It was music that brought Geoff and Wendy Smith together and it remains at the heart of their relationship as they celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary on Christmas Eve.
Wendy was just 16, she recalls, when 17-year-old Geoff joined the ballroom dance school where she danced.
Before long the pair were moving together to waltzes, foxtrots, quicksteps, tangos, sambas and jives.
“Our favourite dance wasn’t the tango!” Wendy laughs. “Geoff used to tread on my feet, and we’d end up walking off the floor, and everyone would laugh at us.”
They loved to waltz though, and Nat King Cole’s song with the lyric ‘they tried to tell us we’re too young’ remains a favourite today.
Songs from the popular musicals at the time - South Pacific, Carousel and Oklahoma – were their soundtrack as they glided or jived their way around the room, sometimes dancing with the formation team and competing against other dance schools.
Now living at Summerset Richmond Range retirement village, Wendy, 90, lives in a villa while Geoff, 91, has moved into the care centre due to Alzheimer’s.
Music still moves him though.
‘I see his feet moving and tapping time. Music is wonderful for people with Alzheimer’s.”
The couple married on Christmas Eve in 1955 because it was one of the few opportunities they had to wed. They were aged 20 and 21 by then and Geoff was doing compulsory national service, so only had a few days leave from the military base.
It was a hectic day as they prepared to get married in their hometown of Isleworth in England, with no refrigeration back then to buy perishable food beforehand and the public also busy buying food for Christmas.
“It was very inconvenient!” Wendy says.
“In the morning, it was dry - we went into the church, and it was still dry – but when we came out it was pouring with rain. Then afterwards, it snowed.It was beautiful. We didn’t have a honeymoon – we had two days before Geoff had to go back to camp. Then I didn’t see him until he came home at Easter.”
Geoff completed his National Service with the Royal Air Force where he trained as an electrician, returning home for good when their first child Alan was five months old. Earning just one pound a week as an apprentice with the RAF left little room to save and the couple were living in a flat that was not supposed to have children.
Both worked evenings to buy their first home - a two-bedroom attached house that was bursting at the seams by the time they had two more children, Kevin and then Cheryl, crowded into one small bedroom.
“It was always ‘Which bill do we pay this week?’ But it didn’t do us any harm.”
The secret to their long marriage, she says, is talking.
“We’ve never argued much. It’s give and take. Sometimes you give and sometimes you take - and then stop and think. And I hate arguments!”
The couple have nine grandchildren and five great-grandchildren and moved to New Zealand 11 years ago to be near their daughter Cheryl and her family.
Cheryl has organised a “quiet celebration” of their wedding anniversary in Summerset’s lounge.
