The 18th Photo!

Derrick from Melrose Musings has tagged me to go to the 18th photo of the 18th folder in my files and tell the story behind it - apparently the meme started off as the 6th photo of the 6th file but it seems that there is a degree of superstition attached to the number 6 which I must investigate later. My husband spent a lot of the winter of 2007 scanning all our family photos, from the late 1800s up until the advent of my digital camera, into my computer and these are all in folder number 18. The photo is a family group taken in our garden in 1988 and left to right are my husband, my Uncle Vic, Aunty May, elder son Stephen aged 15 with daughter Juliette aged 8 in front of him, me and my younger son Neil aged 13.
My Uncle Vic was a Norfolk man and early in WW2 he was stationed in my home town of Macclesfield, Cheshire with the RAMC. There he met May, one of my dad's younger sisters and they fell in love. Soon he was shipped out to the Far East and after the fall of Singapore in February 1942 he became a Japanese prisoner of war. He managed to survive these dreadful years with the help of a small leather wallet containing a photograph of the girl he'd left behind which he managed to keep hidden from the Japanese guards. He was finally repatriated back to the UK in late 1945 weighing just 6 stones (84 pounds). He came straight to Macclesfield to the girl who had been his reason to struggle on and survive and in April 1946 he married her and took her back to live in his home county of Norfolk. They celebrated their Diamond Wedding in 2006 and in August 2007 Uncle Vic died at the age of 87. Aunty May is still going strong and will be 89 in August.
So really this is a cheat as the photograph wasn't taken by me at all but by my Uncle David, it brought back some happy memories though even if it wasn't quite according to specifications. I'm not passing this on to 6 other people but please feel free to do this meme if you want to, you may well find that it brings back some good memories for you too.