Snapshot: My parents’ no-frills wartime wedding

Here are my parents, Doris and Ray, on their wedding day, 10 March 1945. No doubt wartime weddings were not the lavish affairs that we have come to expect, but I think my parents’ wedding day was low-key even by wartime standards.

It took place in a registry office in Bromley, Kent, and there were no guests. My dad apparently asked two passersby if they would go into the registry office with them to act as witnesses. There were no special wedding clothes – Mum is wearing her best (perhaps only) “costume”, a very dull outfit of brown tweed, which she would continue to wear on special occasions throughout my childhood.

There were no flowers and no photographer: after the ceremony, the newlyweds walked along Bromley High Street to a photographer’s shop, and persuaded him to accompany them across the road to the entrance to a park where this picture was taken.

There was no reception. In the evening, they went to a performance of the ballet at Covent Garden, after which they returned to what was to be their home for the next three years – Dad’s “digs” in Erith. There was no honeymoon.

My parents always allowed us to think that this style of wedding was normal for the time, but I suspect there was more to it than that. My dad grew up in a small Norfolk village, and may well have expected to spend his whole life there. But when war broke out in 1939, he decided he was not prepared to join the armed forces, and registered as a conscientious objector. The reaction of local people forced him to leave home, and he went to London, where he found a job with London county council, working for the parks department. Mum grew up in the West Midlands, and met Dad when he came to her home town to visit his brother, who was married to Mum’s best friend.

I suppose Dad’s status as a conscientious objector was a bit of an embarrassment for Mum’s family also, and that they decided to make things easier for everyone by having a simple wedding in London where nobody knew them. Mum got a job in the china department of Heal’s on Tottenham Court Road and was very happy there.

I said that at this plain and simple wedding there were no flowers, but that’s not strictly true. If you look closely at Mum’s jacket, you can see a tiny bunch of iris reticulata pinned to it. In the days leading up to the wedding, Dad identified a group of these flowers growing in one of the London parks where he worked. On the morning of the wedding, he got up early and went and picked them, presenting them to Mum when he met her outside the registry office. Growing up, I remember there were always iris reticulata growing in our garden, wherever we lived, and as they came into flower at the beginning of March, Dad would tell us the story of their wedding day. I have some growing in my garden now, although, thanks to climate change, they now flower in February.

You could say the marriage didn’t get off to a very auspicious start, but it certainly lasted. In 2005, they celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary; Mum died two years later, aged 85. Molly Pollitt

Playlist: Our ‘flippers and snorkel’ dance routine

Nautilus by B Bumble and the Stingers (Instrumental)

Having enjoyed summer holidays in Cromer in Norfolk and Sutton-on-Sea in Lincolnshire in the early 60s, my younger brother and I were thrilled at the prospect of what was to be our first foreign holiday in the summer of 1970. The whole experience of air travel, unusual food and reliable hot weather made our first trip to Cala Murada on the east coast of Mallorca an unforgettable adventure.

My father had rented a villa for three weeks and I recall the excitement with which we explored “599, Jenny Dell” on our arrival. One abiding memory was of the milkman – Pepe Leche, as he was affectionately known – who would draw up in his van and ladle his slightly warm, creamy milk into earthenware jugs that customers would bring out to his churns to be filled.

Inevitably, despite trips to the beach and rainy-day excursions to the Caves of Drach in Porto Cristo, there were long periods of inactivity when it was just too hot to kick a football around or chase my brother through the orange groves. On one such occasion we were delighted to discover a record player and a few singles. I remember Edison Lighthouse’s Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes) being one disc and Sugar, Sugar by the Archies being another. Close neighbours would have to endure the constant repetition of these records, which would echo continually across the sun terrace, disturbing a number of siestas. I recall jumping, jiving and dancing around to these tracks, but my favourite was the strangely haunting Nautilus by B Bumble and the Stingers on the B-side of Nut Rocker. For this ghostly, underwater bubbling melody we used to put on our flippers, diving masks and snorkels and “swim” around the villa until my brother and I fell on each other and dissolved into fits of laughter, before returning the needle to the start to begin our “underwater” adventure all over again. Nigel Bagnall

We love to eat: Bosun’s breakfast

Ingredients (serves two)
Olive oil
A very small onion, finely chopped
Two rashers of bacon cut into small pieces
1 tin of sardines in oil, drained, bones removed, and lightly broken up with a fork
Vinegar and black pepper
One or two slices of toast per person

Gently heat a tablespoon of oil. Sauté the onion until soft and translucent. Add the bacon and cook until done. Add the sardines and mix well until heated through. Season with a little vinegar and black pepper and pile on to the toast.

On 2 October 1915, a week after his 14th birthday, my father, Fred Isaacson, came to London fresh from the Cambridgeshire countryside, to work as a messenger boy with the Nelson Line shipping company in Leadenhall Street in the City. He was told to arrive at 8am. His uncle, with whom he was lodging in Seven Kings, took him on the first day. At the office, he was immediately despatched in the care of the current messenger boy to Fenchurch Street station to catch the 8.15am train to the docks. The job entailed a twice daily journey collecting and delivering messages between the company’s Highland ships and the office, for which he was paid 10 shillings a week.

He gradually worked his way through the stores department, inward freight and eventually the passenger department as sub head in 1924. He remained with the company, later Royal Mail, all his working life.

When he and my mother married in 1935, their honeymoon was spent on the company’s cruise ship. Various mementoes of that unforgettable experience surfaced from time to time during the war years, one of these being a small paper booklet of recipes, mostly for delicacies unimaginable in those straitened times and all with suitably nautical names. One of the more feasible was this unlikely but very tasty combination of sardines and bacon. My mother, desperate for something for a Saturday tea on wartime rations, decided to try it. It has been a family favourite ever since. Gillian Figures

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