’ as she later told her granddaughter. She travelled out with a married friend, Sylvia Cassels, as far as Bombay, and thence by train to Nagpur to stay with her cousin Sylvia Pollard-Lowseley, whose husband was in the Royal Engineers.
Just before Christmas she left her cousins to stay with Sylvia Cassels, whose ICS husband Seton was Commissioner for an area that contained part of the Terai, a tract of jungle at the foot of the Himalayas renowned as the haunt of tigers and other wild animals. After a duty tour with the Cassels came the highlight of the ten days’ Christmas holidays, a tiger shoot, with a Colonel who served as Game Warden to the Maharaja of Kashmir, his wife and their two daughters. Also in the party was Seton Cassels’s brother and his wife and another ICS man, Rupert Barkeley-Smith, always known as ‘Gappy’ and then aged thirty, whom Honor already knew. He was, she recalled, ‘a handsome chap’.
For the tiger shoot, towards the end of the ten days luxurious camping – with its sunny days, elephant rides, jungle sights and sounds, excellent meals and the romance of sitting round the blazing camp fire at night under the stars – Honor was put in the back of Gappy’s howdah. It was the first tiger shoot for them both and, nervous that she would not keep quiet, he bet her that she could not remain motionless for twenty minutes.
They heard the beaters, with their drums, clashing tin cans and whacking trees. ‘Suddenly in the shadows opposite I saw a flash of yellow,’ wrote Honor later. ‘I poked Gappy in the back and pointed. There was a bang and a great mass of yellowy brown toppled forward into the nullah [ravine] and lay there stone dead. Another shot from Gappy and a full grown cub lay dead.’ As the beaters tried to steal the whiskers off the tigers for their magic properties Gappy seized his moment and asked Honor to marry him. She accepted. ‘He was a rotten dancer,’ his granddaughter told me, ‘and thought that if he waited until they reached civilisation and he proposed to her after treading on her toes in a foxtrot she might have refused him.’
Sylvia Cassels, who felt somewhat responsible for the betrothal, since it was through her that the pair had met, sent a reassuringly enthusiastic letter to Honor’s mother, its phraseology redolent of the time: ‘I do hope you will be pleased. We are delighted and think it is a most satisfactory engagement in every way, and they are so happy. I am sure you will approve of him as a son-in-law, he is such a thorough “sahib” and has good brains and good looks and is healthy and sound in mind and body – and he is so very lucky to get engaged to Honor who will make a most excellent Civilian’s wife! . . . He said to me the other day: “The dibs [rupees] are all right!” which is his way of saying he has a certain amount of money of his own.’
For a young woman with little to do except enjoy herself, all mundane necessities taken care of by a host of servants, with friendly and hospitable people delighted to see a pretty new face, the cold-weather season could seem like one long party. While she would undoubtedly notice the glamorising effect of uniform on a young, fit but otherwise perfectly ordinary young man, the fact that there was little for the life of the mind would probably pass her by. What was important was the next dance and what to wear there. As for the dance itself, even a stroll on to the veranda in those balmy nights with huge stars overhead was a potent inducement to romance.
Sometimes, with so many attractive suitors around, it seemed almost a question of luck as to which one a girl would pick, with persistence probably the strongest weapon in a young man’s armoury. It certainly seemed so for nineteen-year-old Claudine Gratton. Her diary is spattered with dates with different young men. ‘Ian called for me at 9.15 and took me to the New Year’s Day Parade. Bad. He then took me to drinks with very queer people. Awful creature, I do detest him He more or less proposed to me last night at the flick. Grim creature.’
Soon her future husband, John Hamilton (always known as Ham), a Lieutenant-Commander in the Royal Indian Navy, then serving on the Cornwallis, appears in her diary. They go sailing, out to dinner, bathing and on 1 July 1939 he kisses her for the first time. Next day, however, ‘Tony asked me to play polo!! I do like him.’ Two days later it is dinner, in a party with Ham to see Pygmalion, on to the Boat Club dance, after which Ham brought her home (more kisses). ‘We said goodbye for ten days as his ship has been called to Bombay.’
With Ham away, Claudine’s life remained as social as before. ‘Dined at home in a Scots Fusiliers lads’ party, invited by Tony Johnson, we went on to the Boat Club. Had good waltzes with Watt. Home about 3.30.’ Next day, 8 July, it was six people to dinner and ‘on to see Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, Flora Robson, David Niven in Wuthering Heights, good but sad. Drinks Sind Club, danced at the Gym [Gymkhana Club]. Bed 3.15.’ Two days later, ‘Fergie took me sailing. He set the course, good one. Grand sail. Home 8.30, changed. Jim Anson called for me. We (six) saw Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in Irene and Vernon Castle.’ On the 12th, ‘Mike Carroll called for me and took me to a champagne party at the Noughtons. We all went on to the Boat Club for lunch.’
