‘I married my teenage sweetheart and 56 years later we’re still going strong’

On the February 7, 1962, I was on my way to Durban Station from work when I learned a friend and neighbour from infancy was killed by a shark that morning. It also happens to be the date two girls in school uniforms, neither of which I knew, approached me as we walked past the Durban post office and said: “Hello, are you David’s brother?”. I was indeed.

Though I don’t remember much else about that conversation — I was in a daze thinking about my friend and the shark attack — it just so happened that one of the girls was a friend of my brother’s girlfriend. At the time I was boarding with a family in our village, but my brother and his girlfriend were living with our parents 80km inland on a 50-acre small holding they had purchased roughly two years before.

The conversation must have been a good one because three months later, on April 29 (a Sunday), this girl called by my boarding house so that I could accompany her, her boyfriend and my brother’s girlfriend to my parent’s farm for the day.

Before arriving at my parent’s house, we made a detour and picked up another friend of the group. My brother’s girlfriend almost insisted that she sit next to me, and being the gentleman that I was (and still am, I think) I leaned forward in the car to give her some more room.

This action was seen as some sort of shyness; that I might have been terrified of girls, or that I thought my equilibrium would be destroyed, or that I had some issue with sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, thigh-to-thigh as we drove along. I can assure you it was nothing of the sort. I did not consider myself an underserving person, and nor did I think she would mind me feeling the softness of her skin against mine, or the smelling of her auburn hair as it was mere inches from my nose. However, while I was being mocked, this cheeky young girl smiled and said, “Sit back, I won’t bite you!” Something did that day, and those words are forever etched on my brain.

Over lunch my father looked at this girl and said, “And whose girlfriend is this?” No one answered him. When I saw her with a cigarette, I plucked up the courage I’d been lacking for the better half of a day, walked over to her and told her that she should not smoke. She told me she didn’t. Until that day I had been ‘in love’ with the girl whose house I had been boarding in. I’ve even written poetry about it.

When it came time to leave my parent’s property, I sat in the rear of the car. When she entered the car and took her seat next to me the most amazing thing occurred. As defined by my encyclopaedia, it was quite a phenomenon — an observable fact or event. An object or aspect known through senses rather than by thought or intuition. A temporal or spatiotemporal object of sensory experience as distinguished from a noumenon: a fact or event of scientific interest susceptible of scientific description and explanation: a rare or significant fact or event: an exceptional, unusual, or abnormal person, thing, or occurrence. I think some of it applies to me and to what happened for I feel I lost my mind. I put my arm right around her and I kissed her.

As the most introverted person on the planet, it was overwhelming that I did such a thing. Some force must have been at work. She didn’t seem to object either — in that she didn’t clout my around the ears for being so bold. Instead, we kissed all the way to her house.

Fifty-six years later I snuggle up to that girl we took a detour for. I married that cheeky girl a year after I met her, at the end of August. She was 16 years, four months, one week and three days old at the time. They say teenage marriages do not last, but I saw ‘Pish!’ to that. Our first daughter was born in the year that followed our wedding.

Some years later I asked her why she’d had a cigarette in her hand when she told me she didn’t smoke and she told me that she had not even put the cigarette to her lips before receiving the response from me that she desired. Very cheeky indeed!

I read somewhere that love is a circular emotion that wraps around you like a hug — or a noose; and that love is curable by marriage, which in some cases it true, but not for me. I don’t feel a noose either, just the many, many hugs.

Do you remember the first time you met your future wife or husband? How old were you when you got married?

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