Experience: I said yes to marriage the first time we met (original) (raw)

April 14 1958. It was a warm, balmy day and I was sitting on the grass in Jackson Square Park, in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana. I had quit my safe, somewhat dull job in a bank on Wall Street and joined the hippy trail to New Orleans and a life that enabled me to live as a will-o'-the-wisp. Working for a dollar an hour (my job was to sit in a shop and sell paintings to tourists) when it suited me, eating my way free through the supermarket (mostly bananas), and sometimes sleeping in the park, I was free of all responsibilities. I suppose I'd have been considered a hippy, but to myself I wasn't. I was existing the best way I knew how, which was to do, and be, nothing. I felt I had no identity and I could go wherever the wind blew me.

Louisiana captivated me in a way that nowhere else on this earth has ever done. It was like returning to a place I had always known but where the memory had faded and only echoes remained.

So I was sitting in the park, reading my book (Rilke, as it happened) and trying to discourage a dope-smoking chap who wanted company, when into the park walked the handsomest man I had ever seen; very tall, with blond curls falling over his forehead and a strange, angling gait. Everyone in the French Quarter wore sneakers or flip-flops, or went barefoot. But he was wearing brogues with steel tips, and it was their click-clicking that made me look up. As he sat on a bench nearby, I said to my nuisance friend, "I'll bet you he is English," to which he replied, "Why don't you ask him?" So I did.

"Excuse me," I said, "I have just made a bet with my friend that you are English."

He looked up and said, "Yes, as a matter of fact, I am."

We drifted out of the park to the nearest bar. We talked and talked and drank; we drank far into the night and into the next day. Nothing ever closes in the French Quarter, and it was easy for days to become nights, nights to become days. It seemed we had known each other for ever. He charmed me by the force of his personality, which was a mixture of diffidence and certainty.

I was 24 and had never had a boyfriend. The very idea of a relationship with a man terrified me. Yet here I was, totally at ease with a beautiful stranger. When we finally emerged into the daylight 48 hours later, it was for a brief walk to his hotel. We fell into bed and my tightly clad chastity belt flew out of the window like a released bird. And we laughed. How we laughed.

Later that evening, sitting in Poppa Joe's, listening to jazz - it was by now the third day of our meeting - Nicholas asked me to marry him. My reply was to get up and select on the jukebox Sarah Vaughn singing I'm Glad There Is You.

I introduced Nicholas to dear friends Janet and Lester, and, bemused as they were by our decision to marry, they quickly rejoiced with us. With their help - they had a car - we drove to Gulfport, Mississippi, and married on April 20, the day before Nicholas's 24th birthday. I had no ring and borrowed Janet's. On the drive back to New Orleans, we came across a funfair and our first wedding present was a ride on the carousel. Nicholas sent a telegram to his family, but in economising missed out a word: "Married English today. Letter following."

It wouldn't have occurred to me to think, "I wonder what I'm doing," or "I wonder if it will last." It was all so magical. Two weeks later, we took the train to New York and sailed back to England on the Queen Mary.

When I said goodbye to my boss, the one who employed me for a dollar an hour, he asked what I knew about my new husband. I told him his family had a huge dairy company in Yorkshire. "Oh, yeah," he said, "You'll get there and find he has a shack on the moors and one cow." I sent him a postcard from Yorkshire, where we were to set up home, saying, "There's more than one cow here."

Forty-eight years on, we have three children and one grandchild. My youngest son, now 37, and my daughter, 45, both visited New Orleans and sat in Jackson Park, my daughter hoping the same thing would happen to her, my son because he felt his roots were there.

Nicholas died last year. He was the love of my life. I'm still here, and full of gratitude, and sadness.

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