For Better, For Worse Love and Marriage: A 20th Century Romance

The romantic idea of a happy marriage that would last a lifetime

has never been more tested than in the 20th century.

This three-part series celebrates the enduring power

of an age-old institution that has survived into the modern age

of individual freedom and affluence.

We begin by taking a new look at marriage during the first half

of the century, when the wedding day was often the culmination

of a long courtship and, finally, a proposal.

I arranged to meet her, sat down on the bench

and said, "Darling, I've got 25 quid, will you marry me?"

And so she became my fiancee.

# Life is wonderful when you love... #

This was an era when the ideal of romantic love in marriage

had to withstand the harsh realities of a world very different to today.

Yet many marriages were defined by friendship

rather than conflict and strife.

Above all else, couples wanted to provide a stable and loving home

for their children.

This was even true of those who struggled to bring up large families

on the breadline.

I did not want a great large family.

It was a case of, what God sends you you've got to put up with.

And God sent me all these kids and I've got to put up with them

and I brought them up.

And I didn't ask God, man or the devil for help to bring them up.

I brought them up myself, my husband and I.

He worked for them and I looked after them.

So what more could we want?

Despite the separation and tragedy of two world wars,

most marriages not only survived,

some became even stronger.

A commitment to see things through, whatever challenges lay ahead,

bonded couples together for life in the most powerful way.

How does one describe

the feeling that you have of being complete

when the other person is with you?

Then you feel whole.

I'm very, very glad I loved my husband.

And I was lucky in getting Reg and a man like Reg.

At the beginning of the 20th century,

most girls grew up believing it was their destiny

to one day fall in love, get married and have children.

Victorian attitudes to innocence and sexual purity

ensured that many girls and boys would remain ignorant

of the basic facts of life,

as ideals of ladylike and gentlemanly behaviour

were passed down through the generations.

This is the Norfolk country estate

where writer Diana Athill spent much of her childhood

dreaming of one day meeting her own Prince Charming.

My granny had very firm ideas.

I don't know whether she told me or whether my mother told me,

but granny believed that no lady could possibly

let a man kiss her

unless they were going to get married.

Unless she was in love with him.

She wouldn't like it unless she was in love with him.

And no gentleman would dream of kissing a girl

unless he was going to marry her because he was in love.

This was what her daughters were brought up believing

and I think my mother was.

This ideal of romantic love had long been the stuff of popular fiction.

Many couples expected to fall in love at first sight,

like Diana's mother and father.

He fell in love with her on sight...

..and I think it was in the conservatory,

half way through the dance, he kissed her,

where upon, of course, my mother,

who enjoyed it immensely -

she'd never been kissed by anybody, it was terribly exciting,

she thought, she was so excited and delighted

she had been kissed by this extremely nice young man,

she thought she was in love with him.

She had let him kiss her

and, according to my grandmother, that meant she was in love.

Convinced that they were in love with each other, Diana's parents

were married in 1916, totally unprepared for what was to follow.

She hadn't a clue of what sex was going to be like.

And, I must say, I think it's quite possible my father hadn't either.

His colonel wrote a letter

to all the young officers who joined the regiment

and one of the things he said was that there would always be

plenty of sport of every kind

that he encourages his officers to indulge in -

football, tennis, cricket, hunting, of course, and riding.

But he did not like young men who spent a lot of time

messing about in London.

That meant women.

And so I'm quite certain my father hadn't spent a lot of time

messing about in London.

It's quite likely that he was as virginal as my mother was.

It's likely too that many of the young, single men who volunteered

to serve in the First World War were also virgin soldiers.

They'd been brought up to believe that a man had to be patriotic

and protective towards women and children if he wanted a wife.

This ideal of manliness saw war as a great adventure

and an opportunity to prove courage and valour,

encouraging some boys to lie about their age on joining up,

like 17-year-old George Louth.

My captain said to the sergeant next to me,

he said, "Louth,

"we're going to France..." he said,

"..and we don't want you crying when we get over there,

"saying you're not old enough...", he said, "..because it wont happen.

"You won't come back. So say it now."

I said, "I'm going with the lads."

Totally unprepared for what was to come,

the horror of trench warfare shattered the innocence

of a generation of young men.

George narrowly survived the slaughter

of the Battle of the Somme.

Suffering from shell shock,

he was discharged and sent to work on the land in Dorset.

But then life completely changed for George.

At the age of 20, he fell in love for the first time,

with the daughter of his landlady.

