BILL Burton remembers it like yesterday.
He was eating an orange on a footpath in Mildura when a beautiful girl walked past.
“Some of the juice went on her and I apologised,” he said.
It was only minutes later when he visited his mother who was working in the laundry at the hospital, when he again crossed paths with the same beautiful girl.
The rest, they say, is history.
And today Bill celebrates his 65th wedding anniversary with that same beautiful girl.
After a brief courtship during war time, Bill Burton and Lorna Martin wed at 3pm in Mildura’s Church of England on November 30, 1942. There are no wedding photographs of the occasion
because film was unavailable during war time.
Bill recalls it cost “30 shillings” for a taxi to the church, and Lorna kept him waiting.
But it was worth every anxious minute ... and every shilling.
“She reckoned I was one in a million,” he said.
“Now she thinks I was won in a raffle.”
But Lorna is quick to add that sharing a joke has been the key to the couple’s long and happy marriage.
“It’s like everything else, it’s not a fairy tale,” she said.
“It’s what you make of it yourself.
“But you can’t agree with everything all the time, no one would believe you.”
The couple’s love for their eight children, Gloria Knight, Bonita Bugeja, Bruce Burton, Lorraine Rushby, John Burton (dec.), Kerry Parris, Janet Evans and Leanne Taylor, their 23 grandchildren, 33 great grandchildren and two great, great grandchildren has also brought Bill and Lorna closer together. “We’ve done everything in our life together,” Bill said.
“We wouldn’t change one bit of it.”
Such is their commitment to each other that the couple
re-married to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary at the same Mildura Church in 1992.
They will celebrate today’s milestone in their White Hills home with family and friends.