Ron talks about life with his wife Pat
We had a wonderful life together. Fantastic.
She was a real mother hen. That was her aim in life to feed the kids and me well. Always she was quite an adventurous cook and cooked a lot of Italian stuff and Greek stuff and try and make it as pleasant as possible in appearance and in taste.
Then she got back into work. She had a… Her first job, she worked for a guy who was a white witch. He ran an occult shop, mostly mail order. And it had all blackened windows, it was in Headingley somewhere. And she was doing his secretarial work, because it was all sort of mail order, mostly. And I used to tell the kids, “Your mum works for a witch.” The ‘Bewitched’ programme was on TV at the moment, and Pat could twitch her nose just like the lead actress did, and she said, “Be careful now, if I touch my nose, if you’re naughty I’ll touch my nose.” And away they went and told all their friends at school, and they used to look askance at Pat when she turned up at the school gates.
She progressed on from there. When she’d finished up, as PA, the head of IT in the Leeds United Hospital Services, quite a high-flying job. Again, she’s pretty conscientious, never came home on time, and me and the kids were quite happy, just sort ourselves out.
We got the kids through their education, off to college. And I took early retirement, and we bought the motorhome, went off for 10 years touring, which wasn’t Pat’s cup of tea at all, something she never thought about. She always liked to go away and stay in posh hotels and just sit by the pool. But yeah, she really got into the travelling business. We didn’t get as far around Europe as we wanted to go. We did want to do Scandinavia as well. We did Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, never did Italy.
And then we went on a lot of… We sold the motorhome; we went on a lot of coach holidays. A lot in Scotland, we used to love Scotland. And we did Ireland as well. And a lot of Italy and France, Spain. Yeah, so we continued travelling, but let somebody else take the strain of driving.
We moved and settled down here about 2002, so it was sometime in that next decade[that Pat’s health deteriorated] It came on very, very insidiously, and then she got this back ache and then she went for scans and found out it was osteoporosis and the bones were just disintegrating. And we just had to take it steady after that. Still, we went on an occasional coach holiday. And then we just couldn’t travel anymore.
[After Pat died in 2023, Ron began to attend the Grief Group]
It was very helpful. As I say, you get so obsessed by your own way of life and problems, you just haven’t time to think about other people’s. But listening to them, you think, if you want to think, well, there’s millions in the same position as me. So, I’m not unique, but you get this feeling that, you could help each other. And you become less self-obsessed and you can talk about your problems. You’ve got people who know what you’re going through and stuff like that. So, it was extremely helpful.
Ron Hutchinson was interviewed in 2025 as part of the Trees of Hope project