Her name was Ellen

and we courted for eight months.

And, erm...

we came out the backdoor together

and I said, "Will you marry me?"

She was shook.

So, then we decided,

when we went indoors and we gave the news to the mother-in-law,

and she clapped.

She clapped.

The lasting memory of the war for George Louth

was not valour or glory,

but the true love which he had found with his sweetheart Ellen.

Their wedding day was on November 11th 1918

which, unbeknown to them, turned out to be Armistice Day.

Got married and, as we came out,

we see all the flags flying.

We thought it was for us and it wasn't.

It was Armistice Day, eleven o'clock...

when we got married.

Yeah, she was my first and only.

Never strayed from when we met, right to this.

Some men did stray, however, and official information films

were quick to point out the dangers posed by loose liaisons.

Staying true to a fiancee or wife, these films warned,

was the key to avoiding sexually transmitted disease like VD

for which there was no cure at the time.

"Emotional Control" was the only option for those

like Diana Athill's parents

who were stuck in a sexually incompatible marriage.

She never did actually find him physically attractive.

And this was the secret of how...

You made the best of it in those days if this happened.

But this was the reason why their marriage,

although she always knew he was a very nice man,

but she did not like sex with him,

which was an underlying tension in their marriage from then on,

which we as children, of course we didn't know what it was,

but we sensed always that there was this something wrong between them.

It was only much later that Diana discovered what had happened

between her mother and father.

One of his fellow officers and my mother began an affair.

And she discovered during this what sex was really like

and that she loved it - it was all right, you know.

But this affair came to light.

It was a frightful time. It must have been ghastly.

She had become pregnant.

And my father, being an extremely honourable and kind and good man,

did accept it

and my sister Patience was born.

And...one of the reasons why...

By the time I was 18,

I guessed that my sister was not my father's daughter.

One of the reasons was, he was always so much nicer to her,

and he was nice to all of us,

but he was especially, especially nice to her.

And that was how I figured, you know,

he would have done that because he wasn't going to blame the child.

Diana's parents stayed together for life

in an era when divorce was very difficult and dishonourable.

Since before the First World War,

the Suffragette movement had been demanding rights for women

as a way to create more equal marriages

and a more equal and better world.

And although most women over 30 would gain the vote in 1918,

social changes were slow in coming.

Many accepted their parents would help them choose their husband,

like Hetty Bower, who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family.

I just took it for granted that one day it would happen.

I didn't spend time dwelling on it.

I was a very practical... Hockey was my great joy

and I was hockey captain of the school

and that occupied me.

My parents would probably find me a suitable young man.

I would look at his photograph and decide,

or several photographs and pick which one.

But Hetty's views on life and love were about to change,

inspired by the rise of a new political force in British life,

the labour and trade union movement.

The First World War had not brought an end to poverty, unemployment

and appalling housing conditions, as many politicians had promised,

so an impassioned young Hetty

joined the ranks of the Labour Party in London's East End

as a volunteer, collecting subscriptions door to door.

I went to number 60 Montague Road

and a little woman with bright blue eyes said, "Mr N Bower?

"Nobody called N Bower.

"What's it about?"

And I said, "Well, I'm from the Labour Party."

"Oh!", she said, "That's our Reg."

She called up the passage,

"Reg! Reg! There's somebody here from the Labour...",

and left me and this young... very good-looking young man

with the most charming smile,

and my first reaction immediately was, what a pity he's not Jewish!

Hetty soon discovered that Reg not only shared her politics,

he also shared her passion for the countryside and music.

Their love gave Hetty the strength to resist

her parent's initial disapproval of her non-Jewish boyfriend.

His kindness,

his courtesy...

..his warmth for humanity.

You felt you couldn't help but feel it.

In the 1920s, those who lived and worked in the countryside

had fewer choices of partner than in the cities.

A sweetheart was often met at the local school

or at work on a local farm.

This was how Marian Atkinson came to fall in love in the remote

Rosthwaite Valley in the Lake District, where she'd grown up.

In 1922, she was working as a farm servant

when she met her first love.

We knew one another when we were 12 and went to the same school.

And when I was 17, I went to this place

and, low and behold, my husband was the horseman there.

I always liked him.

He was a big, tall, good-looking bloke.

I used to go into my own bedroom at night,

I used to think, I wonder if he'll ask me out.

I was allowed out on Sunday afternoon

and I could go to church if I wanted to.

