"LOVE STORY WORTHY OF A HOLLYWOOD SCRIPT" "
'I can't live without him': Last words of wife, 97, who 'died of a broken heart' just hours after her husband of 76 years passed away
It is a love story worthy of a Hollywood script. A devoted couple who were inseparable for more than seven decades of marriage have died within hours of each other – on their 76th wedding anniversary.
War hero Clifford Hartland passed away on July 29, 2014 at the age of 101 and his 97-year-old wife Marjorie followed him 14 hours later.
Their daughter Christine said her mother had 'died of a broken heart'. A frail Clifford passed away at Saint Martin's Rest Home in Coventry hours after his wife was discharged from hospital with a broken leg. 'We think he was waiting for her to come back to the room they shared before he died,' said Christine.
'Afterwards, Mum just kept saying, 'I can't live without him'. That night, Mum rang me. 'She was upset and I told her to think about all the happy times they'd shared in their marriage while she drifted off to sleep. 'She died at 1am, and I like to think that's exactly what she was doing.
'It's a perfect love story. I'm devastated they're gone but so happy for them - they've never really had to live without one another.'
The couple fell met in Cardiff before the war and married soon after in 1938.
But their love story was soon dealt a blow when Clifford, a gunner in the 7th Coast Regiment Royal Artillery, was sent to Singapore on October 1, 1941. When his regiment surrendered to the Japanese in 1942, Clifford was one of four survivors and he was forced to work as a prisoner of war on the infamous Thailand-Burma railway line. Conditions were brutal, and 13,000 prisoners died and were buried along the route.
An 11-stone young man when he left Liverpool Dock, Clifford weighed a pitiful five stone when he returned. Clifford and Marjorie's daughter Christine, 67, said: 'I don't know how Dad survived - mainly luck and determination, I think. There were 700 men in his regiment when they went out, but only four ever came back. Dad was the last to die from his regiment.
'But every day, on her way to work, Mum would go into the church she passed and pray that Dad would come home. She lived without him for four years, but she never believed he was dead.' Clifford had been mercilessly tortured, starved, and worked to the brink of death by the Japanese. He was forced to trek for miles each day through leech-filled swamps.
Mother-of-two Christine said her father had once been caught smoking banana leaves in one of the 15 prison camps he had been sent to. The Japanese officer who discovered him pushed a poisoned bamboo shoot through his leg, leaving a lifelong scar.
Last year, Clifford said: 'The worst thing was when we had to dig our own graves. We were due to be shot on the day the war ended.
'Then the 'all-clear' sounded. You can guess how I felt.' Clifford came home to a street party in Cardiff, and even a letter of thanks from the King. But his wife's welcome was the most treasured of all.
The war hero was discharged from the army in 1945, and Christine - the couple's only child - was born a year later.
The family moved to Hipswell Highway in Wyken, Coventry in 1947, and Clifford worked for Morris Engines as a factory foreman until he retired. Christine said: 'Dad was in hospital for a while after he came back from Burma, but neither of them cared. They were just so happy to be together again.
'They had an incredible marriage. They never, ever argued. Dad idolised Mum and she adored him.
'When they'd go to a restaurant, Dad would eat the same thing that Mum ordered.
'They loved dancing together, and they loved singing, too. Dad had been a choirboy at Gloucester Cathedral.'
