Even the most inventive author of romantic fiction could not have written a plot more heartbreaking - or a sweeter, happy-ever-after ending.
But every word of the extraordinary love story of Penny Umbers and Mark Bethel - from its beginnings in the 1970s to its joyous final chapter, playing out now - is as remarkable as it is true.
Penny and Mark are in their early 60s, but fell in love in their teens: a first love, intense and all-consuming.
They planned to be together for ever, mapped out marriage and children. But bitter racial prejudices forced them apart.
For Penny is white and Mark is black, and in an era when mixed race marriages were rare, Penny’s disapproving father contrived to separate them.
Penny Umbers and Mark Bethel, pictured in the Bahamas together, were forced apart for 40 years by her father
Unaware Mark had been coerced into leaving her, Penny was distraught and attempted suicide. Not long after, Mark returned to the Bahamas.
Separated by 3,000 miles for 39 years, they each endured unhappy marriages and nurtured unspoken hopes that one day they would be reunited. For both, it seemed an impossible dream.
Then, in April 2019 — thanks to social media — their lives collided again. Mark, 62, found his Penny: and she learned of her father’s betrayal.
In June last year, as soon as Covid restrictions permitted, Penny flew to the Bahamas to see Mark again. All their soaring hopes were realised: their future together is at last under way.
‘Mark shouted “Umbers” across the airport concourse and we fell into each other’s arms. The years just melted away. It was as if we’d never been apart,’ says Penny.
‘He kissed me and started to cry. We were both overwhelmed. I said: “Mark, Mark, I am here at last".
'Being with him was every bit as wonderful as I’d remembered, physically and emotionally.’
The loved up couple had planned to spend their whole lives together, but Penny's father threatened Mark into ending their three-year relationship in 1970s
After three blissful weeks together, Penny, 61, returned to Worcestershire to her job as an executive assistant, but longed to see Mark again.
‘And on my second visit in October 2021, he produced a beautiful diamond ring and said: “Please will you marry me?”
‘I had no hesitation in saying yes. I was absolutely dying for him to propose,’ she smiles.
‘We are completely committed to each other,’ adds Mark, speaking on Zoom from the sun-filled garden of his house in Nassau.
He is grey and bearded now, his handsome dark eyes framed by professorial spectacles; a rich, deep voice betraying the timbre of his public school education, where, more than 40 years ago, he was the only black pupil.
Penny, in England tying up loose ends before she emigrates to the Bahamas and finally marries the only man she has ever truly loved, is petite, her face unlined; radiant with happiness.
Hard to imagine, as they contemplate retirement together, the prejudice that separated them four decades ago.
It was three years into their relationship that, unbeknown to Penny, her father sought out Mark in London where he was studying hotel management, and hauled him into the dean’s office.
Mark, pictured here with his cricket team in England, caught Penny's eye in a pub in Nottingham
There he told Mark to stop seeing his daughter - or face dire consequences.
‘I stood there in front of two high status white men - the dean and Penny’s father - who made it clear he knew ways and people who could end my scholarship if I continued to see his daughter; people who could make me leave and go back to the Bahamas.
'"You will tell Penny that you will drop her," he told me. "You will not explain why; you will just move on and not mention this conversation".'
‘And as much as I loved Penny, and respected her father’s right to protect his daughter, his intimidation was the final straw. It completely destroyed me.’
Mark, alone and vulnerable in a city where racial divisions ran deep, said his last farewell to Penny, honouring her father’s diktat that he explain nothing.
Penny was distraught and uncomprehending: 'I saw him disappear and I collapsed in tears. I got the mail train home, heartbroken, in the middle of the night, stupidly thinking I’d find some comfort there.
‘My father came to meet the train at 5am. When I told him in floods of tears that Mark had finished with me, he just grunted. I was too exhausted from crying to wonder why he didn’t comfort me.
‘I felt desperate. Mark had brought such joy into my life and I couldn’t bear to live without the hope of seeing him again. I was crushed. I didn’t want to live any more.’
Months later, already taking antidepressants prescribed by a psychiatrist who had been treating Penny since the break-up, she bought more pills from a chemist and swallowed an overdose.
Penny, pictured here in 1978, was left heartbroken by the apparent conclusion of their relationship
‘I should have died, but my body rejected the medication and I was sick. I survived to endure life without Mark.’
He had written poems dedicated to her; painted pictures for her. He loved her unconditionally and with a fervour she reciprocated.
There had been no rancour or arguments. Inexplicably, the boy she adored had just gone.
That Penny’s home life had been bereft of affection made Mark’s absence all the more distressing.
Born in Leeds, the eldest of three children, her upbringing was privileged but marred by her mother’s remoteness. Her father, a company director, often moved jobs.
‘My mother and I weren’t close, and we children weren’t important to her as individuals,’ says Penny.
‘We had nannies when we were small to keep us out of my mother’s way and I was packed off to boarding school at 11. When I came home for holidays, I poured all my love into my many pets. The saviours of my childhood were my horses.’
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ShareMark, meanwhile, spent his first years in a cottage in Nassau. But his father, an Oxford graduate who worked in telecoms, was determined his son would enjoy a British education as he had done.
Mark was sent away to prep school in Warwickshire at six years old.
There, he was bewildered by racist taunts: ‘I was called a n***er. I didn’t know what the word meant. I was called a golliwog and thought it was a term of endearment.
'I didn’t know they were belittling me. Now I feel the pain of those memories. All I wanted to do was fit in and find my purpose.’
It was at Trent College, a public school in Derbyshire, that he discovered his niche: a dashing sportsman, he excelled at cricket, hockey, rugby, tennis and athletics.
