He thought she wouldn't want to spend her whole life with a man who does not have a leg. But love is a hopeful thing.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on January 2, 2020. It has since been updated.
Love surprises us, in ways more than many. When we expect nothing but disappointment, it fills our life with unfathomable joy and says that we deserved it. Love stays when it should and leaves when it should. Throughout its presence in our lives, love makes us feel various intense emotions. But at the end of our lives, love makes us realize that our lives had meaning and how lucky we were to have experienced something so divine.
Something similar happened with D-Day hero Ken Foster. He lost a leg during World War II and thought he would lose his partner because why would a woman want to spend her entire life with a differently-abled man? Today, 75 years after they wed, they are planning their honeymoon, reports the Mirror.
The couple could never plan a honeymoon in the early phase of their marriage because Ken was still recovering from his amputation and his wife, Vera, had to go back to work. When Ken came around after losing one leg he thought his young, 18-year-old ladylove would not want to be with a man with one leg.
But their love and her man meant a great deal to Vera. She said, "Many injured men were getting letters from wives or sweethearts giving them up." She added, “But as far as I’m concerned it is the man himself who counts.”
Ken met Vera on his first-ever holiday and sparks flew instantly.
But sadly and suddenly, they had to part soon because he enlisted in a Yorkshire regiment and went to train for D-Day. He says of the invasion in June 1944, “We didn’t know the plan. We were in tents in camps and then suddenly we were off and crossing the Channel.”
Describing the event which cost him his leg, Ken added, “We were on an anti-tank battery and I got unlucky when a shell came in. “I saw me boot with a sock go up in the air and I looked down and my foot were hanging on by bits of skin."
“It was like my leg had been put in a bucket of boiling hot water. When we got to the first aid centre, the first thing you got was a pot of hot, sweet tea. They put a dressing on the wound and then did an operation in a field hospital," he revealed.
All of this did not trouble him as much as the thought of losing Vera did, “It didn’t worry me so much; losing Vera was all I could think about,” he said.
But Vera's love for him was greater than that. The couple got married six months after the accident and went on to have three children, who are now 73, 72 and 75.
Vera said, “We got married on Saturday and I went back home and he went back to hospital on Monday morning, no honeymoon." She added, “I went back to my job as a nursery nurse while he was in and out of hospital. But this year we’re going to Eastbourne which is where we would have gone."
“You’ve got to work at being married. There’s no his and hers, it’s all ours. We had hard times but we are lucky with the lives we have had.”
References:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/i-lost-leg-war-feared-21181861