It took, oh, five or six months before it got to the stage of saying,

"Don't go to church. When I've had my tea,

"I'll come down and we'll have a walk across the fields."

After we'd been walking for a while and we'd admired the flowers

and the trees and that, he got a bit closer and put his arm around me

and we walked and I put my arm around the back of him

and we walked quite close together.

As we were striding across the field, I slipped,

and he grabbed me in both hands and he kissed me on that bank.

And that was the first time I can remember he ever kissed me.

After a two-year courtship, Marian and Bill married in 1924

and their first baby arrived a year later.

But this was no romantic rural paradise.

Life was hard, and dominated by work and constant childbearing.

In remote areas, there was little knowledge

of contraception and pregnancy

and childbirth was accepted fatalistically.

Marian had six children in quick succession

yet she still managed to create a stable family life,

working almost every day with her husband on the farm.

When I found out I was pregnant again, I used to say to my husband,

"Oh, God, not again! How are we going to manage?"

But we did manage.

It was just blooming hard work and that was the end of it.

Sometimes you think, what the devil am I doing this for?

I'm getting nothing out of it.

But we were getting something out of it.

And when you're married to a man and been married to him for years,

you've got to pull with him.

Could you have stood by and seen your husband

work his fingers to the bone without helping? No.

I had to muck in and do men's work.

It was hard work, blooming hard work,

and I couldn't...I didn't agree with all of it, but I did it.

Love on the dole was even harder to sustain.

In the 1920s and '30s, Britain suffered mass unemployment

as traditional industries like textiles, shipbuilding

and coal mining declined.

With unemployment reaching three million,

the self esteem of a generation of young men

who believed it was their duty to be a breadwinner took a serious blow.

Most jobs on offer were short term and unskilled

as Yorkshireman Robert Williamson discovered.

They were all casual jobs which you got.

Eight weeks. You'd get eight weeks with your local council.

We used to call it eight weeks' desk work.

You know, you'd be navvying.

Laying cables, you know,

everybody were going on to electricity in them days

and there was always jobs going

digging the pavement up and laying high-tension cables.

Skilled men were doing the digging and filling in.

You felt embittered

but, you see, it was commonplace.

When I got married, I didn't have a job.

19th December, 1931.

Poverty surveys into working-class life in the 1930s

revealed one key factor in family survival through hard times -

the love and labour of the wife and mother.

Her skills in cooking, cleaning, washing and housekeeping

were respected in the control she was often given

over the family finances.

John Salinas grew up in Liverpool.

I always thought of poverty as my mother's purse,

which contained the wealth of the family.

Imagine the wealth of the family was in that purse.

It was put in on payday

and it had to last to the next payday.

And very, very often it didn't.

And when the last penny was gone from the purse, that was it.

No money meant the rent collector couldn't be paid

on his weekly visit.

But every mother knew the best, time-honoured way to avoid him.

We would hear him approach from afar.

And the doors would go, dud, dud, dud, dud.

And then the next door would go, dud, dud, dud, dud.

And then everything must be silent

and he would appear at your door in the shape of the shadow

of the two legs between the bottom of the door and the lobby.

And then that clap would come on your door.

And all was silent, silent, silent.

And after a while it would go again.

Twice.

And then you would hear it go further down the street

and we all breathed again then.

It was a lovely day when you could pay the rent.

Oh, door was open, everybody happy in the house.

Even well-to-do families

who enjoyed what seemed to be an idyllic life in the countryside

could not escape the economic turmoil of the 1930s.

Diana Athill's family inheritance,

handed down from one generation to the next, was dwindling fast.

Her parents found it difficult to come to terms

with their reduced circumstances,

but Diana believed that marriage would save her

from having to work for a living.

We ourselves, in my family, were always a bit short of money.

And there was a terrible time when the bank said...

My mother was extravagant, my father was very careful.

The bank told them they mustn't cash another cheque at one point.

Panic stations all round because we didn't have much money.

We felt, I was being told from when I was a child,

"When you grow up you have to earn your own living",

which used to frighten me as being rather shocking,

considering what I was surrounded by at that time.

But I thought, I suppose that will be so,

except I will be married by then so my husband will keep me.

Young ladies like Diana usually found prospective marriage partners

from a closed circle of eligible young men

they met at balls, dances and dinners.

When she was 17, Diana went to a dance with Tony,

a student at Oxford University

with whom she'd secretly fallen in love.

Driving home after the dance,

Diana wondered if he felt the same way about her.

