About Ruth - continued

At the end of the Dinner Dance they arranged their first date but unfortunately, Len being Len, had forgotten that the day he had arranged the date for, was St Margaret’s Day, the church's Patronal Festival, and, of course, he had to be in church for the Festival Mass. But Ruth understood, came along to the service.

Instead of going across to the Blue Lampy (the pub across the road from the church where the altar servers and others often gathered after Mass), Len took Ruth out in his Morris Traveller for a basket supper (chicken and chips... all the rage in those days) to the Broadstraik Inn which, in those days, was out in the Aberdeenshire countryside.

Ruth and Len were engaged to be married the following year and they were married in St Ninian's Church, Pollokshields, Glasgow, on 31st May 1975. This date upset Len's superstitious grandmother who quoted the old rhyme, 'Marry in May and rue the day'. As the only alternative date was Friday the 13th, she accepted the lesser of two evils. I think they proved her suspicions very wrong! A few weeks before the wedding Len had moved to Dundee where he was to serve his second Curacy in the Episcopal Church as Chaplain of St Paul's Cathedral in the centre of Dundee as well as being Priest-in-Charge of St Martin's in the Hilltown.

Following the wedding they set up home together in Dundee. They lived on the Law Hill in St Martin's Rectory, a large house over three flowers which had spectacular views over the city and the River Tay looking across to Fife. The summer of 1976 in the UK was marked by an exceptionally hot heatwave and severe drought in many parts of the country, making it one of the driest and warmest summers of the 20th century with temperatures in England reaching 35.9 °C. Dundee was not as hot as that, but one day, while still recovering from major surgery, Ruth fell asleep sunbathing in the garden and suffered from minor sun stroke for several days.

While she was still in Glasgow, Ruth had worked as a biochemist in the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research, a facility dedicated to studying the biology of cancer. While she was in the search of work in Dundee, one day she found a litter of kittens at the bottom of the Rectory garden and traced the mother cat to a house in the street below Adelade Place where she met Dr Haddock. In conversation he discovered that Ruth was a biochemist and immediately offered her a job in the University labs. She accepted.

The following year Ruth and Len's first son, George Matthew, was born in Dundee in October 1976, an event that brought great joy to them both.