Living with dementia magazine March 2010

On February 10, Ada and Albie celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary. Here, Ada talks about their life together, and one of our trustees salutes the happy couple.

They married 70 years ago and are as much in love now as when they first met. When Albie Lovell walked Ada back home to her mum's on London's Isle of Dogs after they met at a cinema in Elephant and Castle in 1937, he told his friend Tom, 'I'm seeing my Mrs home.'

At the time, Ada had long red hair and 'the best legs on the island' according to her daughter, Anita, who is delighted she inherited both attributes.

The pair started courting and married on 10 February 1940, just before Albie went off to drive a tank in the war.

While Ada lived with Albie's mother and Uncle Charlie, keeping rabbits for food and getting used to the bombs raining down during the Blitz (the docklands being a target for the Luftwaffe) Albie was fighting in Burma - the  longest campaign fought by the British in the Second World War. They wrote to each other every night.

Albie survived, though the pair sadly lost their three-year-old son to leukaemia.

While Ada recounts dreadful things in the early years, her overall memories are of a wonderful life with Albie, and their friends and family. One of 14 children, she speaks of the importance of togetherness, and of being at the heart of a strong family network.

She says,

'We always did everything together. Albie never went out on his own, it was always him and I.' 

Since Albie developed dementia, the couple attend the Southwark branch Healthy Ageing Café every week. To celebrate their 70th anniversary, staff at the Southwark branch organised a party. Their daughter Anita, pictured here with her parents, flew back from Australia to join the celebrations, and took them away to Weymouth for their actual anniversary.

Although Albie has dementia and Ada worries about him, the pair make the most of their lives. Every Sunday, they move the furniture in their lounge to have a dance. They still cuddle up on the couch, and hold hands all the time. Ada is determined to look after Albie at home. She says,

'I won't have him going into a home. He's mine, I'll give him a lot of love and care and do all I can to help him.'

Society Trustee David Richardson attended the party at the Healthy Ageing Café in Southwark, where he presented Ada and Albie with a bottle of champagne and bouquet of flowers. In his congratulatory speech, he said,

'1940 was a year of great peril for this country. Those of us who are of later generations owe a great debt to the courage, the resilience, and, if I may use a technical term, the sheer bloody mindedness of the young people of that year, both those in the forces like Albie and those on the home front like Ada.

'Now there is another battle. It is the fight against dementia, and Ada and Albie are right there in the front line again. Let us have the courage, the resilience, and the sheer bloody mindedness to persist until that fight is won.

'But in the meantime, let us pause to salute a couple of remarkable people and their life and love together.'