Happy days, Alan and Sally

It’s been a busy few weeks for the Collinses, with Alan’s 96th birthday, Sally’s 90th and the devoted couple’s 65th wedding anniversary all falling within a short period in December.

Watercolour artist Alan’s dealer, Alfred Memelink, was setting up for a formal photo when partner Christine Hanks stepped in with her iPhone and took this quick shot in front of the window of the Marine Parade home where the couple have lived since 1955. Alan is careful to hold his “child bride’s” right hand since Sally lost the sight in that eye due to glaucoma. “We rely on each other,” he jokes. “We’re like a pair of coathangers.”

The couple, who travelled extensively after his retirement as manager of the National Publicity Studios in 1986, have some hairraising stories to tell. They met when the exarmy warden of Alan’s Commonwealth hall of residence, London House, invited the Kiwi art student upstairs to meet his nieces: Sally, from Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, and her cousin. At that meeting, he “fell in love and [it] blew up my life like a bomb”.

But for the man who has lived under five sovereigns, and sold his first painting in 1950 for the sum of seven guineas, every day now is a challenge. He regrets having to give up gardening, but worse, has not picked up a paintbrush since November because the arthritis in his hips distracts him. He says while medication relieves the pain, it also makes him want to sleep – and as an active person his whole life he finds that “bloody frustrating”.

The artist credits specialists with saving the sight in his right eye. But while he’ll never stop visualising a potential watercolour in terms of the colours involved – “cobalt with a bit of burnt siena” – he now suspects the painting itself “will probably never eventuate.”

*For those bemoaning the school’s proximity to the fire station’s siren, Alan Collins, 96, recalls that when King George V died, the siren went “every hour, on the hour, for a whole day”.