There was a level crossing and the train was coming

so we stopped at the level crossing

and at the level crossing, Tony didn't just put his arm around me,

but he kissed me.

And to this day I can remember it was rather a disappointing kiss

because I had expected my first kiss would be a sort of rapture.

But he had been sitting with the cold air blowing in on his face

and his lips were cold and rather sort of sticky.

I thought, that's not much fun, and I remembered reading somewhere,

I think it was in one of Thomas Hardy's books,

first kisses are usually disappointing.

Thomas Hardy said first kisses are disappointing, so that's all right.

REPORTER: Before May is upon us, let's take a look at wedding styles.

In a time of economic uncertainty,

the allure of true love and the glamorous white wedding

became even more captivating.

But influenced by the new ideals of feminism and socialism,

a growing number of modern women like Hetty Bower

wanted something much more simple and unconventional,

so Hetty got married in her local registry office.

Wednesday was the early closing day for that area of Clapham

and so we arranged to get married on Wednesday afternoon.

My sister Anita was, er...

..disapproved of a modern woman marrying.

She, you know, thought marriage was totally unnecessary.

One campaign which helped define the modern woman's attitude to marriage

was the Family Planning movement inspired by Marie Stopes.

She emphasised the importance of contraception

in preventing unplanned large families

and established the first birth control clinic in London in 1921.

Coming from a family of ten,

Hetty was determined not to fall into the same trap as her mother.

I knew I was never, never going to go in for a family that size

so I had to take precautions about becoming pregnant.

I didn't want to have a baby

before I had saved quite an amount of money

so that I could be at home with the baby for at least two years

after birth.

It was in the countryside that large families remained more commonplace.

Here, the benefits of modern family planning

took effect much more slowly.

But few families grew as large as that of Marian Atkinson

in the Lake District.

She and her husband Bill raised 15 children.

Children, when they came as quick as the came to me,

got a burden at times.

And you used to feel you can't put up with any more of it.

"I've had enough. I'm going to run away."

I said many a time in my married life I'm going to run away.

And I'd walk out of the back door and I'd look at the door and I'd think,

I've no money and nowhere to go so I'd better go back in.

So what could you do?

I mean, don't get me wrong, life wasn't all roses, because it wasn't.

We had our ups and downs and our fall-outs,

many a time over the children.

Despite the isolation and the unrelenting nature of farm work,

surprisingly, the shared hardship between husband and wife

often created a strong sense of solidarity.

In these unremittingly tough times, marriages had to be equally robust.

They were all in bed by 8:30pm

while my husband and I used to go to bed at 9pm to 9:30pm.

So we had an hour and we used to sit each side of the fireplace

and discuss things you can't discuss in front of children

or talk about how we were managing or what we would like to do.

or where we were going next or... just things between me and him,

or what we would have liked to have done

or where we would have liked to have been.

We did discuss all these things but we never let the children know.

We never let them think we were discontent.

We used to like to make them feel they were a contented family.

A happy contented family.

This was the '30s image of the ideal family.

Suburban, middle class and built on the solid foundation

of a father at work, a full time mother and two children.

But during the economic depression, the love and commitment

of comfortable middle class couples would also be tested to the limit.

When Denise Robertson's family were plunged into poverty

after her father's company went bankrupt,

her mother was determined to put a brave face on it.

When things got really bad she would sit down and play the piano.

The song she used to play was Spread a Little Happiness.

# Even though the darkest clouds are in the sky

# You mustn't sigh and you mustn't cry

# Spread a little happiness Till clouds roll by. #

# Life is wonderful when you love... #

Denise and her sister came to believe that as in the movies,

true love was the key to the happiness of her mother and father.

He used to come home for lunch

and when it was time for him to go back,

they would go into the hall and my sister and I,

we would run up the stairs and look through the bars

and scream "Hollywood, Hollywood!",

because they were locked in one another's arms, kissing,

and they couldn't bear to part for him to go back after lunch.

I think there was a fair degree of passion in that relationship.

Come along now, into bed.

Got a good night kiss for Daddy? Night-night.

It made me realise that a good marriage could withstand

whatever came against it from outside

because we were being battered from outside by all kinds of things.

The lack of money,

the fact that they had come down in the world,

which I think had a profound effect on them.

I don't think my father ever really recovered from it.

In 1936, Diana Athill went up to Oxford University

and soon immersed herself

in the privileges and pleasures of university life.

As an 18-year-old woman, Diana had lost

none of her enduring seriousness about marrying the right man.

