I met Antoinette on the steps of All Souls Church, Langham Place, London in September 1969. She had come to visit her sister whose husband was serving with the U.S. Navy Support Activity and stationed near the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square. I had met them a week before when they first visited the church and asked a friend, Henrietta Morris, who was a secretary to the Ambassador, to welcome them. She had arranged to have lunch with them that day and invited me to join them to make up the party. I crammed them into my red Morris Mini and we took off to the Columbia Club, Lancaster Gate in Kensington, which was used by American officials.

She was from South Carolina, slim and tall, even statuesque, with the posture of a ballet dancer which she used to be, a brunette, with a charming smile. I found her lovely. She had been teaching school in Florida after finishing her degree in French at Emory University, which included stints at Laval University in Quebec and in Lausanne, where she attended L’Abri Fellowship with Francis and Edith Schaeffer and worked at Schloss Mittersill, Salzburg with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students.

Over lunch she mentioned her need of a dentist and I recommended her mine in Wimpole Street. She was twenty-four and I was twenty-eight. I invited her to join me to see a play in the West End. We went together and saw two of Harold Pinter’s plays, Landscape and Silence, about couples who talked at one another but did not listen, conversation without communication. After that we dated regularly. When Christmas came we drove up to Durham and spent time with dear friends, Robin and Ruth Nixon, and I showed her around where I lived and studied for my postgraduate degree at Cranmer Hall. Then we drove up to Jedburgh to stay with Peta and Muir Sturrock and celebrated Hogmanay with their friends. We bought an engagement ring at Sandy Blair’s Jewelers in Kelso, near Floors Castle, the home of the Duke and Duchess of Roxburghe. We married three months later.

I kissed her last night and I kissed her this morning, fifty-four years later, our two daughters grown with four children of their own, living in Texas. There is no silence in our marriage. There is much conversation and listening. There is prayer and much love. She is precious to me. What a gift!