Romance to Redemption

Margaret Lloyd was a lady who regularly attended our Afternoon Fellowship for some 12 years until she passed away in August. I had the privilege of conducting her funeral at the Sussex & Surrey crematorium last month. Margaret, I feel, came to know the Lord Jesus as her personal Saviour in the last months of her life. How-ever, the story of her life which her daughter, Jo, kindly wrote out for me is fascinating. She gave me permission to share it here. Jo writes:

Margaret Lloyd, born Margit Messner 5th Nov 1924 in Bruno, Czechoslovakia. Her mother was Viennese, her father from Bruno, both leather workers, who when they married, set up a leather shop in Bruno making handbags, purses and other leather goods. They were mak-ing enough money to afford English lessons for Margaret from the age of 6. This proved to be the kingpin that determined her future.

Ernie Lloyd from London, an electrician by trade and in the Royal Tank Regiment in Egypt in the 2nd world war, was captured and marched from Egypt to Sternberck, Czechoslovakia by the Germans in 1941, where he was interred in a prisoner of war camp. Margaret and her mother, following the early death of her father, had also moved to Sternberck, where Margaret worked in an office typing pool. Ernie’s electrical skills were used by the Germans to fix faults in places around the town. And so it happened that one day he was working in Margaret’s office, when the other girls goaded her into using her English to talk to him.

So a romance blossomed. Giving the guards the slip, he would meet her secretly in the town. Later in the war, he and some fellow prisoners escaped out of Czechoslovakia, only to be captured by the Russians, who were moving through Eastern Europe, eventually to ‘liberate’ (but actually to invade) the country themselves. Undaunted, he also escaped from the Russians (who thought he was German), got back to Czechoslovakia, was reunited with Margaret and married her in 1945, before being repatriated back to England at the end of the war.

His marriage was not greeted well by his senior officer, who stripped him of his rank as cor-poral for ‘fraternising with a local girl’.

Ernie sent for Margaret to follow him to England, though she had to do this alone and with only a postal order for 7s and 6d of English money. Her arrival in Tottenham did not go down well, as he had found it impossible to tell his family about his marriage to a foreign girl. However they weathered the storm, eventually buying a house in the suburbs of SE London in Barnehurst, and in 1948, Jo was born. Margaret’s mother, Steffie, came to join her daughter in England in 1952, though she had to leave practically all her precious pos-sessions behind.

In 1966, Ernie was made redundant when the engineering company he worked for closed down, and with redundancy pay they bought a rundown cottage in the Kent countryside near Faversham. They renovated the house and grew fruit, vegetables and flowers in the huge garden until sadly Ernie died of cancer in 1984. Steffie was living there too, but passed away in 1988. Margaret now had to manage on her own for the next 10 years until, following a nasty fall in 1998, Jo decided it was time to move her mother to Horsham, where she could look after her—which she happily did for the next 14 years until her death, aged 87.

Margaret always enjoyed the fellowship on Tuesday afternoons, but it was during her stay in hospital in the last weeks of her life that I was able to go through the wonderful good news of salvation with her again personally, and pray with her. I believe that in those days the Lord came close to her and she received him into her heart—if she had not done so already.

We thank God for his dealings with Margaret throughout her interesting life.