Because of different skin colors
The couple were forced to separate by their parents as teenagers – now they are married 39 years later
After 39 years, Penny Umbers and Mark Bethel are reunited
© Facebook.com / Trent College Old Tridents
Penny Umbers never understood why her teenage love was leaving her – until he contacted her on Facebook years later. The couple have found each other after 39 years and will get married.
Penny Umbers was 16 when she met 17-year-old Mark Bethel, a boy from the Bahamas who attended private school in Nottingham, in the 1970s. The two fell in love and became an inseparable couple – even when he returned to his homeland, the two regularly sent each other love letters, self-painted pictures and poems. When Bethel returned to England to study, happiness seemed perfect. Penny Umbers went to a nearby college so they could be together. This is how the two tell their story to the British media.
Parents objected to the connection
But both Umbers’ and Bethel parents objected to their children’s relationship. The reason: Mark Bethel is black and Penny Umbers is white. The Bahamas student was dependent on his scholarship – and Penny’s father one day took him from class to the assistant director’s office and threatened him that he knew powerful people who could deprive him of these funds. He ordered him to break ties with his daughter and not tell her a word about it.
And Bethel’s parents weren’t thrilled that he was in a relationship with a white woman either. They also cut his financial means and the young man found himself in a dead end: on the one hand, he wanted to do what his parents expected of him, but on the other hand, he also didn’t want to hurt his girlfriend. However, he finally gave in and parted ways with Penny Umbers without warning or explanation. She even dropped out of college and tried to kill herself because she did not understand her lover’s change of heart.
Facebook united the two
After two failed marriages, Umbers said she was still thinking about her lost love until one day in 2019 she received a message from Bethel on Facebook. As they wrote to each other, she was stunned after learning the truth behind the breakup. Bethel, too, got married after graduating, but divorced again and always had to think about his first great love.
As he reported to the British media, he kept looking for Penny Umbers on Facebook, but her name had changed because of the marriages. “Then one day I found a photo of her in a black outfit outside Windsor Castle. Thirty-nine years later. I wasn’t sure if it was her. I kept texting her, but she wasn’t on Facebook regularly, so it took a few months before she saw it, “says Bethel.
Happy reunited today
All of this happened just before the corona pandemic outbreak, so the two of them still couldn’t see each other for 18 months. Because Mark Bethel had meanwhile returned to the Bahamas. When they met again at the ages of 60 and 61, they hugged each other. “There was this feeling of reunification, but it was like we hadn’t changed a bit. It wasn’t strange or uncomfortable. He held my hand and we kissed through our masks,” says Penny Umbers.
On her second trip to the Bahamas, her teenage love proposed to her. “I’m giving up everything in Bromsgrove and moving to the Bahamas with Mark,” she said. “It is a big step to leave everything behind. There are very few couples like us in the Bahamas,” continues Umbers and adds. “But I’ve never loved someone as much as I love Mark.”
Source: “Birmingham Mail”