We had our celebration a little early, on 2 April. It was a lovely day and a lovely venue, the Ransom Vineyard just south of Warkworth. All our family showed up, and other relatives and friends... a happy occasion. Someone suggested I put my speech on the blog. It seems harmless...
Mainly, Mary and I have a sense of wonder that, almost 50 years following that ceremony on 13 May 1961, we are both still here and still happily together, showing our age and wounds perhaps in some ways, but still with most of our marbles and our sense of irony and the ridiculous, and our love. We are still capable of some faith and wisdom, and still glad of what we once upon a time called the holy estate of matrimony.
One of our grand-daughters informed Mary the other day that she does look like a grandmother in the face, but the rest of her still looks normal. It is a huge gift that we continue loving friends with our three children and our grandchildren. And it is very satisfying to note that this achievement is shared in their own cases by others of our friends and relatives present today, who were married in those days, long ago.
Generally speaking, at that time, we assumed that you got married and you stayed married, one way or another, unless it was a real calamity -- and even then sometimes. The number of times in ministry one has encountered a marriage which had found some modus operandi, but which was nevertheless a marriage which should never have happened in the first place... There were plenty of those. I came across a rather nice passage from G K Chesterton, written in 1902, in an essay entitled, “A Defence of Rash Vows”. Chesterton assumed that marriage vows, by their nature are rash. Well, anyone exchanging marriage vows with Gilbert Keith Chesterton was indeed rash. He would send his wife a telegram which read, “Am in Bognor Regis. Where should I be?” Anyway, this is what he wrote:
The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words -- “Free Love” -- as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.
For the record... We were married on 13 May 1961, at St Andrew’s Church, Symonds Street, Auckland, by the Rev George Jeffreys. George Jeffreys was a fine minister and friend, and I remember him most fondly today. I had introduced George to his wife Ngaire, and so it was the least he could do for us. Mary and I were living in Dunedin at that time, and we arrived in Auckland only in time for last minute dress fittings and all that. That is by far the best way to do it. If they want you to have a large wedding, an inter-tribal agglutination, something between an Indian Durbah and the Congress of Vienna, for your wedding, then my advice is to do what we did -- stay at the other end of the country, or perhaps in the Falkland Islands, and show up at the last minute, adopt an air of silly bewilderment, and absolutely veto one or two things at the outset. I must have got a new suit from somewhere -- I really don’t remember that, let alone how I paid for it. Our wedding was attended by 15 thousand people including some somewhat unhinged distant cousins and National Party stalwarts.
Mary looked lovely -- I do remember that -- otherwise, I was hanging out to get out of there. We were seriously broke. Mary was still a student for another two years, and I was on an assistant minister’s stipend and had yet to be introduced to concepts such as saving and budgeting.
Over these 50 years we have lived in Dunedin; in Browns Bay briefly; in Whitehill and then in Carfin, both in Lanarkshire, Scotland; in Mairangi Bay; in Timaru; in Suva, Fiji; in Ellerslie, and then in what the land agents called Onehunga Heights during 15 years at St Peter’s, Ellerslie-Mt Wellington -- and finally here at Algies Bay.
We produced our children, each one of whom is different from the others, mercifully you might think different from us, and indeed from all the rest of humanity. They have produced their children, and I guess the generations will proceed. We have been blessed -- which is one way of putting it -- by the clamorous presence of our grandchildren these last two weeks.
Mary found she was able to do things the way she preferred, over the years. So she was a full time mother until we were living in Suva and Rachel went to school, and then she sought a job at the Suva public hospital. She asked them not to be thrown in at the deep end, so they put her in emergency medicine, and Mary came home and said to me this is not a good time to be having an accident in Suva.
When we came back to Auckland she completed a postgraduate Diploma in Obstetrics. That was quite enough to convince both her and us not to pursue obstetrics. So Peter Herdson, a fine doctor and pathologist, persuaded Mary to sign on for the 5-year course for the Fellowship of the Royal College of Pathology Australasia -- which she got in 5 years, and proceeded as a specialist thereafter at Middlemore Hospital until retirement in 2009. A couple of years before her retirement she was named Distinguished Pathologist by her College, and there is a medal to prove it. I am very proud of what Mary has done.
There are so many important people here with us today. But first I want to honour some who were at that wedding in 1961, but whom we don’t see today. Mary’s parents, and mine... Aunts, uncles and friends... That day we even managed to visit my Scottish grandmother, Leonora Miller, who was able to get to the church but not to the reception. We called on her at the rest home in One Tree Hill. I think that might have been the last time we saw her.
It is wonderful that we have Margaret and Heitia Hiha with us, all the way from Napier.
And of course, this occasion was a reason for our offspring and their families to arrive. Lex and family came out of Japan at a time of huge anxiety there. Rhys and family came from Queensland, and although they were not directly affected by the floods, they certainly saw what happened around the Brisbane River. And of course we have Rachel and family here too.
Our dear cousin Joan Bell has come from her home in Cumbria in the UK, and it is wonderful to see Joan again. My sisters, Marilyn and Barbara are here, with Lionel and Noel. My brother Duncan has come from Brisbane with Genevieve. And my brother Morris has come. It is all good. It is also, I may say, all a great deal more than I ever imagined I was letting myself in for when I feebly agreed to what Mary called a small celebration.
Mary’s cousins Mary and Terry Boyd are here, Judith and Chris Parry, Helen and Don Fletcher...
Then there are our friends -- Barrie and Robin MacCuish, Peter and Barbara Wedde, Graeme Ferguson, Marjory Ramage, and from Wellington, Judith Aitken, with whom we have shared much over these years. (Actually, Judith set out to come from Wellington, but got foiled by Jetstar who cancelled her flight.) We had a message from Kim and Lola Bathgate, in Christchurch, who wanted to be here but had an earthquake.
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