When it comes to love, how do you really know that you have been smitten?
1978 was a year when I made a commitment. I was only nineteen years of age. It’s the age when people went to fight in Vietnam according to Paul Hardcastle. It was the year of the movie " Grease" and those Olivia Neutron Bomb, leather trousers; which girls still seem to want to wear. today ?
John T also made it big in Saturday Night Fever, the Bee Gees had numerous hits from that film and so everything was D I SC O.
However, it was at age eighteen, when I finally experienced the infamous night life I had heard about through my older friends or saw on those TV shows. Because, at eighteen you can drink legally - at least in the U.K. you can!
Being eighteen is fun. It’s sweaty, and it’s kind of expensive, so you save what little you get as wages for drunken nights coming home in a taxi and probably going for a Chinese or a pizza…tons of drunk pizza. It is also the age where you fall head over heels in love, or at least it was for me.
If you’ve ever wondered what true love really is, you’re not the only one.
Love is, I think, wonderful. It makes you feel warm and your insides get all whoosh and your heart flutters. It feels good to give it and receive it.
Of course there are many forms of love. True love is not like parental love, although when a child decides to leave or goes all out awful on you and becomes estranged, it does tug at the heart strings.
It’s also not like the love one has for a pet either. But, events in an animal’s short life span can make you shed ‘breakup tears’. You know, when something happens to them; usually when they die after the “dog years” take their toll or your pet hamster rolls down the twelve stairs, pushed accidentally by one of your beloved children. You then end up, writing an eulogy for "Scarlett the beloved Hamster". Saying burial prayers over a shoebox. You then are forced , by parental nature, to bury the animal in the garden. Standing alongside with the kids, who murdered them, weeping consistently throughout the day.
Back to being in love.
I met Jenny in the summer of 1977. The year of the late Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee. She threw beer over me at the Bell, a pub, in the town of Helston, Cornwall.
Actually, everybody was throwing beer over everyone. It was a sort of fun day ashore celebrating the time and our medals with my sailor mates - remember the stone frigate in my previous blog ?
Well here I was, at RNAS Culdrose. I was eighteen years of age and about to go front line on HMS Hermes. I had come of age, drinking,(and throwing) beer and daring to ask a girl out, a girl who threw beer over me?
If it had been done in West London, where I grew up, it would have been different and the lot of us would have ended up in jail. But this was Helston, Cornwall and the landlords seemed to enjoy the fun.
Jenny had joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service or WRNS, pronounced Wrens, in 1977,. She was an Air Mechanic, like me. It has ceased to exist as an organisation and more than one Wren together like those in the Bell that day was termed a “wriggle of Wrens”. The Wrennery is where the girls lived and I lads walked some of them home regularly and if you got caught outside having intimate relations with one, you would likely spend a night in cells.
I remember an event after a walk and romp at the Culdrose Wrennery. A few weeks after a late night out at a disco and a walk home. I began to experience a tremendous earache. In a week or angst and pain, It was no use, I had to go to the Sick-Bay, (a collection of medical buildings in a shore establishment). There was a sort of stigma about going to the Sick-Bay. If you went often enough you were called "a sickbay ranger" by your mates and if you were put on meds (tablets), you were called "rattling jack." My pain was excruciating, so, I decided, enough was enough. After good look into my aural canal, the Doc decided that he would syringe my ear out and to my surprise and embarrassment out.....came....... a fern?
So to avoid getting caught, 'romping around in the local foliage', most activities happened ashore . But of course "stone frigates" deployed shore patrols. A special duty watch, who policed "jack" and "jenny" while on shore leave, often protecting them from assault and injury or other misdemeanours they might make against the Naval Discipline Act of 1957, later amended in the eighties and now replaced by the Armed Forces Act of 2008.
There are so many pubs in Helston. A great run ashore. As you enter the town, The Bell Inn is first, then the Bee Hive around the corner into Meneage Street.
Across the road from there is the Red Lion. Further down the road is the Angel Hotel, (where Hell’s Stone is). Then, there is The Rodney and finally -the Blue Anchor; the home of the famous ‘Spingo’ cider, ugh, I can taste the lumps in the stuff just writing this!