Her relationship with Tony had developed slowly and steadily.

He was the man she loved.

Tony had by now joined the RAF

but, although he was stationed in Lincolnshire,

this didn't prevent him from coming to Oxford on regular visits.

He used to fly down from Grantham, where he was stationed,

which was terribly dashing compared to everybody else.

My young man would fly down and would come and take me out.

And we used to have lovely times.

For Diana, her relationship with Tony had reached a turning point.

Things warmed up gently

to the point where, at the end of one term,

we spent our first night in bed together.

As a matter of course, really.

There was no question of telling anybody

and very soon afterwards we got engaged.

The taboo about sex before marriage remained as strong as ever

and early sex education films were warning young women...

I believe you're only amusing yourself.

..men were only after one thing...

All this is a game to you.

..and it was the girl who said no that got her man.

-I love you.

-How many girls have you said that to?

-No, Betty, I mean it.

For a new generation of young women like Diana Athill,

this prudery seemed old fashioned,

but the serious business of marriage was unquestioned.

I was a virgin

and I didn't actually particularly enjoy the first time because of that,

excepting for the wonderful fact that this was happening,

because, you know, I was very much in love with him by then

and so it could only be a good thing.

Couples dreaming of marriage were beckoned by a brave new world

of suburban semi-detached and detached homes.

Between the wars there was a boom in home ownership

amongst the middle classes

and local councils built a million homes for rent on cottage estates.

In 1938, Robert Williamson and his family

moved into their brand-new council house in Leeds.

And when we moved into this council house, 61 Howlett Road,

it was like going into heaven.

It was a block of four and we were on the end,

which meant ours was semi-detached.

It was easier being at home then

because you had something to do worthwhile.

Get your garden right.

There were many undreamt-of luxuries that came with his new council house

and to Robert it seemed that life could only get better

for him and his family.

Every night, my wife would run the bath.

When it was ready, she'd call down,

"Come up, Daddy! The bath's ready. Norma's waiting."

So I'd go up, splash a time or two, then I'd croon her a tune.

# Swing me in the moonlight

# In the moonlight tonight. #

But Robert's dream of domestic bliss was cut short when war with Germany

was declared in September 1939 and conscription was introduced.

Britain's young husbands, fathers and fiances

marched off to a war from which they might never return.

For some, the last goodbye was unbearable.

Me and my wife, we couldn't talk about this separation

because it was too painful.

There was always that knowledge

that we may never see each other again.

I never thought I'd come back. Never thought I'd come back.

And I think that the people who saw you off didn't think...

Well, they didn't come to see you off because it was too harrowing.

The only person that was there to see me off was my dad

because he'd gone through the same situation, hadn't he?

But he'd come back alive.

For John Salinas, who had joined the Merchant Navy in 1935,

shore leave during the war took on an entirely new meaning.

It gave John the opportunity to continue his courtship

with his new girlfriend Dorothy.

They had met and fallen in love just weeks before the war started.

I remember coming home up from London to Lime Street.

Dorothy was meeting me on the station

and as I walked down the platform, I passed a very pretty girl

and she had a picture hat tilted on one side

and a beautiful suit and I felt a little bit guilty.

Anyway, I couldn't find Dorothy,

and I went back and it was this lovely girl.

It was she.

Whenever I was on leave, we used to go to the cinema.

We spent our courting days in the cinema, sitting by one another,

holding hands, and it was, I can't... It was heaven.

And, of course, there was always the smell of her.

The smell of her clothes

and the smell of her self that was special.

We had a marvellous time when I was on leave and so it went on.

Voyage, leave, fun, voyage.

# Sweets to my sweet

# Let them entreat you to forgive me, darling... #

And then, one day, my sister Lil said to me,

"Do you intend marrying Dorothy?" I said, "Of course I do."

And she said,

"You'd better get on with it or you're going to lose her."

# Now, once upon a time we'd bill and we'd coo

# We promised that we'd both be true... #

I immediately took Dorothy to Sefton Park,

sat down on a bench

and said, "Darling, I've got 25 quid, will you marry me?"

And so she became my fiancee...

and we were betrothed.

For Diana Athill, the outbreak of war meant an inevitable delay

in her plans to marry her RAF fiance Tony

to whom she had been engaged since 1938.

Tony was stationed in the Far East with an RAF bomber squadron.

Diana knew he was in considerable danger

and was determined to keep in touch.

Letters flew back and forth between us.

