A Victoria, B.C., couple celebrated their 75th anniversary Thursday, still together and very much in love even though they’re now separated by a sheet of glass.
Lew Duddridge, 102, is in a care home under lockdown due to the COVID-19 crisis, forcing him and his 95-year-old wife, Hilda, to mark their diamond anniversary through a window.
“Can you feel it?” Lew asks Hilda as they place their hands on either side of the glass at his care home.
“One of these days, we’ll touch again,” she replies.
The couple met during the Second World War at a train station in England.
Duddridge, a bold Canadian pilot, proposed to the Welsh-born Hilda within a week.
Hilda was impressed, but hesitant.
“At first I said, ‘My mother would kill me if I came home from holidays engaged.”
Lou eventually won her hand and swept her away to Hanley, Sask., where they raised four kids.
The novel coronavirus is not the first pandemic Duddridge has lived through.
He was born in 1918, amid the Spanish Flu, which claimed millions of lives around the world. Both his mother and father had the flu.
Having already lived through a worldwide disease outbreak and two world wars, Duddridge remains positive. At 102, he loses names and faces, but never Hilda’s.
On their anniversary, he sings her one of their favourite songs.
Despite the uncertainty and distress of the present, Hilda believes that this too shall pass.
“Be kind and love everybody,” she said. “We just gotta be patient and know that it’s going to end.”