A mother-of-four returned to England knowing the inevitable repercussion - her arrest over a bigamous marriage to a German lodger.
Vera Myles was just 16 when she wed her husband in 1943 and they lived in a village near Basingstoke. She quickly fell pregnant and two children followed, but she increasingly resented him for trying to submit her to "abnormal practices."
In 1949, an ex-German prisoner of war Siegfried Gabler came to stay with them. They fell in love and she had a baby daughter by him, and two years later - unknown to her former Royal Navy boxer husband - she went through a form of marriage at the register office for Kingsclere and Whitchurch with Gabler, describing herself as a spinster and giving her maiden name.
The following month, she told her husband she and the baby were going to visit relatives in Lowestoft - and never returned. He later received a letter from an address in Dresden, Germany, and there the situation remained for five years until she returned to England by ferry.
Myles immediately went to the police station in Harwich, and following her confession, she was arrested and remanded in custody to appear before a judge.
Justice Hilbery (Image: Echo)
"Do I gather this association with the German has broken up," Mr Justice Hilbery surmised.
"No, it is continuing," prosecutor June Verrall explained. "According to her statement, she came back to this country expressly to get the situation cleared up and the matter dealt with."
Verrall then referred to the statement. "I came back to England yesterday of my own free will. I fully realise what has happened and I am willing to bear the consequences. I have left two small children in Germany and would like to return to them as soon as this matter is settled."
Dressed in a light blue tailored costume and a powder blue hat, Myles, 30, pleaded guilty at Hampshire Assizes on July 5, 1956, telling the judge that she had committed bigamy so she could go abroad on a German passport.
"Why did you not get one?" the judge asked.
"Because I would have had to get the consent of my husband and I knew he would not give it," she replied.
Lawrence Burtonshaw, defending, added: "It is because of certain things which happened during married life which drove her to this act."
But the judge countered: "It did not drive her to bigamy, to go through a ceremony of marriage, an utterly false ceremony which she knew was false because she had not even left her husband at the time."
But considering all the circumstances in the case, he told a relieved Myles he would pass a sentence of three days imprisonment, enabling her to leave court a free woman and return to Germany.