ONE day in 1939, teenager Charlie Lee saw a girl from across the road at Eastleigh fairground.

“I was on the bumper car and Phill was on the other side of the road,” he said. “I was with my friends – I said ‘there’s a really nice girl there, I’ll see if I can get hold of her’”.

And he did – for 71 years.

Phill and Charlie Lee, who celebrate their wedding anniversary today, are looking back on an enduring relationship which began all those years ago at the fairground.

“They got in my bumper car,” Charlie said, “and that’s how we met. The first thing I said to her was ‘can I take you to the pictures?’ She said yes.”

The young couple were married four years later at Winchester’s registry office. Phill, 91, said a long, loving marriage is a simple matter of compromise.

“It’s give and take,” she said. “Stay together and give to one another. I don’t like that people keep leaving their marriages. There’s nothing wrong with marriage if you love one another.”

The pair stuck together through several moves, from Eastleigh to Winchester, Manchester and Lincoln, where Charlie supervised German prisoners during the Second World War.

They moved to Canada but returned after eight months because Phill missed her family in Hampshire.

The couple, who now live in Hazeldene Gardens, Itchen Abbas, had the first of three daughters on their one year anniversary in 1944. Today, they have nine grandchildren and 17 great-grandchildren, with another youngster on the way.

Charlie, 89, said: “When I see them it is quite special, but I don’t often see them. You can’t keep track of them – they’re everywhere."