‘Will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?’ he asked. Madge had half opened the present but was puzzled because it certainly didn’t feel like a ring and she began to wonder what on earth was actually in the delicate velvet bag. She shook the contents into her hand and out came three glittering diamonds. She placed her other hand over her mouth in surprise before beaming with joy.
‘Basil . . . This is the most romantic and thoughtful thing that’s ever happened to me,’ she said. ‘It would be a privilege to become your wife.’
Madge decided that there must be many, many wives who wished their fiancés had done exactly the same thing instead of being given rings that they secretly didn’t like. But Madge was able to choose the setting that she really wanted.
A wedding date was set for the following October at St Mary’s, an old Anglican church in Horsell, Woking. Stringent clothes rationing was still in force and there had even been a reduction from sixty coupons to forty-eight, but even when you had enough coupons clothes were difficult to buy. It was no secret, then, that everything was borrowed. Madge was loaned a beautiful, full-length wedding gown of white crepe with a figure-hugging bodice and a long lace veil with real camellia flowers that accentuated the elegant A-line skirt. Her sisters Doris and Doreen won admiring glances in their borrowed fuchsia-coloured bridesmaid’s dresses. (When Madge and Basil returned from their honeymoon they decided they wanted to keep the dresses, in remembrance of their wonderful day, and paid their kind benefactor for them.)
Madge was hopelessly nervous as she approached the altar on the arm of Basil’s father Herbert, who was giving her away. As she knelt alongside her bridegroom, Basil turned to her and said, ‘You look absolutely beautiful, Madge. Do you know, I was just told about one of our wedding presents. Can you believe we’ve been given six green beer mugs from George Woodman!’ It was a strange thing to say at the altar, Madge thought, but it made her smile and the jitters started to disappear.
When the reception was underway Madge’s ‘new dad’ Herbert gave a speech in which he expressed great pride in the way Madge and Basil had served their country in the Burma Campaign.
‘Madge’s father Charles served in India in the Great War,’ said Herbert, ‘and had he been able to see his eldest daughter married, he would have said the same thing.’ Basil’s father was far too modest to mention his own wartime service in France but continued by saying that he and his wife Alys were equally proud of the way every one of their children had rallied to the cause. ‘And it goes without saying that we are profoundly grateful that Bill, Buster, Beryl, Basil, Brian and Bob have all come home to us.’
Madge changed into a two-piece black bouclé suit, for which she had been saving clothing coupons for months, under which she wore a pale blue roll neck, long-sleeved sweater that she had knitted herself. She had splashed out on new black shoes when she and Basil had had that vague discussion about living together in London.
‘You look just as stunning as you did in your wedding outfit,’ exclaimed Grace. Sadly, Vera and Phyl had not been able to make the wedding because of travel complications.
‘Oh, doesn’t she just,’ Doris agreed.
‘Talk about something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,’ said Doreen. ‘You’ve got the lot!’
Basil had also switched from his Moss Bros morning suit and waistcoat and changed into his Montague Burton double-breasted demob suit.
‘I love that navy blue colour on you,’ Madge whispered to him. ‘You look ever so smart.’ She took her new husband’s hand and gave it a squeeze as they both smiled at each other affectionately.
As they left the Yorkshire Restaurant to catch the train from Woking to London for the first leg of their journey to Brighton, where they were going on honeymoon, they were hit with a blizzard of multi-coloured confetti. Just as they attempted to shake it all off on the platform, the whistle sounded and they hurriedly got into their compartment.
The train very quickly started to pick up speed as Basil tried to open the window in the hope that the draught would blow away the confetti that seemed to appear every time they moved. The window, however, was jammed so he decided to open the train door just a teeny-weeny bit to get rid of the confetti once and for all. It worked, but in doing so the train’s emergency braking system was triggered and the Woking to Waterloo express screeched to a bone-shaking halt.
A moment later an irate guard was stumping through the train carriages to see who had caused the problem. Fortunately when he saw Madge and Basil, who were obviously newly-weds, he simply gave them a very cheery wave as he walked past and searched elsewhere for the culprit. Basil waved back and Madge blew him a kiss before resting her head on Basil’s shoulder.
‘Hello, husband,’ she said, looking up at him with a smile.
‘Hello, wife,’ he replied, smiling back.
Then they fell into a contented silence as they gazed out of the window at a country no longer at war.
How different things are now from when Basil and I first met, thought Madge. But whatever life may throw at us in the future, at least we will always have each other.
Their life together was just beginning.
Epilogue
Nothing could have prepared Madge for the extraordinary events she would experience after she responded to Lord Mountbatten’s appeal for nurses to serve in the Burma Campaign. She didn’t even know if she would make it back to England, but many years later, as she celebrated her ninety-fourth birthday on 24 July and her sixty-ninth wedding anniversary on 16 October 2017, she said there was a very simple reason why she would do it all again.
‘If I
