My first experience of girlfriends was at primary school. I became aware, aged about nine or ten, that the game of ‘kiss-catch’, which periodically became fashionable at school (to the dismay of the teachers) had taken on a subtly different feel, and suddenly I found myself wanting to be caught by the girls, but not just any girls. It was a tiny school, and in my year group, there were only four girls, and perhaps a similar number in other years. I’m not naming names, but there were a couple of girls I found attractive, but as ever in these scenarios, such attractions were sadly unrequited. With my developing interest in the opposite sex, it was with a new feeling of excitement that a few of us used to meet in the long summer evenings either on the canal bank, or in a sandy area behind the school fields just off Kenyon Lane in Wheelton. I have very fond memories of strange feelings beginning to emerge although none of us knew what to do about them, and consequently nothing ever happened.
I later attended a boys only secondary school, so the opportunities to practice my wooing skills were severely limited to the few girls who caught the same bus. I remember being very attracted to two girls who were kind to me and I’d fantasise about going out with one or other of them. They attended sixth form, and so were probably seventeen years old and I’d be about twelve. Yeah, I know, but I always was a dreamer.
I was thirteen when my mum and another dinner lady (Cicely Billington) cooked up (sorry!) a scheme for me to have a girlfriend, and suggested that I started seeing Bernadette Billington (Cicely’s youngest daughter). I can’t remember how it began, but I know that I wasn’t the instigator. However, after a few weeks, I was regularly asking for permission to go and see Bernie (as she was known) and hoping Mum would say yes, with me never realising that she had started it all. This gentle relationship lasted perhaps a year, or even less, but I have fond memories of our first exploratory fumblings. Hearing certain songs from 1972 or 1973 instantly transports me back to that time: Blockbuster by Sweet, You’re so Vain by Carly Simon, Killing me Softly by Roberta Flack, Jean Genie by David Bowie. I remember this period with great affection, and when I read the wonderful novel ‘Cider with Rosie’, I realised how similar some of Laurie Lee’s childhood experiences were to my own, even though he was born 45 years earlier.
Apart from Bernadette during my early teens, I never had any steady girlfriends. I don’t remember being short of female company, but no single girl stands out in my memory. I was far more interested in bikes and cars in those days. Even when I started work, I was one of twelve engineering apprentices, all of whom were male, as was the norm in those days. I did go to college with a female apprentice whom I found very attractive, but there was a serious amount of competition and I got nowhere. She was called Carol and she worked in the Maths Services department at British Aerospace. This would become the IT department once that term had become established in the late 70s. Last I heard, she still worked there.
I was a member of Horwich Cycling Club from November 1973 (another notable male-dominated institution!) and each year, the club would hold both a Christmas dance and an annual awards evening in February. Both events were traditional dinner-dances, which were very popular in those days: drinks on arrival, a three course meal followed by dancing to a disco, home at midnight. In 1976, the person organising the Christmas dance was a chap called Gerry Barlow, who also worked at the ROF, so I knew him well. He saw me at work one day and asked how many tickets I wanted for the forthcoming event. “Just the one, please”, I replied. “No, you’re having two”, Gerry said, “find yourself a girl to take with you”. And with that, he sold me two tickets, which probably cost £3 each. Not wishing to waste the money (see next chapter), I set out to find someone to invite.
I had known Geraldine Hodson from primary school where she was in the year below me. We were already friends, although we were never that close. We had both been invited to a wedding in July 1976, and although I barely remember the occasion, my diary entry for that day reads, “…went to the ‘do’ at Lisieux Hall at 19:30. I danced with Geraldine all night until 23:30 when it finished. Her dad took me home.” There is no more mention of Geraldine in the diary over the coming weeks, although I remember her taking an interest in me when I bought the Puch Free Spirit in August of that year. I was showing off with it, and I walked home with Geraldine chatting all the way.
We both attended the remembrance Sunday service each November at the cenotaph in Wheelton village, and on Sunday November 14th 1976, I walked Geraldine home and on the way, I asked her if she would come with me to the Horwich Cycling Club Christmas dance two weeks later. I was wise enough not to admit that I’d been bullied into buying two tickets and didn’t want to waste the money! (This reminds me of the joke which goes “Oh no, I’ve spilled the antiseptic! Quick, cut yourself!”). She didn’t say yes straight away, but called me back later that evening to accept. I was delighted! My first real date.