And I loved writing. I was a very good letter writer.

And I remember him, in one of his letters, he said,

"Look, I'm not nearly such a good letter writer as you are.

"It's much harder for me to write letters

"so I won't be writing quite as many letters as I ought to.

"Don't let that stop you writing

"because I'd die if you stopped writing to me."

So when his letters started falling off, I went on writing.

After that I had two letters from him.

Just as good as they used to be...

..and then silence.

Absolute silence.

I thought, he told me not to stop writing, so I didn't stop writing.

I don't know how long I went on writing into this silence

but it was quite a long time.

I didn't know what had happened.

And it was not knowing that was so terribly painful.

Living in wartime London, Diana was well aware of a new spirit

of living for the moment in the face of an ever-present threat of death.

This often led to the casting aside of convention

and the breaking of solemn promises.

But after not hearing from her fiance Tony for more than a year,

Diana still had no idea what his silence meant.

I got from him at that stage a little formal letter saying,

would I kindly consider our engagement over

because he was marrying somebody else.

And it was a terrible...

..awful shock, really,

because I thought to myself, I had this image in my head,

I was lying in bed and my mother brought that letter up

and silently handed it to me.

I read it and I thought,

well, anyhow, I suppose it means that it's over.

And I realise that it wasn't over for me.

And I had a, sort of, picture in my mind...

..of a long bridge between two supports

and one of the supports had been knocked away.

And the bridge was still sticking out there.

And it was bad.

I was going to be a wife. Presumably I was going to be a mother.

I had no idea of anything else that I wanted to be.

That's what I had been planning to be.

That was what I was certain I was going to be.

But now I wasn't going to be.

And I wasn't loved any more. That was very, very bleak.

Love was under threat on all fronts, and nowhere more than at sea.

The deadly menace of German U-boats

meant one in four British merchant seamen

never made it home.

John Salinas was one of the lucky ones.

But he almost took one risk too many in the name of love

the day his ship went down.

I struggled off the bunk and I can't find the bloody door.

I just cannot find the door.

Eventually did,

went up onto the boat deck.

When I got up onto the boat deck, I realised I had left

Dorothy's picture in the cabin, and so I decided to go down and get it.

Got it off the desk. And the ship started to list.

Got back up on the deck.

And as I emerge into the daylight, I think, "I've won.

"I've got it."

Stupid, but I'd do it again.

John and Dorothy were married in 1943

and still remain devoted to each other almost 70 years later.

When the war ended in 1945, it often meant a difficult homecoming

for partners who had to readjust

and pick up relationships again after years of separation.

For some, there was heartbreak.

Diana Athill had to come to terms with the loss of her fiance Tony

to another woman.

After the war she discovered he had died in a bombing raid,

leaving behind his wife, who was expecting their first child.

You can hardly really blame him. He was flying bombers.

He must have known perfectly well that his chances were very low

and he could be killed any minute.

And there was this...

I know now, from having met her son, that she was very charming,

pretty, young, innocent, delightful girl.

Loyal and kind and brave and all the good qualities.

And it would be a waste not to marry her, really.

Husbands and fathers came home to a country devastated by war.

Yet despite this, for the vast majority of married couples

the long wait to meet again would end in a happy reunion

with their family.

Most, for better or for worse, would stay together for life,

creating stable homes for their children.

The flags were out. Everything were trimmed up.

Big cake, you know. Welcome home.

Well, it was very emotive.

I'm afraid I cried, you know.

I can't remember crying before.

Only when I got spanked on my bottom when I was about a few months old.

I can't remember crying. Only on that occasion.

With joy, you know.

But this wasn't the brave new world families had fought for.

Bombing raids had destroyed many homes,

which put further pressure on relationships.

There was a shortfall of four million homes

and many young couples were forced to live with parents

and relatives in cramped conditions.

Nevertheless, most were so pleased to be home,

the simple joys of marriage and family life tasted all the sweeter.

Even in poor working-class areas, there was a determination

to make the best of it, a spirit captured by returning soldier

Ed Mitchell, a husband utterly devoted to his wife and children.

I said to Peg during the war, "Whatever happens, Peg, darling,

"we're going to be happy. Whether we've got any money

"or anything, we'll be happy."

In the early '50s, we were living in a little tiny terraced house.

95 New Market Street in Norwich.

Of course, there was no bathroom.

And no hot water.

Nothing like that, and coal fires, you see.

And it was ten shillings a week.

It had an outside toilet.

