Tuesday’s Child Is Full of Grace. Part 7

Wedding Bells.

By May Vincent, with additional comments by Graham Vincent

How we left things last week:

When I first reached Central Station to meet Ron I learned that the “Royal Scot” was running late—enough for me to hop a bus home and douse my unruly mop to tame it into a smoother style. My return to the Station revealed yet further delay so again I dashed home to quell my curls before a third trip—the lucky one. My hairstyle couldn’t have been too different as Ron recognised me first and I sank down from a perch upon a luggage trailer into his eager arms.

It was later that evening that he proposed—later teasing me that I barely hesitated. We named January 1 as the date of our official engagement, received the blessings of my Mum and Dad and floated on Cloud 9 together over that best-ever Christmas-time.

[Graham speaks: It’s true, my dad often said “Your mother couldn’t wait to marry me”, with a laugh and a glint in his eye. My mother would pass first, in 2007, by which time they’d been married for nearly 54 and a half years. And that passing seemed to accelerate the dementia that had already been apparent for some time. My brothers and I had quickly identified that “mum had the brains and dad had the brawn”, and in latter years, together, they’d made a very complementary pair. But with mum’s absence, dad seemed just to go downhill.

My father confided certain things to me in the two years before he joined mum in the hereafter. He spoke about their sex life, which took me aback, but it was in glowing terms. I can remember to this day how he described meeting her. He recounted the evening many times, and each time he did so in virtually identical terms: “I saw her across the room and I thought I’d never seen anyone so beautiful in all my life. I am so lucky that she chose me.” Through his dementia there shone the happy memories of yore.

In the two years following mum’s death, dad continued to live in the bungalow they’d moved into in 2002, which was closer to the Cambridgeshire home of my brother than the Yorkshire home in which we’d lived as a family since 1963. My sister-in-law was very attentive, mainly to make sure he didn’t poison himself or put meat on the compost and encourage rats. But he would call me up often on the phone and ask me simply, “Where’s your mother?”

It’s not like questioning in a court of law—“Could counsel perhaps clarify for the witness?” But we were never quite sure whether he meant “Has she popped to the supermarket without telling me?” or whether he was unaware that she had even already passed; or perhaps he was preoccupied with whether she had made it to Heaven, or the other place. I can assure you, as I assured him, that she went to a good place, but that is a tale for later.]