They just don’t make love stories like this any more.
It was 1942, at a dance in the Yorkshire Dales, when Jean and Douglas Dickinson first laid eyes on each other.
She was Yorkshire-born and bred; he had been stationed there as a captain in the British Army.
Five weeks later, the two lovebirds were engaged.
Then World War II erupted and for the next four years, Douglas was sent all over the world to fight.
The pair spent those four years writing letters to one another, but there were long stretches of time when the couple didn’t hear from one another.
Three other men asked Jean for her hand in marriage during that time, but absence made her heart grow fonder and she waited for her Douglas to come back.
“I didn’t know whether he was alive or dead,” she recalls.
“Then the war ended, and he rang me up and said he was coming from Coventry to Yorkshire, and he would like to meet me.
“I met him, and we went to the movies, and after that we went for a walk, and I went home to my parents and said, ‘I’m going to get married’.”
Jean and Douglas wed shortly after, on November 30, 1946.
Last week, among family and friends, they celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary at Manor Court Werribee Aged Care.
The Dickinsons, who went on to have three children, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, started off their married lives in England then spent 40 years in New Zealand before moving to Werribee in 1995.
Jean, now 92, said the secret to a happy marriage was to marry a man who travelled a lot for work.
“Just as you’ve had enough, they go away, and when he gets home, you fall into his arms because you’ve missed him so much,” she says with a laugh.
“But really, tolerance and forgiveness, on both sides.”
Douglas, 98, adds: “Compromise. If I want to do one thing, and she wants to do something different, we do what she wants to do.”