Only on Ham’s return on 4 August did the roll-call of other young men stop. ‘Went [to the Boat Club] with him and stayed there for supper. We danced to the gram. He took me to Clifton and proposed to me. “Will you be my wife?” said he. And I said: “and never see you? No! not me.” I’m not really in love with him although I like him a lot. Home at 11.30-ish.’
A week later, after a cocktail party on Cornwallis and dancing at the Boat Club, Ham took her home. ‘He proposed again, poor old thing, but I don’t love him.’ The following night there was a visit to the cinema to see Mother India and another proposal. Next morning, on 16 August, he sent her a note. ‘He thinks the balloon is going up as they have been ordered to Bombay. He can’t even see me to say goodbye. He seems very cut up. Wrote him a chit in bed.’
1 September. ‘Germany has invaded Poland. They want Danzig. Probably war to come. Messed about. News on the wireless, lunch . . . I went to dinner at 1 Clifton Road with eight other men, we all went on to the Boat Club.’
Ham’s pursuit of Claudine was eventually successful thanks to his tenacity. On 17 December her diary records: ‘I found a letter on D[addy]’s table from H that he wants to get married!! Oh! I’m so thrilled. Don’t know what to do. D arrived home from camp, want to tell him but I won’t yet. Started a letter to Ham, finished it.’ By the following morning she had made up her mind. ‘When Daddy came to wake me up I told him that Ham and I are engaged. He was so sweet – a bit tearful too I think. I’m going to wear my marquise ring on my engagement finger till I get an engagement ring from Ham.’
When there were limited opportunities for meeting, courtship had to be an affair of speed and decision – if the loved one were not to pass irrevocably out of sight. When John Henry, manager of an indigo plantation in Bihar, went to the annual Meet in Muzaffarpur, he met a beautiful girl, Mabel Exshaw, niece of another indigo planter, staying there with her two sisters and her mother (the planter’s sister). John and Mabel fell in love at first sight. But at the end of the week of socializing and gaiety, John, like every other man there, had to return to work; and Mabel, only on a short visit, would soon be leaving for England with her mother and sisters.
John was desperate – and desperate times require desperate measures. He went back to work but at the end of each afternoon he rode his horse to the nearest railway station and caught the train to Muzaffarpur, a journey of several hours. There he got a one-horse vehicle that took him out to the estate on which his beloved was staying, reaching it in time for dinner. Fortunately her uncle was a hospitable man who liked to entertain and to see his family happy.
He spent the evening courting Mabel, until the horse and cab arrived to take him to Muzaffarpur, where he caught the train to his own station. There he mounted his horse and rode back, arriving at the plantation at 6 a.m., the time when, like other managers, he rode round inspecting the fields. All his changing of clothes, washing, shaving and minimal sleeping were done in the train. He went on doing this until Mabel’s mother gave her permission for the engagement.
The lovely young Violet Hanson was, as we have seen, one of the few Fishing Fleet girls who had already been married. The marriage, at seventeen, to a man who proved to be homosexual, had been annulled. Four years later, her mother had despatched her to stay with her aunt Mable, visiting her son in India.
The omens for finding a suitable husband were favourable. Mable’s son was in a smart English cavalry regiment, the 4th/5th Dragoon Guards. ‘There were very few unmarried girls and dozens of young unmarried men,’ recalled Violet, who had gone back to her maiden name before leaving. The reason was that as well as the 4th/5th, the Secunderabad Brigade consisted of two Indian cavalry regiments – the Deccan Horse and the 3rd (Indian) Cavalry Regiment – and a battalion of the Royal Artillery and a couple of Indian infantry regiments.
Violet had plenty of admirers. One of them, Podge Gregson, in the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, had his mother staying with him for the cold weather. She was fond of entertaining, so he was in a better position to see more of people he liked than most young officers living in the mess. He was good-looking, amusing, around the same age as Violet and, as she noted thankfully, was ‘the very antithesis of the men I had known in the past’ – her husband had had a wide circle of intelligent, witty and almost invariably homosexual friends, to whom Podge, with his mother making a relaxed home for him, seemed quite the opposite. ‘It was all so normal and conventional as to draw me like a magnet,’ said Violet. ‘And so I fell in love – chiefly with normality, I now think.’
