Elegy written in a country churchyard

I have a photo of my grandparents sitting on this same bench in 1973.  They look plump and happy, having just witnessed the marriage of their son.

I took this photo out of surprise, not sentimentality. I've only just connected the bench bit of the story.

On the left is my last husband and on the right is my putative first. 

These two worlds converged in Bell Rope Meadow, from where we walked down the river, past Riverdene (the house Chris Green said we'd live in once we were married), through the half kissing gate (the missing half is now chez moi in the South of France thanks to a crafty bit of work by my aunt.) and into the churchyard and onto The Bench.

In my magnanimous old age I realise that I have a lot to thank Chris Green for (apart from giving me my first cigarette in a phone booth in Dorset).  

He prevented my brother from being bullied at the all boy's comp in Maidenhead, he introduced me to Pink Floyd, Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Dire Straights, Bowie and Prince (the latter never worked).  He took me to the Orkney's on the night train from London , he bunked classes and  hung his school scarf in his grandmother's apple tree on the edge of my school's playing field so I knew I was to meet him on the Thicket,  He drove me down Long Lane singing Strawberry Fields Forever before reminding me that the brakes on  his '64 VW beetle, named  Stanley, were deficient.  We restored an old boat together, scraping the paint off with a bunson burner flame. He made us our own love shack amongst the long grass and reeds on Marsh Meadow and bought me my very first Walkman.  He made cassette compilations I could listen to in the train to York and Bristol for university interviews.  He cycled from his village to mine in the dark every 14 February morning and knocked on my bed room window to be the first person I'd see on Valentine's day.  He came to Paris with me where we lived for a year in a studio the size of a small bathroom.  He drove us to Collioure via Normandy, Brittany, the length of the west coast and across the Pyrenees. He stopped all the traffic on Westminster Bridge to ask me to marry him, to which I said yes because there were some pretty angry taxi drivers.   He rented us a studio in Aix en Provence but the scorpions frightened me and the North Africans seduced me and that's where it all got lost.

I still think of the phone box when I light a cigarette, I can still remember the taste of deep fried haggis and how our parents worried about us, so young and far away in Kirkwall that we'd try to get behind the BBC cameras covering the child abuse scandal outside the Courthouse to prove that we were ok, Whenever I smell wood smoke in the sunshine I think of the Churchill Barriers. Whenever I'm bothered by horse flies I think of the evening in the high Pyrenees and the storm that brought the flies down and the weird opiate we drank that made us forget the rest of the night.  Whenever I'm really hungry it's not a takeaway kebab that I crave but the sandwiche merguez frites we'd buy from a food truck on the road back to Port Vendres.

I had little time to talk to Chris Green.  All I found out was that he'd lost his dad and Stanley which made me sad for him.  I saw a flash of gold on his ring finger which made me feel better.

I offered Chris Green a cigarette. He said he didn't smoke any more . The he disappeared