I have been up to North Wales a few times to stay with Stan and Eunice and to visit Barbara. Once while I was there he ran a Charity Whist Drive for the Rotary Club. As we were clearing up afterwards I got talking to a man and his wife, and after a few minutes I said to him "I can tell that your wife is a local Welsh lady, but although you speak very good English with a local accent I think you are a Pole." He said "Quite right. I came here as a refugee just after the War and stayed at Mrs Brown's Hotel for some time, helping out. Then I got a job in a wireless shop, and now I have my own Radio and Television business here." A penny dropped. "Why, you must be George. At home I've got a photograph taken about forty years ago at a Christmas party in the Hotel Sitting Room. You are standing between me and Stan, who is pretending to be Napoleon Buonaparte. We are all wearing paper hats and surrounded by children." "That sounds possible" he said "but who are you? I've never seen a photograph like that." I explained that I was Marjorie's husband, and it all came back to him. Just then Stan came over and said that he thought he had a copy at home but hadn't seen it for years. We all went back to his bungalow and Eunice found it at the bottom of a cardboard box in a cupboard. Now George has it and after all these years his wife knows what he looked like as a young man.

George had been in one of the Russian internment camps which I mentioned before, and at the age of sixteen had been released through the intervention of the British Ambassaddor, finishing up in Egypt where he joined the reformed Polish Army. He had been in a sister A.A. Regiment to the one I was attached to and had never been very far away from me in Italy.

The previous night we had been to the Clwyd Theatre at Mold to see a play. One of the Studios there is dedicated to Emiyn Williams who was born nearby and went to a local school. When the leading lady, Googie Withers, made her first entrance my heart nearly stopped. She looked just like Marjorie, same height, same fair hair, and wearing a long blue floating dress with long sleeves. About ten years before we had been in Llandudno when I saw a similar dress in a shop window. "Let's go in and see if it fits" I said. It did. The shop assistant said they had it in pink, would Madam like to see? Madam would, but couldn't decide which one to have. So I bought both of them. TWO DRESSES IN THE SAME DAY! Never been known before. They were what I used to call 'your floaty dresses.'

Like all women she liked new clothes but always had trouble in choosing, particularly in later years when trying them on tired her out lifting her arms. She would get frustrated and after trying just two would tend to give up so it was often left to me or Gay to decide what to try in the first place and then tell her what suited her best. Otherwise she was just as likely to give up and say "I don't really want anything." She had a permanent quest for a particular kind of handbag with special pockets which she called a 'Peggy Bag' and was always walking in and out of shops without any luck. One day when she wasn't with me I went into a Dunstable shop to buy a wallet and told the assistant about the search. She came from Lancashire and said "I know what that is, we've got one or two hidden away somewhere." I bought one and gave it to Marjorie when I got home. "At last" she said. But she died two weeks later and never used it. I have given it to one of the girls.

She loved watching the birds in the garden. She wasn't an expert and didn't want to go to places like Minsmere and sit in a 'Hide' all day. She never wanted a pair of binoculars, but when I was due for my forty years presentation from British Gas she looked at the list of gifts and suggested that I should ask for a pair. Instead I selected a gold ladies' wristwatch without telling her and gave it to her when I got home, in its case. "What is it?" "Open it and see. It works out at tuppence a day of happy married life."

When we came to Dunstable there was a dead tree on the back lawn, outside the French windows. Most people would have cut it down for firewood but as a loyal employee I had a gas fire. Instead we hung it about with nut bags, coconut shells and pieces of fat so that she could enjoy watching the birds. In the end it fell down in a high wind, but that was always on the cards, and a year or so previously I had planted a small plum tree nearer to the kitchen window where she could have a better view, and now it's just right, not too tall.

All kinds of birds came, nothing very exotic, a magpie now and then, sometimes a jay. A pair of ring-collared pigeons were regular visitors, and still are. There was a one-legged cock blackbird who came for many years, but after she died I saw him no more. The ones she liked best were the tomtits, who used to try to raise a family in our bird box on the fence, but always left because of the cats. The box is now surrounded by winter jasmine and the cats can't get at it. As I am writing this a pair of tits are flying in and out, even though it is early February and there is a heavy frost and six inches of snow on the lawn. Two or three years ago the cats frightened off a nesting pair and after a time I looked inside the box and found nine or ten eggs, stone cold. The nameplate by the front doors bears a tomtit. We never thought of calling the house 'Tomtit Manor' or anything like that.

