When her husband collapsed and died while making a impassioned speech to a council meeting Jeanette Allen was left facing life on her own.

It was a tragic end to 23 years of marriage and Jeanette still remembers the sense of cold dread she felt as she drove to County Hall in Lewes that day.

She was greeted by the sight of paramedics desperately trying to resuscitate her husband as he lay on the floor surrounded by stunned councillors and friends.

She said: "I drove like a maniac to County Hall and prayed and prayed but it felt like God was saying, 'Not this time'.

"There were people standing around looking really shocked and Robin was lying on the floor. I could see he wasn't going to make it and I knelt down on the floor and spoke to him."

After that terrible day in June last year, Jeanette threw herself into her work as a Tory agent and resigned herself to life as a widow.

But now she has been given a second chance at happiness after meeting widower John Morris and agreeing to marry him next month.

The romance started after John joined the Robin Allen Team Against Portobello and the couple are united in their passionate opposition to plans to build a £60 million sewage plant at Telscombe Cliffs.

County councillor Robin Allen suffered his fatal heart attack after speaking out against the plans.

The new couple are bound together in tragedy as John's late wife Joan also died from a heart attack last year.

Although they only met in October, Jeanette and John say life is too short not to seize another opportunity of married life. But Jeanette stressed the grief of losing Robin will never leave her.

She met John when he turned up one week too early for the start of a public inquiry into the expansion plans for Portobello, at the Meridian Centre, in Peacehaven.

Jeanette had set up a stand featuring photographs of Robin to publicise the issue. The pair started chatting and struck up a rapport when they realised they had both lost partners in almost identical circumstances.

John, 70, who lives in Saltdean, said: "I was immediately attracted to her. I was attracted to the fact she was there on a bleak cold day standing up for something. Her hand was freezing cold. We had so much in common and the same views on things."

His late wife Joan died without warning last year from a heart attack as she stepped off a coach to board a ferry in France. Jeanette and John struck up a firm friendship and helped each other through their grief.

In December, John proposed and Jeanette immediately knew her answer would be yes. She recalled: "Perhaps other people might think it is too soon but when you are used to a loving marriage and you get another chance of that, you take it."

Jeanette added: "Robin will never disappear from my life and there are always memories which come flooding back of him. A death like that shocks you rigid and makes you realise how short life is."

The wedding will be at Eastgate Baptist Church in Lewes on April 9 and will be conducted by Rev Kenneth Lynch, who also took Robin's funeral service.

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