IT was love at first sight, for Margaret Woodward.
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She was just 16, and was at the demonstration school dance when John Woodward came up and asked her to join him on the floor. Six decades on, the couple are still as happy as the day they met and today – St Valentine’s Day – they celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary.
Margaret said yesterday she went to the demonstration school dance with her sister. She said John came up out of the crowd and asked her to dance with him.
“My sister was already up dancing with her boyfriend,” she said.
“John came up to me and said ‘you look lonely sitting there all by yourself’ so he got me up for a dance,” she said.
After the dance John, who had come to the dance on his motorbike, walked Margaret home to her house in Oak Street in South Bathurst and then walked back to the school to collect his bike.
By the following week John had been to Coles, where Margaret worked as a ticket writer, to organise a date for the next weekend.
“We went to the pictures at the Burlington Theatre,” she said.
Margaret said John was a romantic, always bringing her a box of chocolates.
“He’d bring Romance Chocolates. My grandmother, who lived a few doors down from us, would always come and get one,” she laughed.
Margaret said her parents were never worried by the fact John was four years older, or rode a motorbike.
“Not all all,” she said. “Although when he did get a car, the second we pulled up out the front my mum would walk out and get me.
“We were never allowed to sit in the car,” she laughed.
Three years after they met the couple married on St Valentine’s Day, the date chosen by Margaret so “John would always remember when we got married”.
And 60 years on, what do the couple believe is the secret to a happy union?
“Looking after each other but giving each other some space,” she said.