Ted Kelly was also going to the dance so he picked me up and we both went to collect Geraldine. It was a great evening, and I remember winning a spot prize and then coming second at rolling 10p towards a whisky bottle, and winning a miniature. I kissed Geraldine good night at the end of the evening, and thought, “we must do this again”.
The chance to do it again came very soon afterwards when my brother was selling tickets for a school PTA dance on 10th December. I walked Geraldine home from church on 5th December and asked her to come with me. This time, there was no hesitation, and she said yes immediately. We had a lovely time the following Friday, and I knew then that this Christmas I could boast that I had a girlfriend! I next saw Geraldine at midnight mass on Christmas Eve when I asked her round to our house on Boxing Day. We spent the evening listening to records before taking a leisurely walk along the canal bank to her house, which was less than a mile distant. From that point, we have never looked back and we still celebrate November 14th as our ‘anniversary’.
Geraldine was 16 and I was 17 when we started going out, so there was still plenty of time for things to go wrong in our relationship. For 18 months things were going fine, albeit with the inevitable hiccup occasionally as we struggled to understand each other. However when Geraldine applied to go to Brunel University in October 1978, I was prepared for things to change. Brunel University was in Uxbridge, West London, so it was quite a distance. I had a good idea what university life would be like, and I was anticipating us drifting apart as Gee would meet new men. I never wanted, nor really expected, to meet new women, as I was happy with what I had, but I was mentally prepared for Gee to leave me as better prospects came along. I think we talked about this before she left, but I can’t remember the outcome from any conversations. So it was with an open mind that we parted on Friday 29th September. We enjoyed a lovely evening at the Ley Inn, and when we parted, Geraldine just said, “I’ll see you sometime”, and walked away.
I had booked a cycling trip away to Ingleton the following weekend, so those few days were too busy for me to miss Gee much. We had immediately begun to write to each other, which became a habit that we maintained throughout her four years at university. We still have all the letters we both sent. I’ve never counted them, but I would estimate that there may be around 200 each. The first letter to me arrived on Thursday 5th October when Gee showed me a sketch of the layout of the landing in her hall of residence and her room layout. I had a romantic streak in me, because I then wrote to a girl called Alison and asked her to organise a request to be played on the Brunel University radio station. I’m not sure what song I requested, nor whether it was ever played, but the intention was there.
By mid-October, Gee and I were plotting for me to visit her, but I needed permission from my mum, and I anticipated a negative response. Even though I was 19, I was still living at home, and had to abide by the house rules, and one of these (albeit unspoken) was not sleeping with your girlfriend. Well, I thought it was a rule, but since I’d never asked, it remained a moot point. I plucked up the courage to ask Mum on 16th October, and she said OK, much to my surprise. She never asked where I would be sleeping or anything, so all the lies I had lined up weren’t needed.
I drove down to Uxbridge in my Vauxhall Viva on Thursday 2nd November, arriving at lunchtime. It was slightly awkward at first, but we soon began to relax, and it turned out to be a wonderful weekend. We went to Windsor on Friday, spent a day in London on Saturday just walking round all the tourist places, stopping only for a meal at Pizzaland in Leicester Square. (Pizzaland did a special deal, which was half a pizza along with a baked potato and coleslaw, served with coffee. The coffee, which was only ever warm, never hot, always arrived well before the pizza, which puzzled me, but we enjoyed the affordable food, and we ate there all through the university years)
On Sunday, we just stayed around the campus, but in the evening, we decided on a whim to go into London again. We ended up going to see the new film Watership Down at the Ritz in Leicester Square. On Monday, we both drove back to Lancashire since Gee was off for reading week which she spent at home. My diary entry reminds me that this weekend we first hinted at getting married, which, seems very premature, but we certainly discussed a date of 1984 and the Channel Islands for a honeymoon. Our forecasts were quite close, as it turned out. (Spoiler alert! We were actually married in 1983 but did spend our honeymoon in Jersey) It was fitting that we said goodbye at the end of that week at the same remembrance service at Wheelton cenotaph, just two years after I first asked her out.
