Iris' SMR

I had married a Canadian and had gone from Australia to live with him in Canada. We had two small boys. I had been there for four years and our marriage was rubbing along. We got on well and although we did have a lot of things in common there seemed to be no really deep love or real understanding between us. After the birth of my second son my mother asked me to come back to Australia, to bring the children for a visit.

She sent me the fare and I came home. We lived in a small beachside town and there was no entertainment as such, so my mother, my uncle, some friends and I took to going to a small harbor side hotel on Saturday evenings, where a friend would play the piano and we would have a sing-along and just a couple of drinks in the public lounge.

There was a dart board in the corner and one night there were five or six men playing darts for drinks. I walked over to watch them and saw this nice looking young man standing before the board getting ready to throw the darts. All of a sudden as I looked at him, there was a great voice inside me that said" Oh, there you are! I've been looking everywhere for you." I was really shocked and didn't really know what had happened, but I looked at him again and told myself that he was most likely a sugarcane farmer with a fat wife and half a dozen children.

We left shortly after that and I didn't think of him again. But the next weekend we went to the same hotel and he was there again, playing darts. I have no idea what prompted me to do it as I don't play darts, but I went up to him and bet him a pint that I would win. Of course I didn't, but after the game he came over to my table and introduced himself to my mother and my friends and stayed talking to us all. He asked could he see me again and I said "no" as I was married.

Then he invited us all down to visit the dredge he was working on the following day. He was a British seaman who had come out here to work on the ships as a seaman. We all went to see the boat and he gave us a nice lunch. He became friends with my Uncle who lived with us and used to come to see us all on the weekends when he wasn't working. He used to help my mother around the garden and was very good with my two little boys.

After a couple of months the dredge work was finished and he went to Brisbane to get another ship, but he kept writing to us. He had been away for a month when I had news that my husband who was still in Canada had died in a car crash. This was in 1958 and travel wasn't as easy then as it is now, so I never did go back to Canada.

The young man came back to visit us and after awhile he asked me to marry him I hadn't really wanted to, as he was a seaman and would be away from home a lot. But I did. He adopted my children, we bought a house and lived and loved together for forty years until he died of cancer in 1998.

He is absolutely the love of my life, as I was of his. He was a wonderful father to my children and a marvelous grandfather to their children. Our only sorrow was that we didn't have more children, but we had a wonderful life together and I wouldn't have missed a day of it.