‘Tommy used to work on the docks’, while ‘Gina works the diner all day, working for her man, she brings home her pay for love’.
These are the words to the Bon Jovi song Livin’ on a Prayer – but for an Ipswich couple who were together for more than 55 years, they were perfectly true.
On Thursday, September 14, bikers from around the county will come together to accompany Gina Nicholls on her last journey.
Gina’s beloved husband, Tommy, said that Gina was his rock since the day they met. Life was not always easy, but Gina would always do whatever it took to take care of her family, and did it all with a smile on her face.
Gina was born in Ipswich on March 6, 1952, the youngest of three children. Sadly, when she was just four, Gina lost her mother to cancer.
Her father struggled to cope with the three children by himself, and so Gina went to live with an aunt in Ely. Gina soon returned to Ipswich, and lived for a time in a children’s home in Foxhall Road, before going to live with her grandmother in Castle Road along with her two brothers, Malcolm and Chris.
The children later moved to High Road in Trimley St Mary with their father, who had remarried.
Gina was just 16 when she and Tommy met for the very first time, at the Warwick Inn in Woodbridge.
"She had such a gorgeous smile,” said Tommy. “When she smiled at me, I really fell in love with her.”
The pair have been together ever since.
On May 29, 1971, Gina walked down the aisle to marry Tommy, a bride at 19. Their eldest son, Shaun, was born later that year.
"We were living on a prayer,” remembered Tommy. His and Gina's first home together was in Montague Road in Felixstowe. With Tommy working at Felixstowe docks, and Gina as a waitress at Cordy’s Alexandra in Undercliff Road (now the Alex café bar), the Bon Jovi classic soon became ‘their song’.
“We never had much, but we were happy,” said Tommy. “A treat for us would be to walk up to Trimley and have fish and chips. She didn’t like fish, so she’d eat the chips and I’d eat her fish.”
Gina worked up until a month before Shaun was born, and even made all her own baby clothes. After Shaun started Kindergarten, Gina went back to work part-time for Kay of London hairdressers in Felixstowe.
By this time, the family had moved to Burghley Close in the Stoke Park area of Ipswich. Their youngest son Scotty was born in 1978.
Like his older brother, Scotty inherited his parents' love of motorbikes. Both the boys did schoolboy grass track racing and then junior speedway, making their parents incredibly proud.
Gina’s health was not always good, but she remained positive. She underwent operations on her stomach and kidneys as a young woman, and was diagnosed with cancer for the first time at 39.
However, Gina was never one to feel sorry for herself. “She never moaned, she just carried on,” Tommy said.
Gina was thrilled when her sons had children of their own and loved being a grandmother. She had an especially close relationship with Shaun’s daughter, Evie, who had lost her own mum at an early age.
Gina died at home on July 28 with Tommy by her side. She was 71.
To read more tributes to those we have loved and lost in Suffolk, click here
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