I was born in 1953 and my brother two years earlier in August 1951. Our parents had married in September 1950 – in London, as I now know. They had been married in a registry office.
We were brought up in the Carlow countryside in idyllic surroundings. However, one thing as a small child bothered me greatly. There was a clock on the mantelpiece, the inscription of which read, ‘To my father on his marriage in 1936’. This inscription had always puzzled us, and regularly we would stare up at it and wonder.
However, we were never to ask for an explanation.
When I was in my late teens, on a car journey with my mother, she told me that my father had been married before and had a wife (who was still alive), and I had a half-sister.
In fact she went on to tell me that I had stayed with this lady several years before, completely ignorant of who she was.
Immediately the mystery of the clock added up and I realised it had been given to him on his first marriage.
My mother’s voice on telling me of this was upset, and I know it was very hard for her. She was deeply saddened that she had not been able to marry my father in a Catholic church.
Just before he died in 1987, they did have a small ceremony, as his first wife had died several years before.
I found this photograph in my mother’s desk after she died. It had never been displayed in the house nor shown to us children.
It is special not only because it is my parents’ wedding but because it depicts the fashion of the early 1950s so perfectly. What a very different world it was.
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