蜜芽传媒

Carol’s dad was a Methodist minister in Midlands, Ireland. Carol went to school in nearby Dublin, where she showed a passion for art. In her early twenties, she went on to study for her art teacher's diploma at Bray.

1960s Dublin proved to be thrilling. “It was a really vivacious time,” Carol recounts.

Although she was not a big drinker – they never had alcohol at home – she would meet her friend Ruth at a well-known literati pub.

“We smoked our pipes, we pretended to be lesbians… I'd drink a Babycham, she’d drink a Guinness… We had the greatest fun.”

“Then one day,” she recalls, “young Ben walked in.”

Benedict Ryan was a poet, who Ruth knew.

“I can still see him, against the light of the pub,” muses Carol. “He came in the door and he walked up to us. He had a swagger and his hair was sort of longish. Buddy Holly glasses.”

Ben pushed in between the two of them, pheromones flying.

“Ruth and I gasped, and that was it,” says Carol. “I was hooked.”

The couple went on to have a “wonderful romp” – but their fiery affair was short-lived.

“It was so wrong for both of us,” Carol states.

Ben came from a very bohemian family, had lived in Paris and been expelled from an English public school.

She was a minister’s daughter, inexperienced and naïve. “He was wild... Our backgrounds were so different,” she states.

On top of that, he was young. “All my friends were getting engaged and getting married and having babies and I did not see that with Ben,” says Carol, “although I adored him.”

“We broke up by spending a weekend in a dirty old hotel in Dublin together – just a whole weekend – and then parted.”

Carol entered a relationship with a Dutchman who had joined the church and asked her to paint his portrait.

“I don't really know what happened,” she says. “I think I was hunkering after Ben.”

But her new beau offered respectability: “He was from a well-to-do Dutch family, proper like mine, and it sort of rolled into it.”

“I loved him, but I was never in love with him,” she admits.

Carol’s dad married them. Even as she walked down the aisle, she was plagued with doubt.

“It was very soon obvious that it wasn't right,” she states. But by then it was too late: within three months she was pregnant with their first child.

Carol was to have one more, heart-wrenching encounter with Ben: “I went to visit my friend Ruth, who lived in a cottage up in the hills above Bray, and Ben and his friend were there. I hadn't seen him since we'd broken up.”

She fled, he followed her, and they kissed. But – now married and pregnant – she knew she had to walk away. “It was terrible.”

After their second child had been born, Carol’s husband wanted to return to the Netherlands to pursue landscape architecture.

They uprooted their young family and took the leap.

Carol couldn’t speak a word of Dutch and had to work hard to settle.

“I think I suffered quite a bit of depression and didn't recognise it,” she says.

Thankfully, there were art classes in Gouda, where they lived, which Carol enjoyed.

When others recognised how good her portraits were, she started getting offers of work.

“I got one commission after another,” she says.

Two years later she won the city art prize: “Then I was invited to exhibit, and it just rolled from there.”

Newspaper interviews, plus hundreds of exhibitions all over Europe, followed. Carol’s career was flying.

Her family had grown too. She had “four natural births and one aeroplane birth” – an adopted son arrived with them two days before his seventh birthday.

But her marriage was faltering.

“It wasn't comfortable,” she says. “We didn't have a lot of communication with each other.”

Her husband would come home from unexplained places, his mood erratic. “It was difficult to cope with it,” she admits.

“I decided that it must be my fault: I wasn't giving enough… wasn't filling his needs. And so, after about 24 years of marriage, I decided I would go into therapy.”

It was when Carol’s counsellor suggested that he meet her husband too, that the truth finally emerged.

“He had been having relationships with men for almost all of our marriage,” states Carol.

“I thought, that explains everything.”

With honesty came the end of the marriage.

After years of feeling “totally undesired” Carol had been left with “a thick suit of armour.”

15 years later she went on a date or two, but her heart was not in it.

She threw herself into her work and her family. “I made I think six wedding cakes,” she says. Grandchildren followed.

It was when her youngest daughter was pregnant with her third child, and they were thinking of names, that Carol’s thoughts turned to Ben.

“We knew it was a boy so I said, ‘Why not Benedict? It's a beautiful name. I've always loved that.’”

Carol still had Ben’s poems: “I had them on the shelf behind my desk where I was always working.”

She began wondering what had become of their author.

That night, she turned to her computer. She hit a dead-end on Facebook, then tried Skype.

There were three Benedict Ryans; one of them was in Westport, Ireland.

“I was so cautious; I was in a corset of armour,” she states.

But she typed in a line from one of the poems he had written her.

She knew that the right Ben would recognise it. The next morning, she came down to a message: “What a beautiful picture. Reminds me of the vicar of Bray's daughter.”

“I can feel the lurch in my stomach again!” she says. “It was extraordinary.”

The pair rang each other - and a ten-minute chat became half an hour.

Soon they were talking for two hours, then five.

“The joy of it was that we knew each other,” says Carol.

“I felt instantly I could trust him still. It was so remarkably easy.”

They learnt all about each other: Ben had had unsuccessful marriages too. He also had children and grandchildren.

“We just talked and talked,” says Carol.

Carol felt like a wreck, she admits: “I felt so unattractive and so, so awful.”

She would stand up sideways when they were on video calls: “I wouldn't let him see that I was a matronly 70-year-old.”

But gradually, Ben began to build up her confidence. “He peeled away all the hurt, the wounds.”

And from the beginning, it was immensely exciting. “My kids were saying, ‘What's going on with you?’ I tried to keep it secret but I was bubbling. I was bubbling over… they could all see it.”

After three days of conversation, Ben told Carol that he was still in love with her, and reassured her that she was “completely safe” with him.

After more time spent talking online, he suggested they “touch soon.”

Carol remembers hoovering, those words echoing in her head.

“I was absolutely going out of my mind with it,” she says. “So frightening and so wonderful.”

Finally, they arranged to meet in Holland. Ben would sail overnight, arriving in Rotterdam station in the early morning.

“He kept offering me the way out,” she recounts.

He said he wouldn’t approach her; that if she wanted to turn on her heels when she saw him she could.

“Just such a generous, beautiful person. He saw my fear.”

On the day they met, Carol’s legs were jelly, her stomach churning.

She recognised him instantly: “He was my Benny.”

“I thought, I can run or I can take a chance – and I took a chance… I walked over to him very slowly – and it was rush hour, there were people churning around us – and to my amazement, we kissed.

"We just kissed passionately in the middle of a rush hour station and it was magic.”

“We've hardly been more than a few days apart since,” says Carol.

“We love each other, intensely. I didn't know what love was like. I do now.”

Over a decade has passed. The couple, now married, live in a small cottage – imbued with love – in Westport.

That moment in the busy station, when Carol decided to make a leap of faith, altered the course of her life.

“That was the moment that changed everything,” she says.

Ben agrees: “Life changing, yes. Everything fell into place just at the right moment.”

“It was like a natural continuation of a story that had been abruptly interrupted,” states Carol’s lifelong love.

“That 50 years gap – whatever it is exactly – just disappears.”