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This story was submitted to the People's War web site by Sutton Coldfield Library on behalf of Mrs Kathleen Miles and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

This is the final part of the story "A long Friendship".

June 2004

Another sequel!

Nine years have passed since I wrote the last part of my story and I must tell of some of the things that have changed. Vic and I went to Lotte’s and Richard’s Golden Wedding in Bremen and not to be out done by Lotte, I made a speech in German telling all their guests of how we have kept our long friendship going. Then Richard began showing signs of Parkinson’s Disease and sadly he has since died. Lotte now lives at home in Bremen with increasing partial blindness due to Macular Degeneration – BUT – this March she bravely travelled alone to England to spend five days with us for our celebrations of our Diamond Wedding!

There has been much talk and T.V coverage of the D-Day landings and we who lived through those awful times have been re-living some of the emotions we felt.

Vic landed on Juno beach with the Canadians and has visited that beach with our son-in-law some time ago. So many of us will have had our Diamond Weddings recently because so many decided even a few weeks of being married was the right thing to do in those uncertain times. As I said to our family at our Diamond Wedding – we didn’t sleep together before we were married and that was the usual way then, so we had a desperate need to marry and take what togetherness we had. These years were our young years and we were just wishing them away and of course we could never have them again.

We have been the lucky ones and we do realise it and we do appreciate it.

The other part of this story is that our daughter Mandy did not die from her cancer although it was a very malignant type and is still following the advice given to her by Lotte's daughter Julie about what to take to stay well. Best of all five years ago she married a lovely man called Neville who takes care of her as I did, and they are both living just 10 minutes drive away from us and watch over us in our old age!

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