Theresa Davidson was just 25 when she lost her husband, Clark Mitchell, on the final day of the Falklands conflict.
Four decades later, she says it still feels like yesterday, as she remembers her devastation and the slow journey to rebuild her life. Closing her eyes, Theresa can still picture the quarters she shared with Clark, a young Lance Sergeant in the 2nd Battalion Scots Guards, in Lasswade, Midlothan.
The morning after Margaret Thatcher declared victory, she was sitting in their living room. Despite the national mood of celebration, she couldn’t shake a growing feeling of unease and had barely slept the night before.
When she answered the doorbell to see an officer and his wife standing there, she didn’t have to wait for them to speak. “Please tell me he’s just been wounded,” she remembers saying. The officer shook his head.
Theresa, then aged 25, felt her whole life collapsing before her. “I lost everything,” she said. “I lost my husband, my best friend, our home, the family we wanted together. My world shattered into a million pieces.”
Clark, 26, from Laurencekirk, Aberdeenshire, was killed on Mount Tumbledown in the early hours of June 14th, the day the Argentinians surrendered. He was one of eight members of the Scots Guards who died that day, and 255 British servicemen who lost their lives in the 10-week conflict between April and June 1982.
Theresa has been battling with the MOD since her pension was withdrawn after she remarried in 1985.
18th December 2018 – Daily Express Article on Pension Withdrawal
You can find out much more about Theresa and and others on the Royal British Legion website. Please see the links below.
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