How we got married
There is, I suppose, a prolegomenon to getting married, and that is getting engaged. For details of this dread event, click here.
I suppose that one of the more important episodes of our early years together was when we actually got married, and went on our honeymoon. But here I have a problem: we did not have a honeymoon. Setting up a new magazine was taking all our time and energy. I had left work, we had bought a dormobile, but we were still living in our flat on Haverstock Hill. Wendy was house hunting while I was touring round excavations looking for good copy.
In the middle of all this we got married. Both parents wanted to make something of a splash, and Wendy’ s Mother wanted a church wedding in Brentwood to show off to all their friends. However I felt I could not go through with the full church wedding and start my married life with a ceremony I did not believe in, so we decided on a double wedding with an official registry office wedding in the morning where Wendy scandalised some of her mothers’ friends by the shortness of her skirt. Then the church ceremony in the afternoon with two parsons, one being the local parson at the Brentwood church, who did not really approve of the arrangements, while we brought in our Tom Evans, the brother of Brin, my mother’s best friend, who became the family parson and who happily entered into the spirit of the double wedding.
Tom came from a family of parsons – his father had married my parents, but Tom was considered the least intellectually bright of the family and was therefore a great success as a country parson – he was known as the poaching parson.
But the wedding took up a lot of our time and somehow we never got round to thinking about a honeymoon. It was a splendid ceremony and Wendy’s father gave an elegant speech but once it was all over, we mounted our faithful Dormobile and set off to visit an excavation. We were going down to Dorset and we set off down the A30 – the M3 motorway had not yet been built- and we got as far as the Bagshot Heath where we found a suitably deserted nook and camped for the night. We were exhausted but invigorated but nevertheless, we somehow found time to make love. Having made up the bed in the back of the van, we stripped off and Wendy looked as ever gorgeous and I found that I still had the energy to climb on top of her and for the first time I had intercourse with Mrs Wendy Selkirk. She was still as wonderful a lay as she had been when she was Miss Wendy Frost. The business of getting married was an important stage in the great enterprise of launching Current Archaeology, but it was eventually a great success.
The next day we visited Graham Webster at his site at Wadden Hill. Graham was a good friend: he was the extramural tutor in Archaeology at Birmingham, and I had attended his lectures in the year I spent in Birmingham, and when we thought up Current Archaeology, he was a great supporter of our enterprise.
It was not until March 1967 that we eventually launched Current Archaeology. We had managed to buy a house in Islington at 128 Barnsbury Road. We assembled a lot of good copies for the launch issue, and in March 1967 we sent out 5,000 copies to potential subscribers, and a thousand of them replied promptly offering a pound for a year’s subscription. We were on our way.