And when he was 17, Penny, then 16, came into his life. On a night out with schoolfriends in a Nottingham pub, she spotted him smiling at her.
‘He was tall, gorgeous and had a heart-melting smile,’ she recalls. ‘And he seemed genuinely interested in talking to me. He was just so friendly and chatty.’
Mark was there with his cricket team, celebrating a win.
The pair, pictured here with their book Thirty-Nine Years in the Wilderness, were able to reunite using social media
Penny, he says, ‘was the sweetest most adorable person I’d ever spoken to. I remember that English rose walking through the door and my heart melting.’
She went to watch Mark play cricket the next day. The following week they shared their first slow dance at his school ball.
On a cloud of euphoria, she confided to her father: ‘I’ve met a lovely boy.’ I was bubbling with excitement.
'"The darkie?" he asked. I hadn’t heard that word used before and hoped it wasn’t derogatory. I loved and trusted him but I felt disappointed, uncomfortable.'
Penny’s father was firmly aligned with the Conservative MP. But she was resolute: their romance continued.
In those pre-mobile phone days they communicated by letter. Penny was by then boarding at Oakham School in Rutland, and they continued to meet at sporting fixtures.
Mark remembers making love after a cricket match, ‘under the trees and the blue sky in a secluded bower away from the pitch and prying eyes, in our own private world’.
Penny recalls covert weekends when he smuggled her into his room at school. She even recalls a rare evening when her parents invited Mark to dinner.
‘He was so lovely and well-mannered and I thought they were warming to him,’ she says.
The couple, both of whom have been married and divorced, have picked up where they left off and are restarting their lives together
‘I remember watching my father from the drawing room window talking to him in the garden and feeling so pleased. What I didn’t realise was that he was warning Mark off.’
Mark made no mention to Penny of the ultimatum her father gave him that balmy summer’s evening.
Mark says: ‘He said: "You’ve had your fun, move on. You can sleep here tonight, but I want you gone in the morning.”
‘Then we shook hands like gentlemen, and both went back into the house. I sat there, utterly shocked and diminished.’
That might have been the end had Mark and Penny not been so committed to each other. Although Penny had won a place at Warwick University, she chose to go to London instead, to be near Mark.
‘We’d hoped to share a flat, but I had to go into a hall of residence. Mark rented an awful dingy basement bedsit off Baker Street and eked out his small scholarship by working in McDonald’s.’
It was during the first year of their degrees that Penny’s father ended their relationship.
Mark — exhausted by work and study, defeated by the racist bullying — capitulated.
‘I was frightened, I lacked the self-assurance I have today and I was worried that if I lost my scholarship I’d have to go back to the Bahamas and tell my parents I’d failed,’ he says.
Mark and Penny plan on getting married, with Mark popping the question when they met for the second time after their reunion
‘I felt my only option was to leave Penny. I just went back to my bedsit and cried. My life was blown apart when we separated.’
‘It was horrendous,’ adds Penny. ‘My world collapsed. I just thought Mark had gone off me; that I was ugly, fat; not what he wanted. I didn’t want to live any more.’
They never expected to see each other again. Penny went on to marry: it was expected of her.
‘He was a lovely person but I was not in love with him. I left after a year,’ she says.
A second disastrous marriage followed.
‘I stuck it out for ten years because I didn’t want to be divorced for a second time so soon. I just thought: “My life is meant to be miserable".'
Neither marriage bore children - though Penny says that if she had her time again with Mark, she’d have wanted nothing more.
Mark, meanwhile, worked in hotels around the world, as a food and beverage director and assistant general manager.
He married, unhappily, and raised two children. ‘Emotionally, I was an empty vessel,’ he says.
‘I never stopped thinking about Penny and used her as a yardstick against which to measure others, who never measured up — how could they? I was the happiest man ever when I was with her.’
Divorced in the 1990s, he tried to trace Penny, even enquiring through her old school to ask if they could find her. But all his efforts failed.
Penny, meanwhile, harboured similar yearnings. ‘I’d be in London and would catch sight of someone and think it was Mark and my heart would leap.’
In 2014, she looked him up on Facebook: ‘And I found his photo; saw what a handsome middle-aged man he had become. I didn’t dare message him. I didn’t want him to think I was stalking him. I assumed he’d be happily married.’
Meanwhile, Mark had renewed his search for Penny, spurred on by a health scare which focused his mind on what he really wanted from life: his one true love.
In 2018, he finally found her: ‘As beautiful as ever. And when I saw her photo it was like the universe burst open. I fell in love all over again.’
He sent messages via Facebook. Repeatedly. But Penny — not au fait with social media — failed to pick them up for a full five months.
It was April 2019 when she finally, tentatively, responded.
Then they spoke on the phone for the first time in almost 40 years. ‘We both cried. I was trembling all over when I heard his gorgeous voice,’ she says.
‘It was during that first conversation that Mark told me the truth about what had happened between him and my father all those years ago. He explained that he’d still loved me but had been forced to give me up.
‘Only then did it dawn on me that I had been terribly deceived by my father. I was angry, devastated and for the first time I realised what an awful wrong he’d done to Mark.’
Today, Penny’s father has Alzheimer’s. He has no memory of Mark or that betrayal.
I wonder if Mark has forgiven Penny’s father for the devastation he wrought. ‘We have moved on,’ he says mildly. ‘There is no point in harbouring animosity.
‘Now we want to look forward in hope, to sharing our lives together,’ he says, as they exchange a tender smile. I just wish my arms were 3,000 miles long so I could be hugging her now.’
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