A seasonal tale
Times letter reunites wartime couple 68 years on - Times Online
Last November Mr Pettinger went to the Field of Remembrance at Westminster Abbey with his son, Martin. Twice he took a cab that day, and twice the drivers refused to take money from an old soldier with so many medals. One of them said that he owed Mr Pettinger more than any fare. Martin Pettinger described their kindness in a letter to The Times, which was reprinted in The Week.
Five thousand miles away in Zimbabwe, an elderly widow picked up a copy of The Week, saw the letter and noticed Martin Pettinger’s name at the bottom. “The name just came up and hit me,” Mrs Crombie, now 87, said. “I thought, ‘This has got to be his son’.”
Although she had made her own life in Zimbabwe — she married a pilot, and had three children — she had never forgotten Mr Pettinger. “I often wondered how he was doing,” she said. “Every now and then something would happen — an old tune you heard on the boat would be played and you would go back to the old Ceramic days. The big one was Blue Moon — that was our tune.”
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