A CHANCE encounter after a night out that led to a 50-year love story was recently celebrated at the Jersey hotel where the couple first met.
Anne and Norman Targett returned to La Haule Manor, where they both worked during the summer of 1976, to celebrate their anniversary.
The couple, who now live in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham, and are both in their late 60s, will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary next year.
During the famously hot summer of 1976, Anne worked as a chambermaid and Norman as a chef at the Island hotel, far from the homes where they had grown up.
Norman had previously worked in Jersey at the Pomme d’Or Hotel the year before, while Anne had decided to stay on the Island and find work after visiting with a friend.
“It was like university for us, when you leave the nest and then you have to fend for yourselves,” said Anne, who is originally from Birmingham.
Recalling their first encounter, she said: “He’d actually seen me going up the stairs, and I’d seen him when he was in the kitchen.
“He was ironing a shirt in the collar, and I said to him,“I’ll iron that for you”, and – this is no lie – he’s never ironed a shirt since.”
However, it was a chance late-night encounter that finally “broke the ice” and gave the then “quite shy” Norman the confidence to ask Anne out.
One evening, Anne was returning from a night out with a friend when she discovered the manor had been locked up for the night, with every door bolted.
Trying not to wake the entire hotel, the two friends crept around the back of the building, testing windows and doors in search of a way inside.
Eventually, they spotted a single window high above them that could be opened and was just large enough to climb through.
As they worked out how to get inside, Norman arrived back at the manor and offered to help after seeing them stranded outside.
Through laughter and determination, the chef helped push chambermaid Anne safely through the window and back into the hotel.
At the time, neither realised that the moment they now describe as “destiny” would mark the beginning of their love story.
Shortly afterwards, the chef invited the chambermaid on their first date to Jersey Zoo – although Anne admitted she did not realise it was a date at first.
“I thought everybody was going to the zoo, but when I turned up it was just us, and he took my hand and we got on the bus,” she said. “We had a day together and it was just perfect.”
Looking back on the early days of their relationship, Anne recalled another particularly sweet moment.
She said: “One day I got on a bus at Millbrook with my friends, and Norman was already on there, and he had brought me a big, massive cuddly stuffed dog.”
Although the early stages of dating can often feel uncertain, Anne said there was one moment when Norman made his intentions unmistakably clear.
She realised things were serious when Norman told a colleague in the kitchen that he was “going back home with Anne” at the end of the season.
True to his word, Norman, originally from Lancashire, moved back to Birmingham with her and found work at a hotel there.
Deeply in love, the couple became engaged on the anniversary of their first date at Jersey Zoo. Just a year later, they married on Christmas Eve.
Mark Wall, who had worked with Norman in the kitchen and was also from Birmingham, later became the best man at their wedding.
The couple went on to build a family together, welcoming daughter Kimberly and son Ross.
Today, they are grandparents to 11-year-old Joshua and Beatrice, who turns nine next month, and have shared with them the story of how they first met.
Asked the secret to a long and successful marriage, Anne said it was “just loving each other every day”.
“I love him more than I did years ago,” she added.
Rami Hammoude, deputy manager at La Haule Manor, described the couple’s recent stay as “amazing”.
“Sometimes, with the hotel being old, people have a story behind it from the past,” he added.