We got to talking, Jenny and I. We fell in love and I married her in Helston registry office a year later in the July of 1978.
In the charts were Andy Williams, Darts and Nick Lowe and ABBA was No.1 with Take a Chance on me, an apt ode to someone like me.
The first thing I noticed about Jenny was that she was kind of a cute and a good-looking person. By the end of the year we were going out , as Mickey Flanagan often says, but not “out out”.
I was doing my front line service on 814 squadron attached to HMS Hermes. The Sea King HAS.2 was introduced in 1977, making the squadron the first in the Royal Navy to operate a helicopter with passive sonar equipment. 814 NAS relocated from Prestwick, (HMS Gannet), to Royal Naval Air Station (RNAS) Culdrose in Cornwall on 9 April 1976 and still is there. By the end of 1976 the unit strength had increased to nine helicopters and there were over 200 men in the squadron complement.
During our courting days, Jenny and I, like other lovers and wives and girlfriends wrote each other letters on those long and sometimes lonely deployments.
Letters that got stolen on one Mail Drop. Yep, things like that would always kind of happen, with so many people getting loads of mail and others not getting any. Mine were never found after reporting it to the regulators, (naval policemen), and it upset me deeply that my privacy had been fractured.
I consider the things people have today in technology and all we had for communication. was a phone box and pens and paper with stamps. Before the decimal system was in place in the UK, a standard stamp cost would be 5d. In 1971, that is less than 2p in new money. Today, the new money price of a first class stamp is £1.10p and a second class is £0.75p. It wasn't until 1979, when this rose to 10p,:so writing a letter didn’t cost that much.
When I got back to base , in Cornwall, and after 4 months of being away, I gave Jenny tell-tale giveaways that I was interested in getting married and invited her to meet my parents. Mutually, I met hers too, Jean and Pete Hall who lived in Telford Shropshire.
She would always correct me on pronouncing her birthplace, Shrewsbury, as Shrowsberry. So do you say Shrewsbury or Shrowsbury? The answer is...er...both. Apparently, the traditional pronunciation of the 'ew' in Shrewsbury only survives in the word 'sew', and in earlier days the town's name was spelled Shroesbury or Shrowesbury, with the 'ow' pronounced as it is in 'show'. But you'll even hear the locals pronouncing it both ways, so in a way, everyone's right. But of course for, Jenny she was always right, women always are - aren't they?
The excitement of being in love is difficult to explain. We met each others parents first and at the train station, waiting for her to arrive with my dad, was making my heart go faster. Jenny’s parents lived in Telford, Shropshire and her sister was already engaged to a guy who looked like Feargal Sharkey, but not as cool. I think, each of our parents accepted that we loved each other by those meetings and at least, I wasn't as ugly a Feargal. At least, I didn't think so...
Our parents helped fund the wedding and we had a reception at the Lizard Hotel - now sadly closed.
I remember being so hungry , we both were so hungry around nine in the evening, we didn’t get any food at the reception, just drinks were seemingly on offer with light snacks on offer which everyone else ate and so we legged it to the Witchball Restaurant, (also now sadly closed);which was across the road from the reception and after a lovely steak meal we started our honeymoon, at the Lizard Hotel.
Jenny served as Wren Air Mechanic on 706 squadron until her uniform didn’t fit her anymore, I had finished my front line stint when we got married and we were later allowed a married quarter down the road from the Culdrose base.
The first year of marriage is hard. You think that love is still around you. I think, that you probably base love definitions of what you learnt in the past about relationships. Our parents were different and I think we base our love experiences on theirs, my mum and dad were constantly arguing but made up, mum threatening to leave after a particularly serious row, where dad would tell the oldest child to go find her and bring her back, But somehow, they stayed married for 63 years.
Jenny’s parents were more domicile and appeared to respect one another, they owned their own house and had decent jobs. They were though, lovely people. All have now sadly passed and the tears we shed demonstrate a different kind of love we had for them, a love for memories, kindness and respect for the period in time they had to live through to bring us into the world.
