Honeymoon Hell

Diane Hassall

I got married on 18th October, 1980 at the parish church in Fawley, Hampshire. We had a small reception at my parents' house then left about 6 o'clock to drive over 160 miles to Dover.

People waved us merrily off with shouts of: 'Have a good time,' and, 'we know you will' - how wrong they were! Knowing we wouldn't be in time for dinner my Mum leaned in the window and said, 'I've packed you some sandwiches.' We sped off, then stopped at the end of the road while we struggled to untie numerous cans from the rear bumper in the dark. After much swearing and accusations: like 'It was your friends who did this,' and 'No it was your cousin,' we succeeded and drove off again.

Now the folly of this enterprise today seems overwhelming. Why would anyone want to go through all the stress attached to a wedding then face a 3 hour drive in a rattling old Ford Capri. The reason was simply financial and at the time it had seemed like a good idea - at least to my husband, Ray, who has since proved to have a knack for overambitious holiday arrangements. We were to spend the night in a lovely hotel in Dover, then pick up a coach to drive us for 23 hours across Europe to Spain.

Well the best laid plans started to go wrong after a couple of hours when my new husband realized there was something wrong with the car. The dynamo had packed up; we lost the lights and were forced to pull over into a country lane somewhere in Sevenoaks. There was no street lighting and the torch didn't work. We decided to knock on doors and ask if we could use a phone to ring the RAC but found the lane was mainly filled with holiday homes which were empty in October. It was creepy in the dark and I was reminded of several horror films where the young couple are stranded and knock on the door of a strange house looking for help...the door creeps open - well you get the picture.

Finally a rather austere looking woman let us in to use the phone. The RAC came out and looked at the car. I was left with the woman who began asking about our wedding.

'What's your new name?'

When I told her Hassall, she said, 'There's your problem then, fancy marrying a man called Hassall. This is a sign of things to come.'

For the next hour or so she continued on this theme and even asked if I wanted to go home. She offered to run me to the station if I did. I actually began to consider this option; things were not going as I'd anticipated at all.

Then fortunately her husband turned up. He assessed the situation with the car. It could not be fixed without a new dynamo so he offered to drive us to a local hotel where we could spend the night, promising to pick us up early the next day. By the time we reached the hotel we were barely speaking. Both starving hungry, having eaten nothing at the reception, I searched my bag for the food my Mum had provided only to find it had been taken out and my bag filled with confetti and various jokey objects. The room was freezing, the TV didn't work and we lay back to back not speaking. But we were both praying that the chap would remember to come back for us in the morning as we didn't know where the hell he lived.

Fortunately, he did and we were profusely grateful to him. We crawled the car to Dover, left it at a garage with a note about the spare part it needed and hoped they'd have it fixed for us on our return. (They did). We caught a taxi to the ferry, and when the driver heard we were honeymooners he turned off the clock and didn't charge us.

People were actually incredibly kind and helpful and though it wasn't the romantic honeymoon night we had envisaged it was certainly memorable. Ray spent his with the man from the RAC and I spent mine with the Cassandra of Sevenoaks. There have been times over the years when I've wondered if I should have accepted her offer of the lift to Sevenoaks Station but overall I think I made the right choice.