This weekend in London was the first of many visits. I have never counted how many trips I made, but in the later years, I seemed to be visiting every two or three weeks, either by train or car, depending on the economic conditions at the time. Sometimes I could get cheap rail tickets, other times tube prices fell (dramatically so under Ken Livingstone’s reign) so every trip needed a careful calculation to ensure that I was getting the best value for money. I remember doing these sums during a mechanical engineering class at college when I ought to have been calculating the radial forces acting on a payload hanging from a crane jib. The tutor was unimpressed when I was discovered.
Three weeks after my first trip to Brunel, I had planned a four-day cycling trip to Derbyshire on 23rd November. On Thursday morning, I set off at 9am with all my bags packed, but had not travelled much beyond Chorley before I had a puncture that I struggled to mend. I walked back into town, bought a new inner tube, and fitted it but by the time I was ready to set off again, it was getting rather late, and with the darker nights, I became concerned that I may not reach my destination in daylight. Therefore, I decided to cycle back home, put the bike in the car and drive to my first hostel in Derbyshire, and begin cycling from there. I can’t remember at which point I conceived the idea to change the destination from Derbyshire to Uxbridge but it was probably after I’d arrived home and loaded the car. It was certainly not pre-planned. I let everyone at home believe that I had spent the weekend in Derbyshire, but actually had another wonderful few days in London. Thankfully, Gee was pleased to see me, and had not shipped another bloke in for the weekend. This was in the days before mobile phones, so I had to call the telephone in the stairwell of Gee’s hall of residence to get a message to her. I remember a welcoming committee when I did arrive, so the message clearly got through.
Gee was away for four years in total, and we stayed together throughout. I went out with several other girls in the interim, but only for drinks or chats. I don’t know when we seriously decided to get married, but I formally asked Louis (Geraldine’s dad) for her hand in marriage on 6th April 1982. It wasn’t that formal, or probably even necessary, but I did it anyway. I can’t remember actually proposing to Gee, nor going down on one knee.
We started looking at houses soon after we were engaged and we saw 21, Carleton Road on 19th May and quickly decided that it was the property for us. We took ownership in August 1982 and Gee moved in alone some time in the autumn.
We set a wedding day of April 16th 1983 and it was the best day of my life. It was a magnificent feeling knowing that every one of the 53 guests present were there solely to ensure that Gee and I had an exceptional day. The wedding ceremony was at 2pm at St Chad’s church (where we were both christened) and we held the reception at the Howard Arms hotel which was about ½ mile away and midway between our parents’ houses and the church. We didn’t travel far.
We decided not to have an evening reception, and instead, we left the guests at the hotel while we sped away in a taxi. No-one knew where we were going, but assumed that we were heading to a local hotel, but we weren’t. Our taxi took us to the Sacred Heart church in Chorley where we attended a vigil mass since we were leaving on our honeymoon early the following day. We walked home from Sacred Heart to Carleton Road (Gee had changed out of her wedding dress by this time!) and opened a bottle of champagne. Being inexperienced at opening sparkling wine, I managed to spray the kitchen ceiling with bubbly, the sticky residue from which was still there when we returned a week later. For breakfast the following morning, we had a prawn salad and more champagne before realising that the minibus we’d ordered was very late. The minibus never actually turned up, but we managed to book a taxi who took us to Manchester airport (very quickly!) before flying off to Jersey for a week.
The honeymoon was lovely. The hotel in St Helier was a bit tatty (self-imposed budget constraints again!), but we’d hired a car for the week which was a real treat. My cars had been generally old and unreliable up to that point, and the Mini I’d just bought was like a roller skate (a colleague asked whether I’d bought two, one for each foot), so a brand new Ford Fiesta felt like an extravagance. It was one of the last mark 1 versions in dark green, and seeing a similar car brought back fond memories for years afterwards. We drove somewhere every day, and often did more than one lap of the island – it was only 30 miles round. Our favourite spots were the Corbière lighthouse, Portelet bay, and Gorey. We were very fond of Bergerac, a popular TV detective programme which was set in Jersey, and we were delighted to spot many of the locations used in the series. The weather wasn’t good, raining most days, but we had the car to shelter in. We found that even in the rain, there were lovely sunsets over the sea, and we enjoyed just walking along the cliffs enjoying the fresh sea air. We have never since returned to Jersey as a couple. Perhaps we are overdue a visit.
