Teenage sweethearts reconnecting after 48 years

After the Wales-France Rugby World Cup semi-final last October I was surfing New Zealand websites for opinions on the red-carding of the Welsh captain when I spotted a link to The Labrador Club, Inc. As a labrador owner I clicked on it out of curiosity and was astonished to see the name of my teenage sweetheart, who had left our hometown of Pwllheli (North Wales) for New Zealand in 1957. We had corresponded regularly until she married in 1963, since when we had had no further contact. She was shown as a labrador breeder in Auckland. There was a website with an email address to which I wrote asking if she was the same Pat who had been at grammar school with me. She replied immediately in the affirmative, with a short history of her life since 1963. What came as a surpise was that she had had a strong feeling we were going to make contact after accidentally finding separate references to both me and my wife on the internet just a week or two earlier. I asked why she hadn't contacted me - she said she was too embarrassed as her first marriage had failed miserably, as I predicted it might, that I might not remember her, and she knew through relatives in Wales that I was happily married with a large family. A week and several emails later I was sorting through boxes of old train track for my grandson. My wife had put some old files in one of them: as I took one out, a photo of Pat, aged 18, fell out - the first time I had seen it for 45 years. I scanned it and sent it to Pat with my next email. She was quite shocked, as the day before she and her husband of thirty years were clearing out some boxes when the same photo fell out and her husband remarked that that is how I would remember her. But to continue the coincidences, two days later, and totally unconnected with this reacquaintance, I was leafing through my MSc dissertation (1968) and found several sheets stapled together which had been slipped into it - a report from May 1957 of a geography field trip in Snowdonia which was the beginning of our romance (we had spent the whole day together). From then we dated nearly every day until she left for NZ the following September. I also came across two, and only two, schoolboy diaries, one for 1958, the other for 1963, containing several poignant entries - and Pat's married name, without which I would not have made the connection on her website (she runs her business under her first married name). We have compared our life histories and have both finished up in remarkably similar places - we both live on smallholdings (me in Cornwall, Pat near Whitford, southeast of Auckland) with dogs and horses. We both have chidren and grandchildren within the same age ranges, and we both have very similar tastes and outlooks on life - and a shared sense of humour. There are several more very recent NZ-related coincidences, but the latest is that my middle daughter and fiance, who live in Yorkshire, are visiting Auckland next month - a trip planned a long time ago - and have been invited to visit Pat and friends of hers who have the same interest in horse and rider training as my daughter.