“I’VE been rationed all my life,” 78-year-old Mrs Sarah Ann Hunt told an Advertiser reporter who interviewed an elderly couple when they celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary this week in 1940.

The couple, from Stratton St Margaret, who married on November 20, 1880 had raised their eight children in Hunter’s Grove.

“I can’t say we’ve had a particularly eventful life, but we’ve known happiness and that counts for a lot,” said Henry Hunt.

He started work at the age of eight minding the cows on a Wootton Bassett farm for one shilling a week.

Aged 14 he took a job in Swindon as a horse driver before starting work on the railways on the construction of the Highworth branch line and after that on the Swindon to Marlborough line.

He later moved “inside”

and spent 43 years in the GWR Works boilershop.

Mr Hunt, 80, was a keen gardener, and was described by his wife as never happier than when he was on that allotment.

“I should think something was wrong if I couldn’t grow enough potatoes and greenstuff to last us the year round,” he said.

Mrs Hunt, 78, who was born in a thatched cottage at Stratton Green said she was unimpressed by the modern girl who smokes and “makes up” and admitted she was a bit old fashioned.

“Please don’t say I’m running them down,” she told the Advertiser. “That would never do.”