Wife

 

That's my missus - Shirley. We got married in the same year as Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer - 1981 - so we will be celebrating our forty fifth wedding anniversary in October.

She was a young nurse when I first met her and I was a slightly older young teacher. We have stuck together through thick and thin, including health and money issues, raising two wonderful children and now jointly experiencing the special joys of grandparenthood.

Let me say this about Shirley. She was a brilliant, devoted mother and is now a wonderful grandmother. The little ones love her completely. She is practical and attentive when it comes to their toileting, laundry and emotional needs. Partly because of her own rural upbringing with a mother who was a stay-at-home farmer's wife and partly because of her old-fashioned nurse training, she is unflappable, pragmatic and naturally caring.

All of our married life, she has taken charge of the laundry - the washing, the drying, the ironing, the folding, the putting away. She would not have had it any other way, considering it to be a wife, mother and grandmother's duty.

More than once she has said to me that if she hadn't been a nurse, she would have loved to run a launderette. It's not that I was ever against doing my fair share of the laundering but Shirley would have been very resistant to such an arrangement. She needed to do it all herself and as well as recognising my good fortune in that regard, I am enormously grateful for all she has done for me.

John Wesley, the co-founder of Methodism, is credited with the observation that  "cleanliness is next to godliness". In that respect he would have approved of Shirley's personal habits. He might also have admired the fact that she grew up just four miles from where he was born and raised in Epworth, North Lincolnshire. In fact, that is where she went to school.

Through almost forty five years of marriage, her personal hygiene has been remarkable. No foul odours or evidence of bodily processes - ever. Showers or baths every day. No smelly socks or noxious armpits. I wish I could claim the same about me. I have tested her tolerance at times. 

One morning, about ten years ago, as daylight was filtering into our bedroom and I was stirring from my slumber, she said, "I think I am going to start a new Women's Institute... There are plenty of women around my age who would get a lot from it."

Ten years later, that Women's Institute group meets monthly in Banner Cross Methodist Church. It has forty regular members and there is a waiting list for others who might wish to join it. They have enjoyed so much fun together, so many educational evenings and they have raised a lot of money for worthy local charities. However, I wonder how many of those women realise that their thriving W.I. branch began with an idea that was hatched in a lightening bedroom a decade ago.

Shirley is a special woman with many friends. Last month, she celebrated her sixty seventh birthday and received more than forty birthday cards.  She has "been there" for many of those friends, standing by them in times of personal crisis, providing a kind, listening ear.

The other man's grass may always be greener but I know that I was lucky to have found Shirley back in December 1979, lucky that she agreed to marry me, lucky that she gave birth to our children, lucky that she stood by me through the years in the full knowledge that I am not not the easiest man to live with. I have many  faults but she understands I cannot stop being who I am.  And these are the principal reasons why I still love her.