So we got married. David and Maureen, an anagram of which is Dame Dude Nirvana. It wasn’t a grand affair with place cards, and a DJ, and carriages at one, and a box of free pashminas. In fact, six months earlier, it was going to be a coach to the seaside and fish and chips in newspaper.
It evolved into a party in the garden of his son Gabriel and daughter-in-law Lauren, aiming for simplicity, but there is something about weddings that create their own momentum.
Traditional weddings are a cliché in format. I didn’t want that the first time and thought to avoid it the second, but from the moment you answer the question, ‘When’s the happy day, then?’ with the answer, ‘September the seventh’, you become a gerbil on a wheel, spinning out of sight with your current account on plughole and your mind on nothing but the colour of napkins.
When my first husband Jack [Rosenthal, the playwright and screenwriter] and I married in 1973 I was a member of the National Theatre, at The Old Vic. I was 26, in love with a wonderful guy and unable to organise a pre-rinse in a launderette. We booked a travelling rabbi and a faceless ballroom in a bland hotel. Almost all the guests were actors, 70 per cent of whom I never saw again.
A few friends from my youth, a smattering of relatives. Jack wore a brown suit and I was in teal-blue velvet. At the door of the synagogue my absent-minded father told me I was the best daughter he had (my only sibling was a brother) and disappeared into the room growling, ‘I’ll see you in there, love.’
The happy couple during their beautiful garden ceremony
Which meant I had to walk down the aisle alone and give myself away.
Jack died in 2004. It was 19 years later when I met David at a friend’s lunch party. He had been widowed after five years of slowly losing his adored wife, Frances, to Alzheimer’s. We were moved next to each other for dessert and realised that our sons had been school friends. Afterwards, I asked our hostess if David was her man friend and she said, ‘Lord, no, we met in our prams.’
I tuned in to his weekly poetry website and found it much better than I had, rather patronisingly, expected. I found other connections. Both of our mothers’ maiden names were Pearlman – not related. Also, I was introducing, with a short speech, a choir at an event called The Human Spirit. His poetry of choice that week was, I noted, The Human Spirit. I called and invited him and he accepted. Kismet. We had one date – a walk in Hertfordshire and lunch at the Bricklayers Arms. He claims he fell in love with me when I came out of the toilet. I must have looked flushed.
That was it. I moved in, with Jack’s bronze sculptures and some PJs and, aside from trips to Coronation Street for the day job, for the next two years we were together 24/7. We were ridiculously grateful. When I saw a picture of him aged 17, he looked so familiar that I asked if he’d frequented any of my childhood holiday locations up North. He hadn’t.
Then I asked, ‘You didn’t ever go to the Green Park Hotel in Bournemouth, did you?’
‘Yes, every year,’ he replied.
‘That’s it.’ I said. ‘The Green Park. You asked me to dance, but you never came back for a second dance.’
He thought about it. ‘I did. I was shy, so I waited 60 years.’
Every so often we laughed about getting married, but neither of us thought the other meant it. Between us we were 158 years old. It was just a joke when, on a train coming back from Edinburgh, he told me it was a minor Jewish festival when a woman could ask a man for his hand in marriage. So, like anyone steeped in comedy, I slid under the table on one knee and proposed.
As the proud grandma in an iconic 1980s BT ad
‘Do you mean it?’ he said.
‘Er, I think so,’ I replied.
And that would have been that, just a good story, if I hadn’t – for a laugh – written it up in The Spectator diary. Suddenly it was everywhere in the tabloids and that’s when the ‘When’s the happy day?’ started to kick in. We told our children tentatively, then we let it drift on for almost a year.
The seaside idea came from a trip to the private Regency synagogue of Sir Moses Montefiore in Ramsgate. It was beautiful and there hadn’t been a wedding there since 2007. Later in the pub, a man followed us: ‘I’ve got a nice hotel in Broadstairs. You can have your party there.’ It was perched on the sweetest bay and quaintly perfect. We told all our friends. Then we let it drift more.
Our friends, I calculated, were our age. How would we get them down to the beach? And what about the synagogue? There was a slope up a hill and it wasn’t paved…
Then David’s son Gabe said, ‘Why don’t you have it at our house?’ So, that’s what we did on Sunday, 7 September, and it was perfect. Of course, the numbers had to be limited. So many friends we couldn’t invite. His best friends were in Israel. He offered me a honeymoon, with more parties, in a nice war zone. I accepted, of course.
Then it all began: calling caterers, planners, three suits bought and rejected, bridesmaids – no, of course not – oh, but the granddaughters’ faces! Napkins, flowers – ‘how much?’ – the car, the cake. The dress was the least trouble. I had driven past Joyce Young’s wedding shop for 20 years and never had a reason to stop. In July I ventured in. The assistant said, ‘Oh, Joyce hasn’t been here since last September but, you’re in luck, she’s just arrived here for the day.’ I took it as an omen. In one half hour I was sorted.
It was the happiest experience I’ve ever had, including an epidural after 20 hours of labour.
In the week before the big day, there was one hilarious hen night, one stag day, the opening of my daughter Amy’s play, The Party Girls, then one last-minute race to Haringey town hall for a vital document we hadn’t known we needed.
The groom and I rehearsed a mad dance to a clarinet, called the Broiges Dance, which we found online, and a friend offered to play a Yiddish tune on the bagpipes. The groom felt dizzy under the chuppah (canopy) but was well enough to bring down the tent with the dance and it was a beautiful ceremony, with two funny, spiritual and adorable rabbis, one from Kyiv, and a blessing from my friend Bishop Ken of the Ukrainian Cathedral in Duke Street.
The sun shone on some wickedly funny speeches and a poem from my granddaughter brought tears and laughter in equal measure to the whole party. The fabulous Clare Teal wove magic with her jazz band and, yes, a Labour peer knocked a glass of champagne all over my silk dress and coat, but was I bovvered?
Bride and groom went home to beans on toast and packed a tentative suitcase. The honeymoon is postponed due to, er, one of us having a really swollen foot.
No, I didn’t kick the peer. Perhaps we’ll drive to Broadstairs and start Act Three of the rest of our lives.