Collins Barracks

My red wedding dress was £50 from Principals, our weekly income was £90, the amount for the dress seemed extravagant, a splurge on a whole other scale. My husband to be, used the second-hand wool jacket I had bought as a student in a thrift shop in Amsterdam. He also taught me the expression ‘we don’t have two pennies to rub together’, neither of us cared.

I would have married him in his faded jeans and a white tshirt.

In 1994, we were the first in his family to get married in a registry office. His aunt kept murmuring through the proceedings:

“oh, this is really nice”,

“It really is nice”,

“I wasn’t expecting this, very nice” - as if we had our own personal narrator for the event.
It was nice and it was short, within ten minutes we were married and back out on the street and on our way home, where we ate sandwiches in the garden surrounded by family and friends.

I never dreamed of the white dress, of something custom made, layers of lace and satin or walking down the aisle with trailing fabric and a veil. But I felt a million dollars on that July day in my red dress marrying my blue-eyed Irishman.