One of the minor problems of being on my own is that it is difficult to find single room accommodation in overseas hotels. It seems that these holiday hotels are specifically designed with double rooms for couples, ignoring the fact that in England alone there are more than two million single people of my generation. Also, it is usual to have to pay a supplement, as much as £15 a night in some places in Madeira, Italy and the Canary Islands.

My travel agent in Dunstable is very good and has always managed to find me a good hotel with everything I need. So in the last two years I have been to Madeira, Portugal, three times to the Canary Islands, and twice to Sorrento. This year I have already booked for Tenerife to a new four-star hotel which I have watched being built over the past four years; to Portugal, Greece and Crete. I had been booked for Cyprus but when the Gulf War started I changed it for Rhodes.

Apart from that I have been to several places in Britain - a few days midweek break here, a full week there. Hereford/Worcestershire twice, Devon, Yorkshire twice, Boston (Lincs), Cornwall, Blackpool (for Eighth Army Reunion). On these trips I follow my hobby of photographing War Memorials - I now have over two thousand pictures. The Imperial War Museum in Lambeth is currently surveying the whole country for memorials in any shape or form because many of them are unofficial and often only consist of a tablet in a church, put up by local people. So they have started to copy my collection, and I have an arrangement to have copies made at the time of developing in future to make it easier for them. For instance, in my recent trip to Cornwall I must have photographed over sixty in small village churches which the Museum probably did not know existed.

Another project is to record the family history (of which these pages are a part) and this has taken me into several County Record Archive Offices looking for clues. I am nearly back into the eighteenth century for the Saggers family, but disappointingly most of them seemed to be farm labourers who could not write. 'X his/her mark' seems to figure quite a lot. As for the Sporne family I can't really get back into the nineteenth century and neither can contemporary Spornes who are doing the same thing. I have met some of them. We are all doing the same thing - asking Aunt Ruby in Scotland, aged eighty-four, who is the only source of information, and must have spent a lot of money on stamps and writing paper - answering questions from all directions.

On one of my trips when I went to see my childhood/school chum Dick Toogood in Dorset, our conversation turned to dancing. It turned out that while I was in the Army, before I met Marjorie, he and I were unknowingly sharing the same girl friend, writing to her and going to dances on leave. He went to a bookcase and pulled out a diary which she had given him as a Christmas present.

This girl had been a regular partner of mine at local dances and we were quite good together. She deserted us both and had an unfortunate marriage, which Dick told me about. Her husband had fallen seriously ill within a few years and died.

As a young man-about-village I quite enjoyed dancing and went several nights a week (when not at night school) with a regular party or in a group. Dances were mostly held in church halls or public halls and of course were 'dry'. You had to go out to the pub during the interval to get a drink, and dancing never started seriously until you all came back. The Tottenham Palais de Dance and a few other places were specially designed and had a sprung sycamore floor and a restaurant, and cost more to go to (two shillings or more instead of sixpence or ninepence at the church halls) but the bands were better.

For one short, forgettable, period when I was about seventeen, our professional M.C. at Dad's Cheshunt Hall was ill and I took his place at Dad's command. I really wasn't any good at that job but there were compensations. Nobody else could start to dance until I took the floor, and I got first choice of partner. When I say that our M.C. was a professional, what I really mean is that Dad gave him a pound, or ten bob, something of that order. I never found out because all I got was a free cup of tea and a sandwich, and couldn't go over to the pub with my mates. (Life was hard in those days). Unlike me, he always wore full evening dress, white tie and tails, white gloves, and was quite a good dancer. He was the Co-op milkman.

I can see a vision of a regular patron, Stan Tisbury. He was a year or so older than me, short, thick pebble glasses, not quite all there, full evening dress with tails, white tie and gloves, and a handkerchief to protect the girls' shoulders, and a complete pain in the neck. The more desirable girls whom he favoured with his attentions got up to all kinds of tricks to pull his leg, or to avoid him - often going over to the pub at an early stage in the evening. There was no way they would meet him there, he took his dancing (which included conversation) too seriously.

Marjorie loved dancing and was better than me. We didn't seem to 'gell' at all on a dance floor, which was a disappointment for her. We never danced together since my Chairman's Dinner at Yarmouth when I was stricken with a slipped disc for the whole of the three day meeting. She had some 'duty' dances with the Board Chairman and the Mayor of Great Yarmouth and some other colleagues, but we left the function early.

It was on the way back from a dance at 'Sharp's' near Holywell when Marjorie crashed her first car.