Meeting my father's first wife

My mother was my father's second wife. He had been through a very bitter divorce during WW2, with the result that he had gained custody of my half-siblings, even though he was on active service. My father and mother married after the war and my brother and I arrived. Father's first wife remarried and moved abroad. Such was the bitterness that Father would brook no conversation about wife no.1, which of course made her super-fascinating and mysterious. As a teenager in the late 1960s I was hitchhiking on the continent. Outside Clermont Ferrand I was picked up by a delightful Englishwoman who turned out to be that woman - she who should never be mentioned! She had the only picture of my father without a beard that I had ever seen, in her handbag after all that time, along with a Derringer pistol! One of the things she told me was that she thought that if anything ever happened to my mother, she and my father would get back together. I told my father this tale; I think he was amused and interested, but was still unable to make a conversation. When she died my father said only 'thank god', and himself died shortly after. There is much more to the tale, but the coincidence of my lift must rank as extraordinary.