There is no getting away from it girls are annoying, they are always interfering with our games, like that June Moore who lives down Cowley Avenue. We are playing cricket in the road outside her house and she keeps swinging on her gate and asking silly questions.
“Have you got a girl friend Alan”? She keeps this up all the afternoon, it’s one thing after another. June is in my class at Stepgate’s and all the boys like her, but I think she talks too much. How can anyone concentrate on wicket keeping when someone keeps going on and on. If I don’t stop the ball it would go all the way down to the end of the road to Tucker Wells house, and the other boys would start shouting at me.
At the age of ten, I have better things to do than to talk to girls. It’s not that I don’t like girls, for instance there is a very pretty girl who lives in Barker Road . Her name is Wendy Hills, she looks like an American child film star, very pretty, but a bit shy. Thats how I like them, nice to look at but not at all talkative. I see her every day at school or out playing. One day I saw Wendy sitting on the back of Miss Paynes bike, she looked very upset and crying. She was covered in little red spots and was being taken home as she had German measles. She thought a German bomber had given her the spots.
Eight years later in 1950, I saw her standing at her garden gate and told her I was joining the RAF and would she write to me as a pen pal. She didn’t exactly say no, in fact she didn’t say anything, just giving me a look that some people might have thought was a no. But I still wrote to her when I was in Egypt though, I never had a reply, so it probably was a no.
In 2012 I was invited to an art exhibition in Chichester by my school friend Maureen Toobi. She said we could drop in to see her friend who lived there and had lost her husband a few years earlier. As soon as I walked into the room I thought Maureen’s friend looked a bit familiar, and after a few words I realised it was Wendy. Of course she couldn’t remember me, but she did remember my handsome brother Don. Every one knows my brother Donald!
A few weeks of driving down to Chichester, and 70 years after I thought she was like Shirley Temple when I was a ten year old. Wendy finally became my girl friend.
I proposed to her 6 months later—at our age, 78 and 80 you can’t hang around and we married in 2012.
I told everyone we had to get married, and it was a shotgun wedding. This didn’t seem to please her very much though.
We had an 18 month honeymoon and never stopped laughing.
Madeinchertsey 