in-cumbria

Barrow couple find it’s never too late to fall in love and wed

Last updated at 16:47, Tuesday, 17 July 2012

FOR Brenda Hetherington, finding true love has been truly worth the wait.

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This Saturday – her 76th birthday – she will wed her first boyfriend, who she met just three months ago.

Miss Hetherington will marry 60-year-old Charles Wimbledon at Barrow’s Seymour Court, where the pair both live.

The couple met when Mr Wimbledon moved into the Elizabethan Way sheltered housing complex, and got engaged just two weeks later.

But the course of true love never did run smoothly.

Miss Hetherington said: “I didn’t like him at first, to be honest.

“But about a week after he moved in, we got talking and I started loving him at the same time.

“I was surprised when he proposed, but I’d got used to him so I thought, ‘Let’s go for it’.”

But Brenda’s husband-to-be said it was “love at first sight”.

Mr Wimbledon, formerly of Lumley Street, Barrow, said: “When I first met Brenda, she was the light of my life. You can tell when you meet someone that you’re going to love them.”

Once he had won his future wife over, theirs became a real whirlwind romance when Mr Wimbledon got down on one knee at a fellow resident’s birthday party.

Mr Wimbledon, who has been divorced twice and lost his third partner to cancer, said: “We get on so well together, and we’re not getting any younger, so I thought I might as well make her happy – we might as well make the most of these years and enjoy ourselves. I knew she was going to say yes, because I was the first man who’d made her happy, but I was a bit shy at first.”

The couple will marry surrounded by family, friends and their fellow Seymour Court residents, with two of Mr Wimbledon’s grandchildren as a flower girl and page boy, and Miss Hetherington’s brother, David, giving her away.

The bride said her big day would be “well worth the wait”.

Miss Hetherington, who has lived at Seymour Court for 10 years, said: “I’ve never been married, I’ve never had a boyfriend, all I’ve done is lived with my mum.

“Before Charles moved in, I was thinking about it and thinking, ‘Is it never going to happen to me?’, but it did and I’m as happy as anything.”

First published at 16:11, Monday, 16 July 2012
Published by http://www.nwemail.co.uk