I also think love is influenced by romantic movies or love songs you watched or heard from your youth.
Films like “Love Story” and “The Way We Were” were popular in my growing up days and songs like “The Things We Do For Love” and “Just the way you are”, were charted.
Where love is described by Ryan O’ Neal as “never having to say your sorry” or when Barbra Streisand says to Robert Redford, “You'll never find anyone as good for you as I am, to believe in you as much as I do or to love you as much”.
In 10cc, the things we do for love were held in the chorus line:
Like walking in the rain and the snow
When there's nowhere to go
And you're feelin' like a part of you is dying
And you're looking for the answer in her eyes
You think you're gonna break up
Then she says she wants to make up
Or Billy Joel or Barry White singing:
I said I love you, that's forever
And this I promise from the heart, mmm
I couldn't love you any better
I love you just the way you are
We had a rough two years, living with each other. Neither of us had experienced actually being together for a longer time than a date. But, we got through it somehow. We must have done something right as our first child, a boy, Paul David was born on 6th January 1980 in Truro’s Treliske Hospital.
I couldn’t drive then and so had to get a bus home and spent some time alone before mother and baby were discharged.
In those days, mobile phones were not invented and a computer was called Mr Babbage, if you watched “family fortunes” in the early eighties. Family Fortunes was first hosted by comedian Bob Monkhouse (1980–83), followed by singer and entertainer Max Bygraves (1983–85) and that was the type of fun show we experienced and of course, there were only three tv channels.
Hard though it might be for some to believe, in 1982, when I got drafted back to HMS Daedalus to start Mechanicians and Petty Officer’s course, Britain had only three television channels - BBC 's 1 and 2 , and ITV . Home video recording was still young but we got a VHS recorder. The battle was between VHS and BETAMAX. You could rent a video from your local rental place for around £3.00 for the week or like a fool buy one to watch again and again. I was a fool who bought “Raiders of the Lost Ark” for £79. Today, it’s free on some streaming platform or other.
By 1982, I had been selected to go on "Mechanicians Course" where else, but HMS Daedalus.
This was potential promotion time from Leading Hand to Petty Officer and from Mechanic to Artificer, but that is another story. Guess who was on the main gate in 1982?
POEM
(Jenny Wren Bride - , to the tune of My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean)
Not One of Mine per se but adapted and given credit to go old Shep (ex PO Stoker turned entertainer for Jack and Jenny in the 70s- a reminder of the fun times us sailors experienced with our female counterparts. Listen Here
I've just come away from the wedding,
Oh Lord I could laugh till I cried.
I'll never forget the relations I met
When I married my Jenny Wren bride.
cho: Married, married, I married my Jenny Wren bri-iide,
Married, married, I married my Jenny Wren bride.
Her father he works in the dockyard,
Her brother he owns a Marine Store,
And as for their habits, well talk about rabbits
They've yot half the dockyard ashore.
I asked her old man for a dowry,
He gave me a can of soft soap,
A bundle of waste and some polishing paste
And fifty-six fathoms of rope.
The present we got from her brother
Was twenty-four yards of blue jean,
Her cousin, the crusher, he sent us note-paper,
Six packets ot Service Latrine.
Her family hung flags in the churchyard
And they painted the hallway with flatting,
When out steppcd the bride they all piped the side,
And she tripped on the coconut matting.
Her wedding-dress, lashed up with spunyarn,
Was made from an old whaler's sail.
On top of her head a dishcloth was spread,
With a spudnet in front for a veil.
Her pctticoat was made out of hessian,
Her knickers were made of green baize,
While for her suspenders she'd a motor-boat's fenders
And two pusser's gaiters for stays.
Now most of rhe church congregation
Was made up of Wrens on the dole
While in the back pew sat the six-inch gun's crew
And half of the standing patrol. '
The parson got up in the pulpit.
He said, "Who gives this woman away?"
Thcn a bloke from the Hood whispered: "Blimey, I could,
But let every dog have its day."
Well now, I'm just off on me honeymoon,
I don't know what happens tonight,
But I've spoke to a few who declare that they do,
And they swear she's a bit of all right.