“WE were their world, and they were ours,” said Laura Deeks, whose train driver dad Bill Connolly died just five days after his wife Betty.

“We think he died of a broken heart,” she said. “It was technically a cardiac arrest but we think it was a broken heart.”

The devoted Old Walcot couple had been married for 58 years when they both sadly passed away on November 30 and December 5.

“They had been together for such a long time, they’d been married 58 years and known each other 60, and even though she had been in hospital for all that time she was still very much alive,” said Laura.

“They had been through so much together too, after losing my brother, Robbie when he was just 10 and my sister Sharon to leukaemia when she was 18.

“He didn’t say a word when I told him she was dying. He was shocked.

“He was very much a man’s man and wouldn’t have cried in front of me but he was visibly shocked.”

When 76-year-old Betty, who lived in Old Walcot with her 81-year-old husband, went into hospital last August with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, she never thought she would spend the last five months of her life there.

But after being diagnosed with arthritis, osteoporosis and other complications, the green-fingered grandmother repeatedly caught various infections which meant she never became sufficiently well to move into Edgehill Care Home, just minutes from Laura’s Liden home.

“She’s been saying for about a month before she died that she wanted to go, that she’d had enough,” said Laura, 43, who lives with her husband, Simon, in Grasmere.

“She’d been saying she just wanted to go to sleep and not to wake up. She didn’t want to be in the hospital any more.

“She was moved into a room by herself on the Friday and that’s when we decided to stop giving her all the medication.

“Then I had to tell my dad. That was one of the most difficult conversations of my life.”

Laura stayed with her mum on the evening overnight at the hospital on November 29, and it was while she was at home catching up on her own rest that her mum died.

She said: “We got the call from the hospital and we must have been only a few minutes too late.

“I was devastated that she’d gone and she’d been on her own.

“But I know that’s what she wanted. She wouldn’t have wanted me to be there when she went.”

In the days following, Bill’s own health began to deteriorate.

Laura’s 24-year-old daughter Briony Rogers, who lived with the couple for four years and still spent a lot of time with them, said: “He was acting a little bit strangely, but on the Thursday he suddenly seemed so much better.

“He had called to ask when the district nurse was coming to give him his insulin.”

Paramedics called Laura to say he had died the next morning at around 10am, moments before she was due to register her mother’s death.

“I’ll just miss them being there,” said Briony.

The couple moved to Park South after Bill found work on the railways with the London Overspill scheme in the 1960s. Both keen darts players, they were often found at the Grange Drive Community Centre and at the Spotted Cow.

“She had very high standards and was very house proud,” said Laura.

“She always used to say she wouldn’t even go out to put the washing on the line without any make up on.

“She was definitely the boss of the house. She was very much on to my dad.

“She always used to say if you wanted him to do anything you had to plant the seed.”

A joint funeral service will be held at Kingsdown Crematorium tomorrow at 2.15pm. Family flowers only. Enquiries – Co-operative Funeral Care in Cricklade Road.