Alan and Irene Brogan talk to Hannah Stephenson about their incredible love story and why they wanted to share it in a book.

ALAN and Irene Brogan are like two lovestruck teenagers.

They may be in their fifties but they have waited most of their lives to be together.

The Sunderland couple’s story is a gift for romantics everywhere. They met when he was seven and she was nine at the children’s home where they were sent after their mothers died – and formed an instant bond.

Both were from workingclass backgrounds. Irene was one of four girls, Alan one of four boys, and both spent their childhood in care after their fathers were deemed unfit to look after them.

They soon became inseparable, but the staff who ran the cold, highly-regimented children’s home didn’t approve of their close friendship. When they were caught having a “tickle fight” on the annual summer excursion to Whitby, Alan was quickly removed without explanation.

He ended up in a succession of harshly-run institutions, had brushes with the law and a clutch of different jobs.

Irene remained at the same home until adulthood.

They moved on but they never forgot each other. Both had various relationships – Irene married and had two children, but later divorced, Alan also married and divorced, but didn’t have children.

Nearly 40 years later they met by chance when Alan went to pick up his then-partner at the gym where Irene worked as a fitness trainer.

“It was the best and the worst day in my life,” Alan recalls now, when he came face to face with the woman he had yearned for virtually all of his life.

“It took a few moments for me to recognise her, for the mist to clear, then it was absolutely wonderful. But I was with someone at the time, which was really frustrating.”

“When he walked through the door, I saw that little boy again,” Irene says. “His blue eyes had never changed and I just wanted to scream, grab him and run away with him.”

However, it proved an agonising time for both of them.

“I wasn’t the sort of man to just dump someone I had been with for over a decade,” Alan says.

He saw Irene once more at the gym, but found it too painful to see her if he couldn’t have her.

His other relationship also deteriorated fast. At the same time he was made redundant, but was offered work in Scotland, which he took, partly out of need and partly to escape his turmoil.

“It broke my heart when Alan didn’t come back to the gym again,” Irene adds.

Alan, however, returned to live in Sunderland a year later to find her.

“Irene had left the gym and I didn’t have a contact number, but I resolved in my mind that she would have to come back into the town centre one day shopping. I lived close to the town and went out every day into town looking for her.”

But it wasn’t until 2004, five years after the gym encounter and 45 years after they first met, that they saw each other. Alan was walking near a roundabout and Irene was in a passing car.

“Three months later, I was busy chatting to a friend as we walked through town and only by chance turned my head to see Alan across the street,” Irene recalls.

“The moment she called my name I knew it was her, and in that moment my whole life changed. It was as if I had been in a tunnel and suddenly emerged into the sunshine,” says Alan.

They have been inseparable ever since. Alan moved into Irene’s house and they married in 2007 when she was 56 and he was 54.

Their remarkable real-life romance is charted in their new book, Not Without You.

These days, Alan, a semi-retired management consultant, buys Irene red roses every week. They return to Whitby from time to time, to relive the childhood memories of the happy holidays they spent together when they were both at the children’s home.

“These are the happiest days of my life,” says Alan.