Roding Rotary Club

On Sunday 27th July Past President Angela Jestico and her husband John celebrated their fortieth Wedding Anniversary. A large crowd of Rotarians and non-Rotarians and members of their family joined them in the delightful garden of their Wanstead home to share the celebrations. The couple met while they were both training at the Middlesex Hospital. Angela was in her second year of training as a nurse and John doing his pre-clinical studies and completing a BSc in Physiology. Though only 19 Angela already had gained rich experience working with a Belgian order of missionaries in the Congo, in what we would now call a gap year after leaving St Mary's Convent School in Bishop's Stortford. She taught English, typing and games in the Girls' School in Kikwit City, all complicated by the fact that French was the only language spoken in the school apart from Swahili. Even the typewriters had a different keyboard.
Angela swears that it was she who proposed to John but he tells a different story. They were married in St Joseph's Roman Catholic Church in Bishop's Stortford. As a non-catholic John had to undergo instruction from Father Finbar Healey, who was later defrocked for IRA activities. Angela, of course, qualified first, so for the first two years of their marriage they lived on a staff nurse's salary. Later Angela worked as a District Nurse in Barnes and then as an Air Ambulance Nurse while John was climbing the medical ladder to his present eminence as a consultant neurologist at Barts. Asked what kind of marriage it had been, Angela replied with a twinkle in her eye - 'Forty happy years with never a cross word!' - and then admitted that 'we don't argue much'. They are both very busy people and part of the bedrock which makes Rotary the effective organisation it is. We wish them many more happy years together.