The wedding

Marja and I were married yesterday.

We were engaged in January of this year, three years after I had retired and a few months before she did the same. We had been together for around four years. To announce the wedding we used an image taken from the front cover of Karel Capek’s 1932 travel book, Letters from Holland, which was the first present that I gave to Marja, who is Dutch. The image of a couple cycling side by side, which was drawn by the author, has such charm. It says something about the bringing together of people. It set the tone and suggested design ideas for the wedding. We know that others were similarly taken by it.

The wedding was at Rochester’s Guildhall Museum, a Grade 1-listed building in the high street. Fifteen years ago, when Marja first moved to this area, she visited the Guildhall and saw an ornate room that was once a council chamber and was now used for wedding ceremonies. She was particularly taken by a painting on the wall of William of Orange, the Dutch prince who became King William III of England. If I ever get married, she told herself, which is not a part of my plans at all, I would like to get married here. Little did she know that not only that her wish would come true, but that the person she would marry was living fifty metres away on the other side of the road.

The ceremony took place at 4pm. We had around seventy-five guests. We entered together (it’s a Dutch thing). The bride wore an ivory jump suit with a hand-knitted burnt orange shawl and a cloche hat with owl feathers. Burnt orange was the primary colour theme, its inspiration being the eye colour of Marja’s former pet European Eagle owl. The colour was used from the wedding invitation, to the groom’s tie, to the colour of the best man’s hair. The groom wore a buttonhole with a white rose and lavender to symbolise those growing in my late mother’s garden.

Our entrance music was the late Abdullah Ibrahim’s beautiful jazz piece ‘The Wedding’; our exit music the final dance from Henry Purcell’s opera The Fairy Queen, which was composed to mark the fifteenth wedding anniversary of William III and Queen Mary. A poem was read in Dutch, ‘Vriend‘ (‘Friend’) by M. Vasalis, Dutch female poet from Marja’s home town; and the anonymous seventeenth-century English poem ‘Love Will Found Out the Way‘, known to me since childhood. A livestream was supposed to go out to friends and family in the Netherlands, Belgium, Russia, Australia and Japan, but somehow failed. Our rings were made of English oak. Our vows said it all.

Abdullah Ibrahim and Ekaya, ‘The Wedding’

After photographs outside the building and in the ground of nearby Rochester castle, we all repaired to Rochester Masonic Hall, also close by, for a silent film show. We had themes running through the day – Anglo-Dutch relations, local history, and film. After teas, coffees and some Dutch snacks, our audience watched two Buster Keaton films, with piano accompaniment by Neil Brand. The first was the final twenty minutes of Three Ages (1923), a film co-starring British would-be actress Margaret Leahy, whose poignant life story I researched many years ago. It ends with a wedding, and the second film we showed was One Week (1920), Keaton’s classic short comedy about a recently-married couple attempting to build their own home.

After that it was all round to the Royal Crown for the reception. The current building dates from the nineteenth century, but the Crown inn that preceded it dated back to the early fourteenth century. It was a regular staging post for those heading on into London, and its famous visitors whose ghosts now haunt the place include Elizabeth II, King Philip of Spain, Mary Tudor, Anne of Cleves and Charles I. We kept the speeches short, giving our thanks to the many people who have helped us by using a set of mock film credits, set to the tune of Bob Dylan’s instrumental ‘Wigwam‘. He had to be fitted in somewhere. Then toasts were made, food served, and the music played. Guests departed with cloth goodie bags containing hand-made blackberry jam, English and Dutch confectionery, and a bookmark showing Capek’s cyclists.

We have been helped by many good friends, and our families, to whom we offer our warmest thanks. We could not have got here without you. New adventures must now begin.

And I love her very much.