And the coalhouse was outside as well.

The highlight of the week was bath night,

a time when Ed's can-do spirit was pushed to the limit.

Bath night was always Friday night,

and that was a panic, that was, because we had a bath

which was called a "bungalow bath"

and they were long tin baths.

I could just about sit in it with my knees out straight.

And to heat the water up for that,

we used to put the bath on the gas fire

and light two burners underneath it and heat the water up.

Shirley used to be bathed first, who was then a little baby.

Then Gran was bathed in the same water.

Then we put a couple of saucepans full of boiling water in the water

and it was getting a bit of scum on top by then, and Gran was bathed.

Peg would wipe them down and get them into bed.

Then Peg would get in, have her bath,

put another couple of saucepans of water in it.

By the time I got in the bath, there was about an inch of scum on there.

And the bloody water was lukewarm.

And then to get it out of the kitchen,

which was only about eight foot by four foot wide,

to get it out of the kitchen door and tip it in the drain in the yard

was a bit of a job, cos it had slopped about all over the floor and it was a panic.

And I used to hang that up in the shed, which was an Anderson shelter.

Despite a brief upsurge in divorces immediately after the war,

marriage soon became more popular than ever before.

In the late 1940s and '50s,

there was a boom in the numbers getting married,

with around half a million couples tying the knot each year.

So you're going to get married, are you?

Most couples married in their early- to mid-20s.

Women who left it much later,

or who appeared to have too many boyfriends,

were viewed with suspicion.

However, marrying the right man was a big decision

and having seen the passionate and enduring love enjoyed by her parents,

Denise Robertson wasn't going to settle for anything less.

I had quite a lot of boyfriends when I was a girl.

And my mother, who believed that if you weren't married at 21...

My sister had been married at 20,

you know, I got into my early 20s

and I was showing no sign of settling down

and my mother became very agitated.

And I remember she had a saying - "Too may rings around Rosie,

"Rosie gets no ring at all."

And I don't know what I was holding out for,

but I had... You know, I wanted what they had had.

I wanted to be stirred.

The dream of domestic bliss and a comfortable married life

in the affluent suburbs was never stronger than in the post-war years.

One contemporary survey showed that 71% of British wives were "very happy"

and only 4% were "unhappy".

A steadfast husband, the protector and provider,

was part of this vision, as was his dutiful wife at home.

But for some women, this was not all they wanted.

There was this place called Cleedon,

which was where all the posh houses were.

All my friends simply wanted to be married to someone

who could take them to Cleedon.

And I didn't know what I wanted, but I knew Cleedon wasn't it.

I wanted to be loved and protected.

I thought that's what you have a husband for. He shelters you.

There was a new respectability,

as strict rules about courtship were re-established.

Early sex surveys of the late 1940s and early '50s

revealed the enduring power of sexual taboos,

which restrained many couples from having sex before marriage.

And even on holiday, couples were policed by their parents,

as Eileen Cook and her fiance Arthur would discover

when they went away together.

We were going to Blackpool. And we'd been courting over two years

and could we go to Blackpool for four days?

"Yes."

So in those days you had to write and get a letter,

so I wrote and asked for two single rooms

and she wrote back, did the landlady.

My mother read the letter. "That's OK."

So off we went on the Saturday, to this boarding house.

Sunday morning, my mother and dad landed.

They'd come on a coach trip.

Came to the hotel, and obviously we'd gone out for the day

and could they have their tea with us?

"Yes." And could I go to Eileen's room to get washed?

That was to check that I was in the single room

and Arthur's room was upstairs.

The deep sexual longings of many couples

would only finally be expressed on their honeymoon.

When Eileen Cook got married in 1950,

she and Arthur went back to Blackpool.

This was the moment they'd been waiting for.

But Eileen was apprehensive about what to expect on her wedding night.

It's a bit intimidating, like,

well, am I to put my pyjamas on?

Have I to take pyjamas?

Have I to take a nightie?

It's a bit, you know, a bit worrying

when you're not sure whether you want to take a nightie or pyjamas.

I mean, talking to some of the people at work, they said,

"Well, you won't want either of them." I thought, "I will.

"I'm not getting into bed without a nightie on.

Then when you're getting undressed...

Well, am I to put my nightie on first?

Have I to put it on, then will he ask me to take it off?

I don't know whether it went on and came off or whatever!

I've forgotten.

However, there was yet further embarrassment for Eileen

as she contemplated coming down to breakfast with her husband

the following morning.

