Heathrow Crash Landing

From the Canteen we used to gravitate towards the Departure Lounge in the opposite building. It was always interesting in there, people coming and going, fine-looking cabin crew swirling around. And the banks were there. In later years it was often a comment made by your mother that she usually saw me at the counter of the Midland Bank. She had assumed I was paying in, but was later annoyed to find that I had been drawing out...
There were comfortable seats in the foyer area, below the main staircase, and there we would sit and chat.
Around November 1963 I had heard that there was a Carol Service planned at the Toynbee Hall in Victoria. I decided to go. My next decision was more momentous. I would ask one of the girls (in retrospect, why not both?) if they wanted to go with me. I spun a coin - Heads for Girl A, Tails for Girl B. It came down Heads and so I invited your mother.
I ought to have known then to avoid games of chance for evermore, but by the time we are 18, we know everything, and I was 21.
Girl B was a tall, slim ectomorph with black hair set in deep waves. The exact opposite to your mother, and it transpired later that I would have done better with her. But back to the Carol Service. We arranged to travel by Underground (which, at Hounslow was, in fact, overground) and she would get on at Hounslow West. I would get on at Hounslow Central. She would sit in the rearmost carriage. I was more than I bargained for when she turned up wearing a green balaclava with white spots.
There is today nothing I can recall about the evening, which must have gone reasonably well, because we carried on seeing each other - but unbeknown to Girl B.
About two weeks later Girl B invited several friends to an Xmas Party to be heald at her home. Because she lived out in Hayes, Middlesex, your mother and I travelled out there together. When we got to the house, the door was opened by a beaming father and mother.
More later