Yesterday the couple celebrated 70 years of marriage. Originally from the United Kingdom, the couple met in Austrey, the village where Patrick (91) had evacuated to during the Blitz. It is close to the city of Leicester, where Iris (89) lived.
With tears in his eyes, Mr Aughterlony described seeing his future bride for the first time.
"She was only more or less five or six yards across the road in the village and do you know, it was truly love at first sight — it truly was and I’ve never looked back," he said.
The next day, the pair went for their first walk together and from then on, Mrs Aughterlony (nee Draper) would catch the bus to the nearby village of No Man’s Heath.
Since the bus stop was about 3km away, Mr Aughterlony would ride his bike to pick her up and she would ride on his handle bars back to Austrey.
"I’d put my bike slightly up the hill and then put her on the cross bar and rolled right back down to our village and it was so lovely," he said.
"We did, honestly, that’s what we did," she said.
After marrying on April 24, 1948, the couple would have three children before moving to Dunedin, on the other side of the world, in 1959.
Mr Aughterlony said the secret to staying together for 70 years was to give and take both the bad and the good.
"We’ve had our ups and downs. We had to work very hard at the start because we had three children. Then when we came to New Zealand we had another one ... We had hard times. We didn’t have any money at the start. But we wouldn’t change a thing now."
The couple, who now live in Mosgiel, have four children, 11 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren.