Eileen, the wife, she was quite concerned - "Will we go now?

"They'll all be looking at us. What will they think?"

I said, "I'm not bothered what they think.

I said, "We're married now."

"Well, I don't like going down." I said, "I want some breakfast!

"I'm hungry." I said, "Come on, never mind what they think."

She said, "They'll be staring at us."

I said, "Well, let them stare, I'm not bothered."

For married couples in the '50s, happiness was a new home,

and DIY and home improvements became a national pastime.

Even the addition of an indoor bathroom and toilet

could be a dream come true.

I didn't have a bathroom and I didn't have an inside toilet.

But through from the kitchen at the time was a kind of archway.

And a fireplace beside it.

So I busted through from the kitchen into this room

what was behind it, but that had been a washhouse.

Cos there was a copper in the corner.

So I took the copper out and I made that into a bathroom.

So now we had an indoor bathroom, but still had an outdoor loo.

Had to go down the yard to the loo.

So that joined the bathroom.

So I busted through from the bathroom into the loo

and put a doorway in there. So now we had indoor loo, indoor bathroom.

And that was really going up-market to have an indoor bathroom.

Cos half of them houses off Cleeve Road didn't have a bathroom.

And they never had an indoor loo.

The post-war baby boom grew out of a new spirit of optimism

for the future.

It was unquestioned that this future would be built around the institution of marriage,

leading onto a happy and stable family life.

The introduction of the welfare state and the National Health Service in the late 1940s

made this life look more promising than ever before.

Nevertheless, some of the new babies were unplanned,

a consequence of their mother's total lack of any knowledge

about birth control.

I kept getting up in the night, feeling rotten. Feeling quite sick.

And Arthur came along and said, "Go across to the doctor's."

And it was a new doctor that I didn't know,

so he took me across to register at the doctor, where we lived, his doctor.

And he said, bring a sample of water in - your urine.

Which I did, the following day and he tested it.

And he said, "Yes, you're pregnant."

How can he tell with water?

I thought, "Never in this world. No."

So then I went on to my mother's

and I said, "Book me in to our own doctor," which I did.

And he took me in and I said, "The doctor says I'm pregnant," but I said, "I'm not."

I said, "I just feel really sick.

"I think I have an ulcer or something.

So he said, "All right. I'll examine you."

And then afterwards he says "Yes." He said, "You are pregnant.

"I think you're round about three month."

I said, "No, I can't be."

He said, "And why not? You're a married woman."

I said, "Yes, but we haven't been trying."

He said, "Well, if you haven't been trying, you've succeeded,

"because you're definitely pregnant."

Eileen's baby son David was born in 1952.

For her, motherhood was a rite of passage.

From the minute that David was born,

the minute that they brought him in and put him in my arms,

I suddenly grew up.

Cos until then, it had just been me, you know.

I just did what I did, I went out and enjoyed myself.

And then I realised that I had a great responsibility.

This little tiny thing was solely going to be relying on me.

And that was the first time that I really felt that I'd grown up.

As with many others of her generation,

Eileen and Arthur have remained happily married for life

and recently celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary.

By the late '50s, a new and restless younger generation

was growing up much faster.

Inspired by modern jazz and rock and roll,

they began to enjoy the fruits of affluence in post-war Britain.

The new breed of young men and women were more independent

and questioning of authority,

very different from those who had served in two world wars.

Denise Robertson bridged these two generations.

She wanted a man who was like her father, but also different.

When she met an older man from the Shetlands, a ship's captain on his shore leave on Tyneside,

she thought she had found him.

He rang me up and he said, "The ship's coming in.

"I want to take you out, I've got something important to say to you."

And I said to my mother, "He's going to propose.

"But I'm not going to say yes this time."

And he took me out to dinner and he said, "I want to talk to you."

"I...won't be seeing you again.

"Because if I see you again, I will want to marry you

"and I don't want to get married."

And I thought, "Right, that's great.

"I don't have to worry - he's not going to propose."

And I promptly forgot all about him.

I think that was October...

and in January he rang me up again

and said, "I don't know if I can live with you,

"but I know now I can't live without you."

And we were married about five months later.

And I have never been so happy.

But in the '60s and '70s,

the institution of marriage would be questioned as never before.

The baby boomers began to rebel against all the traditional values

and institutions that had once been held dear.

The stage was set for a cultural revolution

that would start to transform the meaning of love and marriage

in Britain for ever.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media