They got engaged at a dance given by the Deccan Horse. ‘I don’t think my aunt was very pleased, as she thought I could have done much better and married into the British Cavalry – as I could have, had I wanted. There was nothing she could do and there was no real objection to the engagement except my fiancé’s youth and the fact that he was not yet a captain. Men in the Indian Cavalry were not supposed to marry as subalterns. However his colonel was quite amenable, if we waited a year before we got married, so that was all settled.’
Violet’s engagement meant that her mother, a woman to whom the subtle gradations of status meant much, had to balance the desired result – remarriage – against the fact that her daughter’s fiancé was in a less desirable regiment. ‘My mother was quite pleased though not as ecstatic as she might have been,’ recorded Violet. ‘She thought I might have done better than a young officer in an Indian cavalry regiment but I suppose my aunt reported favourably – and my mother was anxious that I should get married as it was embarrassing for her to have to explain why I was still Miss Hanson.’
Violet returned home as her fiancé was not due for leave that year – officers serving in the Indian Army had six months’ home leave every three or four years – and spent the English summer staying with a cousin and getting her trousseau together. She returned to India in September 1924, was met by her Podge when she landed in Bombay and married the same day in Bombay Cathedral.*
Dorothy Hughes had been an unofficial member of the Fishing Fleet when she accompanied her older sister Dulcie to India. Dulcie, a young woman of difficult character, had been sent out specifically to look for a husband; Dorothy herself, at twenty, was not considered seriously in need of one at that time. She was, however, perfectly clear that marriage was her eventual goal (she later brought up her own daughters with the words: ‘If you are unfortunate enough to be born clever, for heaven’s sake, be clever enough to hide it.’)
Soon after her return from India to the family home in Baker Street Dorothy was asked to a dinner party. ‘Please come,’ begged the friend who invited her. ‘I’ve got a frightfully difficult man to cope with. You’ve been out to India and he lives in India – he’s in the Indian Civil Service – and we’re desperate to find someone to keep him amused for the evening.’ Dorothy, with her beautiful figure, blonde hair, blue eyes and easy, lively manner, seemed just the girl to entertain someone clever, shy and reserved.
This was Charles Ormerod, on record in Chapter Five as saying of his life in India, ‘The people here who have a better life are the ones who are married. So when my next leave comes up I’m going to go back to England with the idea of getting a wife.’ And when, in 1935, aged thirty, he had both passed the age barrier and had six months’ leave, home he came with that goal in mind. Finding Dorothy placed next to him at dinner gave him immediate hope: he found this pretty young woman fascinating – but she found him rather a bore. So when at the end of the evening he asked her: ‘May I have your telephone number?’ she replied rudely, ‘Look it up in the telephone directory if you’re so keen.’
For a man accustomed to dealing with anything from a runaway horse to a crowd of angry villagers, ringing up a reluctant young woman was not difficult. He was anxious to give her an evening that she would enjoy, without the pressure of a one-to-one conversation, so arranged a party at Quaglino’s, a well-known West End restaurant. It was not an unqualified success. The other guests, prepared to make the most of an evening with a generous host, had no hesitation in drinking the champagne and eating the caviar offered, but Dorothy, always conscious of people spending too much money on her, looked at the prices and was horrified, so picked the cheapest thing on the menu, an omelette. Nor did she realise he had asked the others purely for her benefit.
Shortly afterwards, a benign fate stepped in. Dorothy developed chickenpox and as she lay first ill and then convalescing at home splendid hampers began arriving from Fortnum & Mason. Her mother looked at them thoughtfully and said: ‘This seems quite promising.’ When she met Charles his northern roots – in those class-conscious days – told against him. All the same, their friendship developed and Charles, aware that this was his chance to realise his dream and by now deeply in love with Dorothy, pursued her until she agreed to marry him.
The wedding, in July 1936, proved to be the start of a highly successful marriage. Dorothy took to life in India at once. Charles was now a Deputy Commissioner and because his immediate superior, the Commissioner, had no wife, Dorothy became First Lady of their province at the age of twenty- two. For her this was no problem: she had all the social graces, could entertain well, was artistic, and good at bridge and tennis. Her outgoing personality and the friendliness that had originally captivated the quieter Charles was an invaluable counterbalance to his more subdued and less socially adept persona. Much of their time was spent in Delhi, whence Charles would be sent out to neighbouring areas; Dorothy would accompany him, to help the village women with hygiene and medical care.
