Page 84 - br-june-2020

June 2020 June 2020

OBITUARIES

Shortly before Geoffrey was posted to Germany to join his first
regimen, in September 1955, he asked Joan to marry him, and this
they did at Christmas the following year.
Their children have told them that it was very irresponsible to marry after
knowing one another for such a short time, most of which was spent apart!
However, Geoffrey and Joan were quite sure that they were right for one
another, a fact proved by over sixty-three years of happy marriage. Living
accommodation was in very short supply in Germany, so Joan could not join
Geoffrey until the following autumn. She resigned her teaching job at the end
of the summer term, just before finding out that Geoffrey's regiment was
moving to a place where accommodation was even more scarce.
Nevertheless, they decided that two years was long enough to have been
apart, and bought a caravan built for living in at the 1957 Caravan Exhibition
in London, and, as they owned only a motorbike and sidecar, had it sent out
to Germany by rail.
They were on leave in England when the caravan arrived at the local station
in Germany, so when their friend received a message asking him to collect a
parcel for Mr. Booth, he was startled to see the size of the "parcel", and
returned with an Army truck to tow it to the farm where it was to be sited for
the next couple of years, three miles from the barracks.
Geoffrey and Joan lived happily in a field, shared with chickens, twelve ducks
and a hand-reared lamb called Pieter, which was culled and replaced every
year. When they were invited to join the annual feast involved, they found it
hard to find excuses for not attending, but couldn't face eating their friend
Pieter.
The regiment's colonel got used to Geoffrey's living arrangements, after
sending his wife to inspect the caravan, though he was not impressed when,
during heavy snow that prevented Geoffrey coming to work on his motorbike,
he arrived in the barracks on the local dung cart.
For the last six months of their time in the caravan,
they were joined by Sara, who was born in the local
Canadian Army hospital, when Geoffrey was on
exercise in Belgium. After just over two years in the
caravan, word came that Geoffrey was to be posted
back to England, and the regiment was to be
disbanded. He had bought a large, ancient Opel car
when Sara was born, and decided to tow the
caravan to the Midlands, where he was to be
stationed.

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