Until 1963, the year we bought The Walnut Tree Inn, Franco had been working in a hotel in Rugby. He had trained at a then famous hotel school in Bellagio, Como, Italy, one of the first hotel schools to open after the war. Through the hotel school he had done a stage in Switzerland, then France and had come to England to learn English to further his career in Italy. I had been teaching first in Rugby then in Wolverhampton. We met and all Franco’s plans changed, he opted to stay here and get married. We then decided that if we were ever going to see each other when we got married we had better buy a business straight away.