Perhaps the strangest story was that of Rowan Mary McLeish, who knew her future husband for a mere fortnight, became engaged to him over the telephone after six years apart, and finally met him again a week before their wedding.
Mary (‘I was called Mary, except at school, where there were too many Marys’) was born in April 1921. Her father worked in Burma, in the trading firm started by her grandfather, and she and her brother had one of the more unhappy Raj childhoods. As she told me: ‘I used not to see my father for five years at a time, after which he would come back for a year. It was really very upsetting. My parents were away most of my childhood. We were at school on Hayling Island and we lived at the school all year except for a holiday in the summer when my mother came back and I and she and my brother would meet. You can imagine how we looked forward to it. After this one lovely holiday she would go back again. For us it was devastating being left like that. My parents were almost strangers.’
One day, on one of her visits to England, Mary’s mother, the prolific romantic novelist Dorothy Black,* asked her daughter if she would like to come out to India to stay with some friends. Mary jumped at the chance and they set off from Tilbury in the autumn of 1937. ‘I remember we changed for dinner every night – I had to take out about six evening dresses. I was just seventeen and I’d very much had a boarding school upbringing so it was my first experience of meeting young men. There were three very nice ones on board so I had a lovely voyage, dancing every night.’
After a stop-off in Colombo, they landed in Bombay and set off for Madras by train, there to be met by a military car and taken to the cantonment where the King’s Own Royal Regiment was stationed. Their host was the commanding officer. ‘The following night Nigel came to dinner. I can see him now, leaping up the stairs – he was rather agile, with reddish hair, a good bit taller than me. He was twenty-two, and had gone out with his battalion. We clicked at once. He said: “Will you come sailing with me?”
‘I’d never really done much but I said I would love to. It was a small sailing boat with one little cabin. We had a lovely time and I found I liked sailing very much. I saw him almost every day during the fortnight we spent there. At the end of the fortnight my mother and I went up to Ootacamund and I had to say goodbye to him, which made me very sad. All the time we were in Ootacamund I was wishing I could be with him in Madras.’
Nigel St George Gribbon, born in London in February 1917 during a First World War zeppelin raid, was educated at Rugby and Sandhurst and commissioned into his father’s old regiment in 1937. From the point of view of Mary’s mother, and everyone else in that society including Nigel himself, as a twenty-year-old Lieutenant he was far too young to marry.
Soon after Mary returned to England she was sent to Paris to improve her French. ‘When war seemed a certainty the German girls at the school all went and shut themselves in their bedrooms. I was the only English girl there. I was told to go immediately to Calais and get on the first boat I could.’ Back in England, Mary joined the WAAF as an aircraftwoman second class, gaining a commission after five months. ‘I worked in radar, where we were constantly busy with raids, either coming in or going out.’ All the time, she and Nigel were writing to each other, although there was no question of even an ‘understanding’.
One day, when she was at home on leave staying with her mother, the telephone rang. ‘Will you marry me?’ said Nigel’s voice, last heard six years earlier. He was telephoning from India. She was, she recalls, completely taken aback – but not enough to prevent her answering ‘Certainly I will.’ Still in the first flush of astonishment, she turned to her mother and asked: ‘Shall I get engaged?’ ‘Yes, darling,’ replied her mother. ‘After all, it won’t tie you down.’
‘When I had said “yes”, I didn’t feel “Oh, what have I done?” I just felt, “How wonderful!” I knew I’d done the right thing. You see, nobody else had ever made a real dent on my heart. Partly one was so busy in the war one didn’t have a real social life, and being on this very mixed radar station, although I got on with everyone very well, there was nobody tempting there.’
Nigel was not able to return to England for another four months, spending part of the voyage stuck in the Mediterranean for a while because the escorting destroyers ran out of fuel (‘everyone sat there with their life jackets on wondering if the Germans would come in for the kill’).
‘We met in London. I was very nervous. Would I remember him properly after six years? But there he was, sitting there, looking just as he always had. I suppose I had changed quite a lot in the intervening years but somehow it hadn’t affected us.
‘He had one week’s leave, during which we got married. I wore a white wedding dress – I’d been presented before the war and we added sleeves to my presentation dress. He was in uniform. Nigel came down to near my station for the last few days of his leave and we stayed at a grotty b and b. I had to go back on my three watches in the WAAF – eight hours on then eight hours off. So often I would have to get up in the middle of the night and leave him. When I’d thought of marriage before, this wasn’t quite how I’d pictured it.’