Nuptials

After our six months of writing affectionate letters to each other - some of which will appear in the e-book version of my memoirs - Wendy came back to Adelaide. I drove to Melbourne to collect her at the airport, and brought her back to Adelaide in my little Morris Minor. My recollection is that we didn't stop talking the whole way across, although if my life depended on it I couldn't recall  now what we said to each other. I think I tried to give Wendy an advance briefing about my family, forewarning her of the aunts, uncles and cousins she would soon be meeting, and my mother too of course, although she had met my mother briefly, and they had written to each other.

Wendy in the garden, 238 Melbourne Street North Adelaide,
August 16, 1956, the day we announced our engagement

Leaving the Chapel after our wedding

We got officially engaged to be married on August 16 1956. I asked Wendy to marry me the previous evening when we were in the midst of a steamy session of necking, petting, or whatever other word can be used to describe the ways loving couples express their affection for each other. Next day I took my all time favourite photo of her, against a background of the spring blossoms in the garden of my mother's home at 238 Melbourne Street, North Adelaide.

Signing the Marriage Registry

I'm repeating myself if I reminisce about our wedding day. I've posted photos of the event and I'll illustrate this instalment with a few of the same pictures.  It  was a scorching hot day, temperature already in the 90s (Fahrenheit) when I got up and started to clean the car before breakfast. I managed to lacerate my thumb, so had to visit the Western Clinic and get two stitches and the bandage that is visible in some of the wedding photos. I must mention that Wendy made her own wedding dress, made it on the old treadle sewing machine in the nurses' residence at the Adelaide Children's Hospital. (Two years after we married I bought her a Singer electric sewing machine, which she used for the next 50 years to make most of her own clothes, and the children's clothes when they were young, occasionally clothes for me).   

The temperature reached 104 F on our wedding day, but during the wedding service a south-west breeze brought welcome relief from the heat, so our reception was pleasantly cool, even if the candles on our wedding table remained askew because the heat earlier in the day had softened them.

Cutting our wedding cake

We had our honeymoon at Lorne, a resort on the south coast of Victoria about 150 Km west of Melbourne, went on to Melbourne at the end of our honeymoon to see Pop Wendelken safely on his way back to New Zealand, then turned back  to Adelaide, where at that time we fully expected to spend the rest of our lives, I as a family doctor, Wendy beside me as my helpmate and leading support in the practice.

But life seldom works out as expected, and ours certainly didn't.  Instead, it soon became far more interesting and worth while in ways we never would have imagined possible if we'd thought of them when we married or during the first two rather stormy years of our married lives together.