Doug and Pat Buckingham, this week happily celebrating their golden wedding, are both from bombed-out backgrounds.

At 13, Doug and his parents had to leave the family home in Hendon because of the Blitz and they made their way to Winchester.

They moved to Hursley, where Doug's father ran the Kings Head pub from 1943 to the early '50s.

Meanwhile, Pat's family moved from central Southampton, also heavily bombed during the war, to live with relatives in Alresford.

Doug (72) vividly remembers the change to a country life: "My eyes were opened on the bus from Winchester to Alresford. I was amazed at the sights I saw, cows in the field, and pheasants."

Nights in air-raid shelters had been left behind for ever.

Pat, now 69, was six when she left Southampton "We had used a cellar as an air -aid shelter. We lived near the High Street, which was flattened during the bombing."

Doug became an apprentice electrician, working on damaged fighter planes for Vickers Armstrong at Hursley Park.

The war and its effects were not quite over. When Doug did his National Service in the army, part of it was spent in Germany, where he remembers a landscape flattened from the Ruhr to Berlin. After the army, he did electrical contracting for Dicks, a Winchester company.

Pat, meanwhile, went first to Dean School and then Perin's, Alresford. She worked for a time at a chemist's and then she was a cashier at Sainsbury's, Winchester, where the Cheltenham and Gloucester office is now.

Doug and Pat's romance began in a quiet way, when they exchanged polite hellos as they passed each other on the way to work each morning. "We started talking to each other and we met a couple of times at dances," Pat remembers.

The couple, who married at Trinity Church, Winchester, in 1952, have three daughters, Hazel, Linda and Pennie, and six grandchildren.

They made their home in Andover Road and moved to their present address, in Main Road, Littleton, 40 years ago.

Doug, who had his own electrical company, retired in 1988. After their children had grown up, Pat returned to work, at Boots in Winchester, for 14 years.

Doug has been a member of Alresford Golf Club for 40 years. Now he and Pat enjoy caravanning; they've been to France and Spain and Scotland.

Both give succinct advice for a happy marriage. Doug said: "Be agreeable, bite your tongue, enjoy your life."

Pat said: "Respect the other person - and say you're sorry."