55 years of true love

Mr. and Mrs Richards (Leonard and Claris) married for 55 years.

LEONARD and Claris Richards have been married for more than 50 years and they say they have never had a fight. Their secret, true love and a good relationship with God.

"Some people say that teeth an tongue must meet but it don't must," says Claris. "This love caan break at all, too long. Love doan carry any evil." Leonard and Claris, affectionately called Maas Sergeant and Miss Claris, live in the quiet farming community of Above Rocks in rural St. Catherine.

Come December 23, they will have been married for 55 years.

It is said that love conquers all and the Richards say that it is the love they share that has kept them together for so long. They had to overcome many odds before finally tying the knot in 1945, the day Mr Richards holds dearest of his memories.

"The first time I saw Claris I liked her but I didn't tell her," Leonard recalls. "Things happened and she disappeared for a long while and I didn't see her. I got involved with another lady and she had a child for me. She didn't want to stay with me because I didn't have anything at the time, so we split up and I took my son."

He says he saw Claris again and this time he didn't hesitate to take her for himself. They started a relationship and she took his son as her own. They lived together for three years before they got married.

The Richards who are devout Christians got converted the same year they were married.

Mr. Richards says after they started a relationship they experienced the difficult period of World War II, when Jamaica could not get food and other basic items from abroad.

"During the time of Hitler we had to make fashion. We had to use ashes make salt and coconut oil and make light," Claris recalls.

"I was paying rent but I built a little thatched roof house and lived in it. We stayed together through all of this."

Claris says she went through a difficult time with her mother because of her relationship with Leonard.

"Yuh know how much lik mi get from my mother for it. One time she beat mi until I had to go to the clinic. My mother was a fair skin woman and she didn't like black skin man. She said him was too black."

"Mi neva pay har no mine," says Claris, "You love yours and I love mine," she says. "My mother did want mi to marry brown skin man with pretty hair. My sister do that an she, her husband and mi mother dead now."

"We don't go no where leave each other. Mi love him too much," Claris declares.

Their union did not produce any children and Leonard's son who was born in 1941, died at the age of 35. Despite this, however, they raised several adopted children, and grandchildren as their own.

Mrs Maureen Nemhard, a teacher at the St. Mary's All-Age School in Above Rocks was a tenant of the Richards for nearly five years and says she has always admired the strength of their love and has never heard them in a fuss before.

"During the time I lived with them I have never heard them use any swear words or things like that. The only thing they would say is: 'Don't let mi lik out yuh clothes basket or something like that. It was always good with them, no fussing and fighting. It was such that we were like a family."

Mrs Nemhard, who has been married for almost four years now, says the life the Richards lead has had a tremendous effect on her own life.

Their parting words to couples in Jamaica are : "To thump and box and kick, that is not love. Love is just pure, love doan carry no evil."

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